POLICE say they have slashed the time it takes to answer 999 calls by 10 seconds in the last four months.

Senior officers from North Yorkshire Police were speaking on Tuesday night (December 19) at a public meeting in York, held to look at delays in answering emergency calls.

Chief Inspector Charlotte Bloxham, head of the Force Control Room (FCR), said November had been "the busiest month on record ever for 999 calls in the country" and admitted this followed "quite a painful summer".

But she told the meeting the time taken to answer 999 calls had fallen from an average of 17 seconds in August to seven seconds in November - with the same level of demand.

The time taken to answer a non-emergency 101 calls in August was up to three-and-a-half minutes, and that had fallen to about 90 seconds in November.

The figures were revealed at a meeting hosted by Councillor Ashley Mason, who sits on the Police and Crime Panel, at West Offices.

It was also attended by North Yorkshire Police Deputy Chief Constable Lisa Winward.

Ms Winward responded to angry residents who said they had not seen any police response to numerous calls in Foxwood and Woodthorpe, saying their cases would be looked into.

She said: "I can only offer apologies because you clearly haven't had the service from police in the incidents you describe. It's absolutely unacceptable that that's carrying on in your community.

"We desperately need you to ring us because without that information we don't have patterns of what's happening in our community and we police based on those patterns. All that information links where hotspots are, links people and incidents and if we don't have that information we can't link the details."

Earlier this year the force took steps to tackle call answering delays.

Changes to the FCR included introducing an operator service, new operators, a call-back facility on the non-emergency line during times of high demand, and the removal of a series of administrative tasks from FCR workers which meant call takers had 14,000 fewer administrative tasks to complete each month.