Q1 – How many calls have Avon and Somerset Police received for 999 in the last year.

Q2 – How many calls have they attended.

Q3 – How many were found to be “false alarms”.

Your request for information has now been considered and some of the information asked for is below.

Section 17 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 requires Avon and Somerset Constabulary, when refusing to provide such information (because the information is exempt) to provide you the applicant with a notice which: (a) states that fact, (b) specifies the exemption in question and (c) states (if that would not otherwise be apparent) why the exemption applies.

Q1 – In the 2009/10 financial year, Avon and Somerset Constabulary answered 279,650 999 calls.

Q2 – Avon and Somerset Constabulary attend incidents graded in three ways:

Grade 1 – Immediate
Grade 2 – Priority
Grade 3 – Scheduled

During the 2009/10 financial year Avon and Somerset attended 54,703 Grade 1 incidents, 137,376 Grade 2 incidents and 52,336 Grade 3 incidents which equates to a total of 244,415 incidents attended.

Please note however that the above figures are not necessarily as a result of a 999 call but may also be for calls to our general inquiries number. To try and determine the exact number of 999 calls which were attended would involve a manual review of every single call card created in the last financial year to determine to origin of the initial call. As such, the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the “appropriate level” as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. It is estimated that it would cost at least £450 to comply with your request.

In accordance with the Act, this represents a Refusal Notice for this part of your request.

Q3 – We have taken your request for “false alarms” to mean incidents which were categorised and recorded as hoax calls. During 2009/10 there were 5713 incidents recorded as hoax calls by Avon and Somerset Constabulary.

As per question 2, please note that the above figure is not necessarily as a result of 999 calls but may also be for calls to our general enquiry number. To try and determine the exact number of 999 calls which were categorised as hoax calls in the last financial year would require a manual review of the 571 incidents to determine to origin of the initial call. As such, the cost of providing you with the information is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of locating and retrieving the information exceeds the “appropriate level” as stated in the Freedom of Information (Fees and Appropriate Limit) Regulations 2004. It is estimated that it would cost at least £450 to comply with your request.

In accordance with the Act, this represents a Refusal Notice for this part of your request.

Avon and Somerset Constabulary along with its emergency service partners regularly run campaigns to promote appropriate use of the 999 system. We have no wish to discourage its use for genuine emergencies where someone is in danger or a crime is being witnessed but there can be serious consequences for inappropriate or hoax use of the system.

Police Forces in the United Kingdom are routinely required to provide statistics to government bodies and the recording criteria is set nationally. However, the systems used for recording these figures are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data. It should be noted that for these reasons the figures given relate to information from the specific recording system of Avon and Somerset Constabulary and should not be used for comparison purposes with any other response you receive.