Cambridgeshire: Unanswered Police Calls

16 January 2012, 06:00 | Updated: 16 January 2012, 17:17

More than 800 calls to the Cambridgeshire Police non-emergency number weren't answered last month, according to police figures.

The 101 number was bought in across the country last year as a memorable number for people to use when calling their local police force for non-emergency incidents.

However, budget cuts at Cambridgeshire Police have led to call handlers struggling to answer all of the calls to the new number, although the situation is improving.

Last month 812 calls weren't picked up.

In November 2011, 1,844 went unanswered.

In September 2011, 2,523 calls weren't picked up.

All of the above calls were classified as 'abandoned' by Cambridgeshire Police.

It follows a cut of £2,000,000 to the call centre department's budget following big cuts at the force as a whole.

This has resulted in the number of call handlers at Cambridgeshire Police being cut from 90 in 2009 to 75 currently.

Superintendent Paul Fullwood, who is in charge of the force control room said: "The number of call handlers has been cut which did have an effect on performance. 

However we are committed to improving our non-emergency call handling service and are reviewing the number of call handlers we have in place to accurately meet the demand.

We also have plans in place to introduce a speech dialling service which will ease the pressure on the police service centre.

We continue to encourage people to call us when they have issues in their community, so we dedicate resources to tackle any problems."

The 1-0-1 number is only to be used for non-emergencies.

People should continue to call 9-9-9 when there is an emergency and they need police assistance.