West Midlands to centralise call handling hubs

West Midlands Police is to change how it answers non-emergency calls by moving to a new two-hub system.

The force currently has 12 hubs dedicated to handling calls from the public but these will be cut to two based at Lloyd House in Birmingham and West Bromwich police station.

The force believes this will achieve £3.9 million in savings by the 2014-15 financial year, taking 12 months to put into operation.

It is expected the changes will improve the way the force handles its calls, especially improving the number of calls answered within the 30-second target time. The force currently achieves this in 85 per cent of cases (equating to more than a million calls).

As a result, a new department, called Force Contact, will be created to manage the contact centres instead of the ten local policing units currently overseeing them.

New guidelines are being introduced to maximise the information received from every caller to ensure repeat and vulnerable callers are effectively identified.

‘Load sharing’ will be introduced, allowing the contact centres to take calls from cluster areas to reduce caller-waiting times.

West Midlands’ lead for contact, Assistant Chief Constable Sharon Rowe, said: “We recognise that the way that we handle calls in our contact centres has a significant impact on the public’s sense of trust and confidence in policing. The planned changes are very much focused on delivering an improved service.

“The introduction of a centralised force contact department will build on the hard work already underway throughout all of our contact centres, by adopting a more consistent and efficient approach across the force and making more effective use of staff, their skills and experience.”

She added that it was important to note that the developments included no change to the delivery of local policing through local policing units.