Emergency 999 calls to Sussex Police rise as a fifth are 'hoaxes'

But figures to the 101 non-emergency number fell by almost one quarter.

The figures were shared during a performance & accountability meeting with Katy Bourne, the Police and Crime Commissioner.

Of the 999 calls, 86 per cent were answered within ten seconds, placing Sussex Police ‘around mid-table’ when compared to the other Forces in the UK.

That percentage was lower than the two previous years.

Data from police.uk showed that, of the 21,524 999 calls received in January, 17,398 (80.8 per cent) were answered in under ten seconds – compared to 16,062 (83.5 per cent) in January 2022.

A further 3,826 (17.8 per cent) were answered in ten to 60 seconds, and 300 (1.4 per cent) took a minute or longer to answer.

As for the non-emergency lines, the average wait time for a call to be answered stood at four minutes 14 seconds, with 11 per cent of people abandoning their calls.

Chief Constable Jo Shiner said Sussex Police was ‘always striving to improve our performance within the control room’.

And she pointed out that new technology – the Joint Force Contract & Telephony Programme – was being brought in to deal with a ‘lag’ in the current system.

She explained that the ‘lag’ was caused because the Force’s system and the BT system ‘don’t quite jigsaw together sometimes’, causing a delay of between five and 13 seconds on calls filtering through.

Chief Constable Shiner added: “The new technology which we are building in will ensure that that lag effectively is no longer there.

“And we know by analysing our performance, that when that lag is no longer there, we will actually absolutely top quartile, if not top five Forces in terms of that performance.”

February was the 12th consecutive month in which a greater number of 999 calls were received compared to calls to 101.

The Chief Constable told Mrs Bourne that some 20 per cent of 999 calls were hoaxes, with others being made by people with mental health issues.