The “staggering” number of abandoned calls to Police Scotland in recent years can be revealed today by the Scottish Conservatives.
A Freedom of Information Request from the party shows that since 2018 almost 1.9 million calls to Police Scotland’s 101 number were discontinued by the caller after they went unanswered for two minutes.
There are also alarming figures on emergency 999 calls. As well as more than 15,000 calls being discontinued since 2018, the number of callers who had to wait more than two minutes for their 999 call to be answered jumped from 150 in 2019 to 2,624 in 2020.
Shadow Justice Secretary Jamie Greene has described the numbers as a “damning indictment” of the failures by the SNP Government to give frontline policing services the resources they need to protect the public.
He says that previous tragedies have occurred due to emergency calls not being picked up and says that there is a grave risk of serious incidents happening once again if SNP Ministers do not act urgently on these figures.
The problem has got worse during the pandemic. In 2020 almost one million calls were discontinued, while in 2021, to the end of November, the figure was almost 600,000.
Police Scotland’s own reports show that the average time taken to answer a call increased by over 16% between 2020-21 and 2021-22.
Scottish Conservative Shadow Justice Secretary Jamie Greene MSP, said: “These figures are absolutely staggering. Our officers are doing their best under severe pressure, but they are simply not being given the resources they need by the SNP Government.
“This situation is completely unacceptable and unsustainable going forward. We cannot have this huge volume of calls from members of the public going unanswered when they could be alerting police to serious incidents.
“We have seen tragedies occur before in Scotland when calls have been missed. These figures must be a wake-up call for SNP Ministers to guarantee officers can answers calls as promptly as possible. If not, this could again have devastating consequences.
“These statistics are a damning indictment of the SNP’s failures to fund our police. Ministers must urgently reverse their plans to hit police with yet another cut in this year’s budget and support Scottish Conservative calls for a significant increase in their capital funding.”