Report shows number of unanswered 101 phone calls

A TOTAL of 5.8% of calls from the public go unanswered at South Yorkshire Police, research into the 101 non-emergency phone service has found.

The force received 778,039 calls between October 2012 and September last year, to report crime, pass on intelligence or to report problems of drug abuse. More than a million callers who tried to get through to the service in the past year were cut off or decided to abandon their efforts nationwide.

The number of dropped calls rose by more than 200,000 in the 12 months to September, despite a fall in the overall number of people dialling 101.

Some police forces had examples of callers kept waiting more than an hour.

The government said it was working with forces to improve the service.

The BBC used the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act to request data from all 46 police forces across the UK, including the British Transport Police. West Yorkshire Police did not respond.

Sam Clayton, from Bradford, said he made several lengthy but unsuccessful attempts to contact West Yorkshire Police on 101 when he saw people stealing metal from his neighbour’s garden.

“I’d spent just over 60 minutes on hold. Then the call seemed to be answered, but then I was cut off,” he said.

Mr Clayton said he also tried to use contact forms on the force website, but these also did not work.

Responses were received from 40 forces, providing figures for the past two years from October 2012 to the end of September 2014. Some were able to provide more information than others.

The FOI request revealed that from October 2013 to September 2014 there were 1.07 million dropped or abandoned calls to the 33 forces providing such data. This was a rise of more than 26% on the previous 12 months, even though there were 113,640 fewer calls.

The figures also showed few forces were achieving their own internal targets of answering 90% of calls within 30 seconds.

By this measure, the poorest-performing force was Surrey Police, where 66.8% of calls were answered within 30 seconds, and the best-performing force was Merseyside Police, which answered 97% of calls within 30 seconds.