People will soon be able to telephone or email local police officers, Gordon Brown has said.
Address
Manvers Street,
Bath BA1 1JNTelephone
0845 4567000
My, that was fast, wasn’t it? Got to hand it to the monocular Scot, when he decides to do something he gets right down to it.
Under a £325 million-a-year Home Office plan,
Not quite sure why it costs that much though.
9 responses so far ↓
1 MarkC // Feb 26, 2008 at 9:37 am
Hey, it’s Guvvermint. Bloody lucky to get anything in place for less than half a billion. Or should that be “less than half an Old Bill”? Let’s see what kind of a mess they can make of a simple email protocol and application.
And how spookily appropriate that the Conservative’s Home Affairs spokesman should be called “Brokenshire”. I think that sums it up nicely.
2 Ian Bennett // Feb 26, 2008 at 10:05 am
Is it suggested anywhere that the telephone will be manned, or that e-mails will be read by more than an auto-responder?
3 Letters From A Tory // Feb 26, 2008 at 10:19 am
Email them to say what? Help, someone is breaking into my house while I’m surfing the internet?
http://lettersfromatory.wordpress.com
4 Judge // Feb 26, 2008 at 10:41 am
Phoning local police officers (or local stations) sounds a big improvement to the situation now where I live. And not trusting 0845 numbers, I checked on some of the others in Avon and Somerset - looks like a call centre to me:
Avonmouth police station
0845 4567000
Portishead police station
0845 4567000
Minehead police station
0845 4567000
Chipping Sodbury police station
0845 4567000
5 Kay Tie // Feb 26, 2008 at 10:45 am
I think the plan is to be able to contact individual officers. You know, plod2355@sclerotic.police.gov.uk.
My local force already has email addresses, and they also all have mobile phones. Quite why this is going to cost £325m PER YEAR is beyond me.
6 Umbongo // Feb 26, 2008 at 3:44 pm
“Quite why this is going to cost £325m PER YEAR is beyond me.”
Presumably there’s going to be a national OfPolCall with regional and local OfPolCalls to follow - all with diversity and outreach officers . . . . . . etc etc.
7 jeremiah // Feb 26, 2008 at 8:45 pm
IT is indeed a call centre and the number is no different from the one that we’ve had in Bath for some years; the “out of hours” service for non-emergencies is terrible (as, perhaps, it should be)
8 Philip Thomas // Feb 26, 2008 at 8:48 pm
I quite like the idea of having a local bobbie and being able to call them. However, I agree that the cost seems absurd. Does it represent some deluxe mobile phone contract for every officer in the land.
9 Kay Tie // Feb 26, 2008 at 9:08 pm
“Does it represent some deluxe mobile phone contract for every officer in the land.”
Since they already have a bionic radio system being rolled out which can do SMS and voicecalls, no, I don’t see that as the excuse. And you can’t tell me that email costs that much. You could probably run an entire force’s email off one Mac Leopard Server without an administrator.
Where do I bid for the £325m/year contract? I’ll do it for half that.
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