New data shows that Wiltshire Police received over 120,000 emergency 999 calls in one year.

The latest publicly available Wiltshire Police performance report shows that the force recorded 123,920 999 calls in the year leading up to April 2024 and took on average 12 seconds to answer them.

This is five seconds slower than the fastest UK force, Lincolnshire Police, but significantly faster than the slowest UK force, Bedfordshire Police, which takes 30 seconds. 

Wiltshire Police's abandonment rate, meaning the cases in which the caller disconnects before their call is answered, was at 1.7 per cent for the same year.  

Meanwhile, the immediate response time was 13 minutes 11 seconds, and the average time the police spent at the scene was 2 hours 7 minutes and 59 seconds.

Wiltshire Police was recently taken out of special measures after inspectors found that the force had made “significant improvement”.

It was placed in special measures two years prior after it was found to be failing in several areas.

This included “ineffective” management and a failure to “understand and promptly identify the vulnerability of victims at the first point of contact.”

Conservative Philip Wilkinson was re-elected as Police and Crime Commissioner in May, facing a strong challenge from Labour candidate Stanka Adamcova, who came within 2,250 votes of a win.

Chief Superintendent, Dave Minty, head of contact management and specialist operations, said: “We are working extremely hard within the Crime and Communication Centre to achieve an average call response time of 10 seconds and we are making progress in this area.

"Our dedicated call handlers are committed to reducing call waiting times for the public and we currently have an improvement project in place to help us achieve this target. Our priority remains the assessment of threat, harm, risk and identifying vulnerability at the first point of contact with the public.”