NEW STORM AT 999 CALL CENTRE
Police Scotland staff dealing with emergencies from London and Belfast
A SCOTTISH police call-handling centre where failures have been linked to three fatalities is now taking 999 calls from two other major UK forces.
Bilston Glen in Midlothian is at the centre of a series of major investigations by the police watchdog following a string of alleged call-handling failures north of the Border.
But the controversial control unit – where an inspectors’ report has warned that staff do not have time to deal with calls adequately – is now close to breaking point after routine and emergency calls from the Metropolitan Police and the Police Service of Northern Ireland were added to its workload.
Last night, a source said: ‘We
handle thousands of calls from all over Scotland on every shift. That should be enough and we should never be taking emergency calls for an outside force, which is extremely stressful. But in recent weeks, there has been an upturn in calls from other forces, especially from the Met. It is pushing us beyond any reasonable limits.
‘We’ve never really had the resources to do the job very well for our own communities. We’ve been associated with two of the worst mistakes made since Police Scotland came into being, and many people are scared that the pressure we have been under recently will lead to a third.’
Bilston Glen is one of three huge call centres set up following the creation of Scotland’s single force in 2013. Local call centres from the eight legacy forces were shut down, jobs were cut and the new centres set up to serve the East, West and North of the country.
At busy times, calls made in one part of Scotland can be picked up by another centre. A similar set-up between UK forces is now seeing an extension of that arrangement.
Police Scotland call handlers are picking up calls from the Met and the Police Service of Northern Ireland when their handlers fail to respond. Staff at Bilston Glen have noticed a recent surge in calls, especially from the Met, and had suspected Police Scotland was being paid to ease the pressure on the UK’s largest force.
But yesterday a force spokesman maintained there was no financial arrangement in place, and a spokesman for the Met confirmed that.
Investigations into Police Scotland by the Police Investigations and Review Commission now stand at a record total of 26.
These include now-concluded probes into the 2015 deaths of M9 crash victims John Yuill and Lamara Bell, and the death in Edinburgh in 2016 of Andrew Bow, 37, who had Asperger syndrome.
The call-handling team at Bilston Glen was subsequently criticised by Commissioner Kate Frame over both cases, for failing to pass on information quickly to officers on the ground, but the problems with understaffing and poor management were recognised.
Yet staff today say little has changed. The source said: ‘HMI [Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland] found that this place was over-stretched, that staff didn’t have enough time to deal with calls adequately, that procedures had changed too often and that morale was low. I can assure you that with us also having to deal with calls from people who need the police in the London area, morale is now at rock-bottom.
‘If you raise the matter with supervisors, they tell you the outside calls only come our way when we have “spare capacity”, but it never feels as though we have anything to spare.’
The Police Scotland spokesman said: ‘This is simply about the ability of fully trained and experienced call handlers to deal with people calling the emergency services. It only happens when we have the capacity to deal with it.’ In July 2015, Sgt Brian Henry, an officer on overtime at Bilston Glen, took a call reporting that a car had come off the M9, but the information was not processed and the car was only found three days later.
Driver John Yuill was already dead and his partner Miss Bell, who had been trapped beside his body, died days later in hospital. She had suffered kidney failure from dehydration and could have survived the crash.
Officers such as Sgt Henry were providing ad hoc cover following the loss of 2,000 civilian staff due to budget cuts. Most were not trained on the computer system but were told to make paper notes and pass them to civilian staff to input.
In March last year, despite assurances of changes at the call centre, Mr Bow was found dead in his flat by police – a week after no action was taken following four calls from worried members of the public.
A spokesman for the National Police Chiefs’ Council said: ‘While all forces would ideally want to deal with every call directly, we have to factor in contingencies for periods of exceptional demand.’