AVON and Somerset police must improve their ‘disgraceful’ response times if they are not to lose the respect and support of the public, a local MP has warned.

Ian Liddell-Grainger said if senior force leaders did not know how improvements might be achieved then they needed only visit a neighbouring county to learn how it was done.

Mr Liddell-Grainger said it had been revealed that Avon and Somerset officers took an average of 13 hours to respond to grade two calls – those incidents which required an urgent response but which posed no imminent risk to life.

The category included burglaries, domestic abuse, and grievous bodily harm, all of which were incidents where a suspect might still be in the vicinity or evidence was at risk of being destroyed.

Mr Liddell-Grainger said the national average for responding was five hours, putting Avon and Somerset in the lower reaches of the league table.

By contrast, Wiltshire police recorded the best response time in the country at just 16 minutes.

Mr Liddell-Grainger, who represents West Somerset and will be the Conservative candidate for the new Tiverton and Minehead constituency taking in much of the area around Wellington, said such a discrepancy was hard to understand.

He said: “Quite simply, I want to know why Wiltshire is getting it so right and Avon and Somerset is getting it so wrong.

“I really feel a trip across the country boundary to see how they do things in Wiltshire would be a greatly enlightening experience for those leading the Avon and Somerset force.

“I am afraid these figures bear out so many of the complaints I have been getting about the length of time police take to turn up to any incident.

“So many of these have come from rural parts of my constituency.

“It seems at times that Avon and Somerset is concentrating manpower on towns and cities and leaving the countryside to run itself.

“Certainly, farmers who experience machinery theft or attacks on animals now feel there is little point in calling the police because the response is even slower than it was when ‘country coppers’ went around on pushbikes, and often the only action that ensues is the offer of a crime number for the insurers.

“Thirteen hours is a disgraceful response time and hardly does anything to improve the generally low opinion people have about Avon and Somerset police.

“I should be greatly obliged if the chief constable could find a moment to drop me a line explaining why her officers take 48 times longer to get to an incident than their colleagues across the county line.”

Police reaction to MP's statement

Responding to Mr Liddell-Grainger’s criticism, Avon and Somerset Police said it was committed to providing outstanding policing to all communities, which included giving the public confidence that officers would be there in an emergency, when they were needed the most.

A spokeswoman said: “At the moment, there is no nationally agreed standardised measure for reporting response timelines, which means direct comparisons between forces can be misleading.

“Our most recent PEEL assessment from His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services identified that we need to improve our response times, and a significant improvement plan is already in place.

“We’re confident this plan, along with the uplift in officer numbers, means we’re on track to improve our performance in this area.

“We are also working hard to reduce the sheer volume of non-emergency demand coming into the police, much of which we know is overspill demand from other public services.

“For example, in a recent 12-month period we took more than 385,000 calls for services, with under a third of these relating to crime or anti-social behaviour.

“The rest are issues which go beyond the policing sphere, including incidents involving people in mental health crisis.”

The spokeswoman said the Avon and Somerset force’s ‘median average response for all calls graded as immediate, where there is a risk to life’ in 2022 was 11 minutes.

Sixty-eight per cent of those calls were attended within the force’s service level agreement (SLA) time of 15 minutes for an urban location and 20 minutes for a rural location.

She said: “For calls graded as priority, where there is an urgent need to respond but no risk to life, our median average response time is less than 50 minutes, with 54 per cent of calls being responded to within the 60-minute timeframe set in our SLA.”

The spokeswoman said it was important to recognise different criteria were used by police forces to measure response times, when the clock starts and stops.

In Avon and Somerset, the response time was recorded from the point of a call being received into the contact centre, while other police forces might use a different measure, such as the point at which an officer was dispatched, at the end of a call being received, or at the point an officer was assigned