Gwent Police control room behind the scenes - 999 call times

Gwent Police moved into their new headquarters in Cwmbran back in November.

The new incident control room is a sea of screens, each fronted by a call handler working away - a vision of calm amid a veritable mountain of incoming calls.

Even when the room is as busy as it can get, work remains steady, with activity going on under the surface - “like the legs of a swan” says Deputy Head of the Force Contact & Control Centre Jo Glastonbury-Watkins.

Around 30-35 call handlers and staff are working in the control room at its busiest.

“We need that many to answer calls in a timely manner," Ms Glastonbury-Watkins explained.

Gwent Police's new incident control room

The room is where all the calls come in – both emergency and 101.

Staff also manage digital, email and social correspondence.

It’s a purpose-built control room, with force dispatch located in the middle - on a raised plinth the likes of which has been often seen on screen used for things like tracking Jason Bourne.

The force incident manager oversees the operation – constantly managing threat risk.

Sat near them is the silver manager, who is in contact with other parts of the force such as firearms officers.

Operations typically work as follows:

Take a crash for example – calls come into the handlers and officers are dispatched.

Call handlers keep taking calls on the incident, while the officers are en route. They can then relay more information from callers in real time.

When there is a big incident, such as a major traffic incident or firearms, a dedicated team are put in charge. This means call handlers can still take other calls from the area that major incident is in.

"No victims of crime are left behind," superintendent John Davies said, with a bone-shattering handshake.

Which such a fast-paced environment often dealing with sensitive incidents, surely a lot of training is required?

More than a year in total it turns out.

Training to work in the control room is “significant”, Ms Glastonbury-Watkins explained

There are six weeks in the classroom before a further seven to eight weeks embedding that knowledge into the role.

"By week 14, the new starter would join the shift pattern and by month 10 they come back to the classroom to learn the dispatch element of the role," she said.

There is also constant one-to-one mentoring on shift.

By month 14 the recruit should be competent in all aspects of the role.

Two of those past recruits are Jess Nancarrow and Jack Richards.

Ms Nancarrow has been in the control room for two years, Mr Richards for eight.

"The role itself hasn’t changed since moving to the new control room, but it’s better for staff. It’s somewhere we can be proud of," Mr Richards - whose father and grandfather served in Gwent Police - said.

"It looks like something you’d see on the TV."

Ms Nancarrow said: "You look forward to going to work, you don’t know what to expect.

"It could be murder, it could be parking issues."

Some calls, however, stick in the memory for the wrong reasons.

"I had a call once about someone having been kicked out of a taxi and needing a lift home – another one wondering if the local takeaway was open," Mr Richards said.

Ms Nancarrow recounted an incident of an elderly gentleman calling to find out when he should get his food out of the oven as his wife was in hospital.

Sometimes though, the team have to rally around one another after a particularly difficult call.

"I did have one call I can still remember," Ms Nancarrow said.

"A woman phoned up screaming after she’d been attacked. It was quite a nasty one.

"She was so afraid she didn’t want to put the phone down, but due to her call we were able to get a victimless prosecution for the guy.

"It’s just a call, but in the bigger picture it was quite a lot.

"It’s quite rewarding when things like that happen."

On average, the pair said they field around 70 calls a day - but that number has surpassed 100 on occasion.

"Sometimes they all blur into one," Ms Nancarrow said.

"Even if something isn’t for us, we do want to help those people."

Mr Richards said part of the response protocol now included asking people "what their expectations are from the call" - information which is then used to help manage their expectations.

"This helps us prioritise a response," he said.

Moving up the chain of command, we come to chief inspector Rhys Caddick.

Mr Caddick is a silver manager mentioned earlier.

It's his third stint in the control room and "there have been lots of changes with a real focus on making improvements".

"We’re often the first point of contact for someone in a traumatic situation, that can be challenging," he said.

More so than frontline policing at times, he says.

"It’s like we’re the first investigators, not just a call centre," Mr Caddick said.

"I can’t do my job without the call handlers asking those questions."

Moving higher still up the command chain, we're reunited with superintendant John Davies and Ms Glastonbury-Watkins.

"Our whole ethos is being there for the public when they need us the most," Mr Davies said.

"Most of the time they ring us when they’re at their most vulnerable."

He noted those recent headlines and conceded that the time taken to answer 999 calls was "identified as an area we could improve upon".

Police forces are expected to answer 90 per cent of 999 calls within 10 seconds, but recent Home Office stats showed Gwent Police managed just 75 per cent of calls in that time and 6.7 per cent of calls took more than 60 seconds. 

"The number of calls we receive has been increasingly consistently since Covid at about 20 per cent each year," he said.

"We have around 50,000 contacts each month. About 9,500 are 999 calls and 26,000 are 101s. We also field emails and other non-emergency contacts.

"They’re huge numbers, often weather related, but we want to be more accessible to the public."

He stressed that, while there are "lots of ways to contact us", 999 was reserved "very much for emergencies".

"We don’t want to discourage people wishing to contact us, just do it by the most appropriate means," he said.

"We average about 300 999 calls a day, so around 100 are unnecessary for 999."

Ms Glastonbury-Watkins said that 30-40 per cent of 999 calls are not recorded as police incidents as "they didn’t require emergency response".

Staff, she said, will be able to ascertain if it’s an emergency or not "very quickly".

All of this, Gwent Police say, is part of a "huge amount of work" being put in to reduce 999 answering times, but targets are not the main aim.

"It’s more about helping keep people safe than the targets," Mr Davies said.

"There have only been four occasions this month when we have dropped below 90 per cent of our target.

"We’ll never be perfect, but we’re always trying to improve the service we provide."

Gwent Police also now offer a 'ride along' service, in which an applicant can experience daily life as a frontline officcer or a control room operative.

More information is available on their website.