Ms Helen Hall:

It is essential. It is one thing to remember when members are thinking about the new legislation. It will be critical to make sure the new policing and community safety authority, PCSA, is beyond doubt in terms of what information and data can be accessed by it. This has been a big issue across 2020 and 2021 and it still endures, in terms of our oversight.. I have concerns about the 200,000 cancelled calls, which I expressed that earlier, and there is still more work to be done there. However, it is important to clarify that it is not that the 999 calls were cancelled or knocked off. When a call comes in, a computer-aided dispatch, CAD, incident needs to be created. Some 200,000 of those were cancelled. That will often happen and there are perfectly valid reasons for cancellation.

For example, if five of us see a road traffic accident and we dial in, there will then be five CAD incidences. It would be appropriate to delete four of those and have just one so that double-counting does not take place. That being said, the bigger concern is around where there is a domestic violence call that should have had a response. I am not diminishing the issue but I am just saying that in respect of the numbers, there were still a great number of them that should not been cancelled.