REPORTING crime to the Surrey Police 101 phone number needs “sharpening up”, the county’s crime chief has been told.

One victim had to wait for days before police responded to his call about a common assault and another resident called their local councillor when they could not get through to 101 looking for help.

Surrey Police and Crime Commissioner David Munro has now been asked to look into how call operators deal with non-urgent and emergency calls.

The same room of phone operators deal with 999 and 101 calls at the force call centre at Mount Browne near Guildford and it can take around one minute and 40 seconds on average for a call to be answered.

At a Police and Crime Panel meeting on Thursday last week, councillor Margaret Cooksey from Mole Valley District Council said there was so much “chatter” people had to go through when they first call 101 and get a recorded message, she was worried some were putting the phone down without reporting the crime.

Mrs Cooksey also raised concerns that victims of crime living in rural areas of the county failed to get a good response from officers after reporting a crime.

She said: “I had had complaints about a common assault that hadn’t been dealt with effectively and quickly. Which was very disappointing, but if it had been an assault in the centre of the town one assumes we would have had a quick response and there would have made quite a lot of noise.”

She said there was no police response for a number of days and the gentleman involved ended up in hospital because of his injuries.

She then pointed out the difficulty with operators responding to both 999 and 101 calls.

Mrs Cooksey added: “They are clearly going to prioritise 999 calls, that’s their raison d’etre, we can’t complain about that, but it’s no wonder then that the 101 calls suffer and that’s what we are supposed to use.”

She said the experience of calling 101 included a “rigmarole” of pressing buttons or being told to go onto the website.

Mr Munro said the number of 999 calls received at the call centre was much smaller than the number of 101 calls and stressed it was a “very slick system”.

He said: “101 has improved immensely since two years ago, but I do believe there is little more way to go and I think they are coping well with the substantial rise with 101 calls. People are calling 101 more than they used to.”

He said this was adding pressure to the system and that they could “cope even better”.

He said people should use 999 if they felt threatened or needed an urgent response and that rural crime was treated the same as town crime, but admitted it may sometimes take officers longer to get to an out-of-town call out.

Beryl Hunwicks from Woking Borough Council said residents in Woking had almost given up on using 101 so they had to bring in an anti-social behaviour officer to the front-line desk at the borough offices.

Councillor Josephine Hawkins from Surrey Heath Borough Council told the crime chief that on the Sunday prior to the panel meeting, a resident who failed to get through to anyone on 101 ended up calling her. She then got in contact with a borough officer who managed to get through to the police.

Mrs Hawkins said: “I definitely think the 101 needs sharpening up.”

Mr Munro agreed to look at the system and invited panel members in to the call handling centre to see how the system worked.