International Control Room Week

It’s International Control Room Week – an opportunity to celebrate all those ‘heroes in headsets’ that work in emergency services.

And North Yorkshire Police have their own set of heroes who have worked hard over the past year to improve the force’s response times to 999 and 101 calls. Every day our control room colleagues are dealing with traumatic and distressing situations, keeping a calm head, gathering critical information and providing advice. They are usually the first contact that a member of the public will have with the police when they need to report an emergency.

During this week we wanted to share with the public the improvements that have been made over the past year to the 999 and 101 call answering service provided by North Yorkshire Police.

Responding to 999 emergency calls

 There is a national standard response time that police forces in England & Wales are expected to meet, and that is answering over 90 per cent of 999 calls within 10 seconds – as an average across the whole year.

Over the summer period North Yorkshire Police saw 999 emergency calls increase by 16 per cent. Even against this backdrop its call performance in the force control room was maintained with an average answer time of 3 seconds. From 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2025, the force answered 93.96 per cent of 999 calls within 10 seconds.  Against the same period in 2024 and 2023 the comparative numbers are 88.62 and 77.30 per cent.

Ali Godfrey, Service Delivery Manager said, “This year’s strong performance has enabled our response officers to reach incidents more quickly.”

Performance for 101 – non-emergency calls

The Force Control Room does not have a separate set of call handlers for the non-emergency 101 calls. It is the same crew who also have to respond to 999 calls. That is why the time it takes to answer a 101 call can vary depending on how busy the 999 lines are. In September the time taken to answer a non-emergency call to North Yorkshire Police was 172 seconds. The average answer time for 101 call continues to fall with a reduction of a further 1 minute 14 seconds in 2025 against the same period in 2024.

Ali Godfrey, Service Delivery Manager said “While emergencies should still be reported by calling 999, non-urgent matters can be handled through several alternative channels. These include our Q-buster line for call-backs, online reporting managed by our call handlers, and a recently introduced live chat service on the NYP website for advice or service direction.

Here are a selection of the band 4 call handlers and dispatchers that are helping keep North Yorkshire safe on Monday afternoon.