Police yesterday appealed for Scotland to get a single public information hotline as they struggle to handle thousands of misdirected calls every day.
Frustrated senior officers have watched spending soar as they try to field 16,000 calls a day, many of which should have gone to other services and many as a result of people dialling 999.
Now they want to see a single number, say 101 or 888, for all non-emergency calls to public services, including the police.
The proposal came as Audit Scotland said the public was still confused over whom it should phone for non-emergency calls.
The Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland said it was "watching with interest" pilot projects for a 101 non- emergency police phone line in England and Wales.
Its spokesman on telecommunications, Doug Cross of Tayside Police, said: "Acpos is keen to see this developed as a public service number in Scotland rather than being restricted to dealing just with antisocial behaviour.
"In addition, Acpos has recognised the need for forces to work with its partners in all communities throughout Scotland in developing a list of appropriate telephone numbers for households and businesses that can direct residents to the most appropriate service they may need until such a single non-emergency number is developed."
Forces spend £45m a year on call handling, dealing with an ever-increasing daily total that has been attributed to the huge rise in mobile phone ownership.
Emergency 999 calls make up only a small proportion of calls. But, thanks to mobiles, forces regularly get numerous reports of the same incident. They also get a lot of accidental emergency calls. Fully a quarter of all 999 calls in Britain are "silent", with people inadvertently phoning.
Non-emergency calls make up the bulk of the police's burgeoning telephone traffic. Audit Scotland carried out its own research, finding that fully one-third of Scots thought they should phone the police (rather than the council) if their neighbours were noisy and 8% believed the police would want to know if they were locked out of their house. Another 16% said they would phone the police for traffic information.
Bill Aitken MSP, the Tories' justice spokesman, agreed with Acpos. He said: "One option to consider is the creation of a national non-emergency phone number, such as 888. The call could be received at a central point and a message sent to the local divisional police office."
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article