More than 90 per cent of 999 calls are now being answered by Cheshire Police within 10 seconds compared to 76 per cent this time last year.

And 90 per cent of all grade one incidents in October, November and December were attended within the target time of 15 minutes, police commissioner John Dwyer said.

Mr Dwyer was responding to a question at the recent meeting of the Cheshire Police and Crime Panel from Cllr Paul Findlow (Cheshire East, Con) who raised concerns about the January 2022 figure of 76 per cent quoted in the Peel review by HM Inspectorate into Cheshire Constabulary.

Mr Dwyer said the Peel inspection took place in the summer of 2021 and the present chief constable had only arrived in April 2021 and he, himself, had only been elected as commissioner in May 2021.

"I campaigned in my election (2021) that I was going to sort out the 101 calls in particular but then Peel came along and we realised that there was more things to be done," said Mr Dwyer.

He said he regularly monitors call handling performance as part of his scrutiny process.

"In November 2022, 90.4 per cent of 999 calls were answered within 10 seconds and the average answer time was seven seconds," Mr Dwyer said. "For assurance, there has only been one month in the last eight months where 90 per cent or more of emergency calls were not answered within 10 seconds. This was in June 2022 when the figure was 89.3 per cent."

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But he said answering 999 calls at the force control centre was only part of the emergency process.

"Throughout November 2022, 90 per cent of grade one incidents were attended within the target time of 15 minutes, with an average response time across Cheshire of less than seven and half minutes," said the commissioner.

"I'm of the view that one or two seconds delay in answering the 999 call isn't really the issue, the issue is that, having made the 999 call, how long is it going to take the police to get to you, to deal with the call that they have asked them to attend to."

Cllr Findlow also asked about the number of non-emergency 101 calls, where members of the public had given up waiting for a response because of the time taken to answer.

The Peel report stated the abandonment rate ranged from a year high of 37.3 per cent in August 2021 to 16.2 per cent in January 2022.

Mr Dwyer said he had invested in the force control centre to help deal with this.

"The abandonment rate between April and November 2022 was 16.2 per cent and between September and November 2022 was down at 14.6 per cent with an average answer time of less than six minutes. This is my drive to make sure that the 101s are properly dealt with," he said, adding: "There's still room for improvement."

He was asked by panel chair Evan Morris if there was still a recruitment problem.

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Mr Dwyer replied: "We did end up with an issue where I discovered that our neighbouring forces were paying their call handlers more than we paying, so the chief constable and I discussed this, we raised the level of pay. We actually then had people coming back into force."