Police deal with a quarter of all incidents by telephone without sending an officer to the scene, a Home Office report revealed yesterday. Watchdogs examining control and command centres in England and Wales found that eight million incidents a year were handled on the telephone out of the 33 million reported. The use of the telephone, often to deal with minor crimes where there was no witness or evidence, has been criticised, but Beyond the Call, issued by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary, says that “telephone resolution” will increase as pressures grow.

In one force the watchdogs found that 800 officers were on duty for a shift but only 20 were providing responses to incidents.

In another only three out of fifty officers were assigned to incident management.

The report found that the forces that attended all calls were not necessarily more effective and said: “Realistically the ever-growing volume of calls for service combined with resource constraints make this approach unviable in all but isolated instances.”

Since last April all forces are expected to use a four-tier grading system for incidents, but it has not been implememted by some. The top level is “immediate”, which requires a patrolling officer.

The second level is “priority”, in which an officer should arrive within a set period. There is also a “scheduled” response by which a force arranges an appointment for a call.

The lowest level is “non-attendance”, when advice or information is provided and information from the call will be used for intelligence files.

The report found that some dispatchers or control rooms admit “that occasionally incidents are regraded or even consciously graded incorrectly to match resource availability, for example at peak times a relatively high-priority call may be allocated a scheduled response as a patrol cannot attend immediately”.

Few forces say that they have the time to check the accuracy of the gradings. Sampling has suggested an error rate of less than 1 per cent but, says the report, “there remain concerns over the validity of limited dip-sampling exercises and the issues that might lie unnoticed within the unchecked majority of incidents”.

Currently about 17 per cent of incidents are classed as emergencies and another 20 per cent are given priority and there is high public satisfaction with responses. But an examination of seven forces by the watchdogs found that response to nonurgent calls could be “very slow, ranging from four to twenty-four hours and, in some cases, customers have to wait several days”.

The report urges forces to do more to keep callers briefed on what has happened about incidents that they have reported and overall concludes that “despite the progress to date, there is clearly still room for further improvement”.

In a preface to the report, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the Chief Inspector of Constabulary, warns chief constables that police call centres are the poor relations within forces, even though they are a “core element” in meeting public demands.

Julie Spence, a national police spokesman and the Chief Constable of Cambridge-shire, said: “It is clear from this report that there are still improvements to be made by the police service into our management and resolution of emergency and nonemergency calls.”

The Home Office report was published yesterday as the tele-coms regulator gave a warning that customers making phone calls over the internet cannot always get through to 999 numbers.

Ofcom will consult on whether access to emergency services via the “voice over internet protocol” (VoIP) service should be made compulsory and announced a code that requires VoIP suppliers to state whether customers can call emergency services, directory inquiries and the operator.

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