Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department are taking to reduce waiting times on the 101 non-emergency line.

Police forces are operationally independent and the handling of 101 calls is a matter for them. It is for Chief Constables and elected Police and Crime Commissioners or Mayors to decide how to handle communications with the public, based on their experience and knowledge of the communities they serve.

However, the Home Office is clear that any call to the 101 number should be answered in a timely manner, and after providing details of the incident the caller should be given a crime reference number to track progress or request an update from the police on the case. In its Beating Crime Plan the Government committed to improving the responsiveness of local police to 101 and 999 calls by developing league tables for call answering times and ensuring that the public know how responsive their local force is when they call them for help.

On 31 May we published national data on answering times to 999 calls and later this year we are planning to publish performance data for all forces showing responsiveness to 101 calls.

The Home Office is making sure that the police have the resources they need to beat crime, which remains one of the Government’s top priorities.

This includes £14m in funding to the NPCC’s Digital Public Contact Programme to support delivery of the Single Online Home national policing digital platform. This provides a digital 101 service, an online facility to make it easier for victims of ASB to report incidents.