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North Yorkshire Police has gone from being one of the slowest forces in the country for answering 999 calls to one of the quickest.
The force answered more than 95 per cent of calls in less than ten seconds for the first two months of 2025.
The figure for February of 95.6 per cent makes the force the fifth-best-performing in the country after previously being the worst.
The maximum wait time for February was two minutes and 55 seconds.
In December 2022, just 74 per cent of calls were answered within ten seconds.
The force still fell below 90 per cent — the national target — for at least six months in 2024 but has an average of 95.86 so far this year.
Improvements were made following a report in 2022 by the HM Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS), which found North Yorkshire Police required improvement in several areas, including responding to calls from the public.
Superintendent for customer contact, Andy Nunns, said the force was proud of its improvements in call answer times:
“Each call we manage represents a potential life saved, a crime prevented, or a person in distress comforted, and our Force Control Room colleagues’ efforts have made a significant impact on our community.
“We know how important it is to answer a victim’s call as quickly as possible and are continuing to work to improve our performance month on month.
“Our answering times are one area of business that we can never afford to take our eye off. It is critical to the public’s confidence in our service and how safe they feel living and working in York and North Yorkshire.”
Improvements have also been made with 101 call answering.
More than 67 per cent of calls were answered within the target of two minutes in February 2025, compared to a low of around 32 per cent in March 2022.
The average wait time was two minutes and 51 seconds in February, although the maximum wait was one hour and 15 minutes.
Jo Coles, York and North Yorkshire deputy mayor with responsibility for policing, fire and crime, thanked control room staff for their efforts at a recent online public meeting.
She said:
“I just want to thank all the staff in the control room who I know work incredibly hard and in an incredibly stressful kind of environment particularly when it’s busy.
“I just want to make sure that we publicly thank them for everything that they’re doing, particularly on the nines where the performance is so much improved on where we’ve been.”
An update on call handling will be given to members of North Yorkshire Police, Fire and Crime Panel on Tuesday next week.
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