Lincolnshire Police's average response time for answering 999 calls revealed as quickest in UK

For the first time, data on how long it takes each force in the UK to answer 999 calls has been published.

The Home Office has released the figures in a bid to ‘further improve the speed of the service provided to the public’, it says.

The numbers are based on a six-month period running up to April of this year.

Nationally, the time taken to respond to a 999 call was 16.1 seconds. In Lincolnshire, however, it was 6.0 seconds – the quickest of all, with Avon-and-Somerset in second on 6.2 seconds.

The county’s force also fared well in a separate measure: the proportion of calls being answered within the target of 10 seconds. Here, Lincolnshire Police was joint-second on 89 per cent, behind Avon-and-Somerset on 92 per cent, with the national average being 71 per cent.

Mike Modder-Fitch, from Lincolnshire Police’s Force Control Room (FCR), said: “The 999-performance data released today shows, when someone is in immediate danger, in Lincolnshire we answer 999 calls quicker than most other forces in the country.

“Over the last 10 years, the emergency 999 calls we receive have been increasing by around 10 per cent year on year. At points over summer 2021, we were taking over 12,000 999 calls per month. These are never seen levels of demand. This increase is up from an average of around 6,000 calls per month, at peak times 10 years ago.

“The efforts of the FCR team to answer emergency calls cannot be underestimated. They answer some of the most traumatic calls for service that we receive. We’d like to recognise their endeavours and the challenges they face to get the details and the police on their way. This level of demand puts extra pressure on our response teams too, with more urgent and priority graded responses.

“We continue to face many challenges and our ambition is to maintain these excellent standards while working to improve our response times when people call 101.

“We will be recruiting again in September for call takers and welcome enquiries from anyone who would like further details.”