Police chief urges caution on single control room scheme
Officer says collaborative working is possibility for blue light services
THE police officer in charge of 999 calls has warned of “pros and cons” of merging all of Scotland’s “blue light” control rooms.
Chief Superintendent Alan Speirs was speaking before a Home Office minister in England urged mergers of emergency service call centres.
Mr Speirs – while acknowledging that it may one day be possible to bring call operators for fire, police and ambulance under one roof – stressed the very different challenges.
He said: “There are pros and cons.
“Take the ambulance service. Their staff are trained to deal with medical calls and we are not.
“We all bring a different sort of skill set. Could the future have a much more resources in one location and work more collaboratively? Quite possibly.”
UK Home Office Minister Mike Penning this week said it “made no sense” for fire, police and ambulance to run their own costly 999 operations. In Hampshire, all three services are sharing training, command and premises.
Scotland now has national services for all blue-light services but joint working – or shared premises – are still limited.
Mr Speirs stressed that all three services do have the capacity to work together.
He said: “When we run big events we very much do it from a multi-agency perspective.
“We have pods in our control room where the fire and ambulance just connect up their computers. That works really, really well.
“We would have to do a bit more work to look at pros and cons of having a single control room for blue light services.”
Police C3 – the shorthand for “contact, command and control” – has been in the headlines every since plans to rationalise control rooms were first announced in 2013. But Mr Speirs stressed that performance had been improving under the national force.
This was evidenced last year when Lothian and Borders’ call centre at Bilston Glen suffered an IT failure but colleagues in the old Strathclyde hub were able to pick up the slack.
Mr Speirs said: “Between December 18 and January 4 we had 26,000 emergency calls and the average speed of answer was between three and four seconds.
“The biggest delay was two minutes. That worst-case scenario is not a bad time. We had no calls being discontinued. We are not dropping calls on the ‘nines’.”
But Mr Speirs stressed that his staff were not “back office” but a real frontline.
He said: “We get branded a call centre. We don’t have any performance targets for how long we are on the phone.
“What we talk about is the appropriate length of time. That varies.
“During the recent flooding, we had a woman who was stuck in the car and the water had risen in the car and our operator kept the call going for 25 minutes keeping the woman calm and making sure we had the right resources to help. Only when police arrived did we hang up.”
“Now when you phone the police, we will answer really quickly and prioritise.”