Accessibility

As a Public Authority, Gwent Police has a responsibility to ensure that our premises and services are made accessible to members of the public that will often have differing access needs.

Access is not just about physical needs, but also about our approach to engaging with communities, making information that we publish easy to understand, and ensuring there is a range of different ways that people can contact us, for example, providing email addresses for our Neighbourhood Teams.

Gwent Police have introduced a range of initiatives to support people that may find it challenging to access our services, including regular forums for our Deaf communities, incident reporting centres for people with learning disabilities, and an emergency 999 SMS text service for people who may find it difficult to communicate over the telephone.

Key Facts:

• Around 632 people visit our police stations on a daily basis (data collected in May 2011 from stations with published opening hours and Station Enquiry Officers)
• There are 27 buildings owned by the Police Authority which are open to the public; out of these 27, 23 are suitable and accessible to disabled people
• There are 141 people currently registered to use the SMS emergency text service, most of these people are from our Deaf communities
• Gwent's Force Control Room takes an average of 750 calls a day