Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what proportion of calls to the 101 police non-emergency number were dropped calls in (a) South Yorkshire and (b) the UK in (i) 2013 and (ii) 2014.

Data on total 101 calls received, average time to answer and caller abandonment rates (the proportion of calls that do not get answered before the caller hangs up) has been published on www.Police.uk since April 2014. The Home Office does not hold data before this date, this data is held by local forces.

Each individual police force is responsible for ensuring that calls transferred from 101 are answered within their local service standards. Due to different recording practices between forces, the number of directly comparable forces is small and may not represent a national average. From analysis of the data available from April to December 2014, of the 25 forces comparable to South Yorkshire, over the same period, the abandonment rate was 7.5% of calls.

In South Yorkshire the average abandonment rate in the nine months April to December 2014 was 7.1% (5133.) Data on total 101 calls received, average time to answer and caller abandonment rates (the proportion of calls that do not get answered before the caller hangs up) has been published on www.Police.uk since April 2014.The Home Office does not hold data before this date, this data is held by local forces. Each individual police force is responsible for ensuring that calls transferred from 101 are answered within their local service standards.

Due to different recording practices between forces, the number of directly comparable forces is small and may not represent a national average. From analysis of the data available from April to December 2014, of the 19 forces directly comparable to South Yorkshire in terms of types of call recorded, the average answering time was 36 seconds. In South Yorkshire the average answering time in the nine months April to December 2014 was 39 seconds.