2022/24880 - Police Callouts

REQUEST

Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, please can you provide me with responses to the following regarding police attendance response times for 999 calls:

1/ Please provide the average annual police response time to attend 999 calls categorised as (i) grade 1 emergency, (ii) grade 2, (iii) grade 3, and (iv) all grades, for each year from 2011 up until and including 2021. Please also provide both the total annual number of calls and time taken to attend for each part of the question.

Grades 1 to 3 typically refer to an emergency response, a prompt response and a routine response. Please provide a description of the different grades (including expected response times to attend) used by the force if these differ. An example for GMP is included here:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-manchester-47582743

2/ Please provide the total number of occasions that police did not attend i) grade 1, ii) grade 2 or iii) grade 3 emergencies last year (2021).

3/ Please provide the longest individual time taken to attend a grade 1 emergency call in 2021.

Please send me the data requested in the form of an Excel spreadsheet or as a csv file, using the template provided.

If you are able to supply some of this information more quickly than other items, please supply each item when you can rather than delay everything until it is all available.

RESPONSE

Please see the attached spreadsheet.

The question ‘Please provide the total number of occasions that police did not attend i) grade 1, ii) grade 2 or iii) grade 3 emergencies last year (2021)’ is exempt as it exceeds the 18 hour time limit.  34,625 incidents were created as a result of a 999 call in 2021 with either response Grade 1 (Emergency), Grade 2 (Priority) or Grade 3 (Scheduled) assigned.  To determine whether police did not attend these calls a manual trawl through the incident log would be required. Each log takes approx. 30 seconds to look through, 30 seconds x 34,625 = approx. 12 days of work

Section 12 – Excess Cost

The exemption applicable to the information you have requested for this question can be found at Section 12(1) of the Act and this refusal notice is issued under Section 17.

Section 12(1) “does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.” 

In the case of a police force, the appropriate limit is set at £450, which is calculated at £25 per hour (i.e., 18 hours). Gwent Police would have to conduct a manual search to find and extract the information for this question. This would take more than 18 hours of staff time therefore we are unable to answer this question and the exemption is engaged.