Single non-emergency number for London

Report: 8
Date: 11 May 2006
By: Commissioner

Summary

The purpose of this report is to introduce the Single Non Emergency Number service (SNEN) and then set out the current MPS position for the implementation of the SNEN service in London. It is very likely that there will be a large impact upon the MPS. The actual impact on both Central Command Complex (CCC) and the 32 MPS boroughs (and the City of London) is currently un-quantified.

A. Recommendations

That Members note the content of the report

B. Supporting information

Introduction

1. The Single Non Emergency Number (SNEN or 101) is a new service that will provide the public with direct access, through a new 3-digit number, to community safety advice, information and action, it is expected to free up the 999 emergency services to handle emergency incidents.

2. The Government made a commitment to introduce the SNEN in its 2005 Election Manifesto, as one of a package of measures to improve community safety. The Home Office and the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister are introducing the initiative jointly.

General concept of SNEN

3. The Home Office vision for the 101 Programme:

• 101 provides the public with access to advice, information and action on community safety issues through a new three-digit number, and helps to free up the 999 emergency service to handle emergency calls.
• 01 deals with community safety, including non-emergency crime, policing and anti-social behaviour issues. Callers to the 101 phone number are connected to the service covering their part of the country. When fully rolled out, customers will be able to access the service using multiple channels – phone, web, email and SMS.
• Calls made within one area are routed to one or more contact centres and handled by trained advisers. These advisers will, for the majority of calls, be able to resolve the caller’s query through giving advice or information, or will gather information from the caller and refer the caller’s query to a service delivery partner to resolve the issue. Callers will be told what performance level to expect, for example if reporting an abandoned car; they will be told how quickly it will be removed.
• For calls that are not within the scope of the service, the advisers will either transfer the caller to another part of the service provider’s operation to progress the caller’s query or signpost the caller to a more appropriate service, requiring the caller to dial another number.

The 101 service

4. The 101 service includes the following ‘core’ services:

• vandalism, graffiti and other deliberate damage to property;
• noisy neighbours or loud parties;
• intimidation and harassment;
• abandoned vehicles;
• rubbish and litter, including fly tipping;
• people being drunk or rowdy in public places;
• drug-related anti-social behaviour; and
• street lighting.

Additional services will be developed as a part of the Wave 2 rollout.

Current status

5. The MPS and MPA have been working closely with the Home Office, Greater London Authority and Association of Local Government (and other key stakeholders) for several months now. The aim is to develop a solution for London that will be scalable and flexible, suitable for all parties (with varying levels of service delivery experience and skills), avoiding the evolution of local solutions that create a “patchwork” approach that cannot be integrated economically.

6. In the autumn of 2005, the MPS worked with Westminster City Council (WCC) in preparing a proposal for Wave One funding. This proposal was not submitted, due to issues relating to funding, timing and the associated operational and reputational risks.

7. The MPS is now in the process of setting up a project team to determine the likely impact of SNEN. This project will work with the SNEN partnership to:

• Develop an expression of interest;
• Scope and determine the feasibility of the partnership proposal;
• Working to develop a concept of operation that is feasible for the MPS to support and deliver;
• Support SNEN service development and implementation;
• Start developing a MPS Business Case.

8. The MPS project will include representation from: MPA, Directorate of Information (DoI), Territorial Policing - Modernising Operations, affected Borough Operational Command Units and Central Operations (CCC).

Home Office rollout approach

9. 101 will be launched in three waves across England and Wales. This ensures that key lessons are learned early on, before we commit funds and resources to the wider rollout. The first wave goes live in 2006. The second wave will be launched the following year. National rollout will be achieved by 2008.

10. The focus of the second wave is to achieve economies of scale and wider geographical coverage, while maintaining a high quality of customer experience and service delivery. Evaluation of the first wave areas and lessons learned will be collated in August 2006 and introduced into the second wave.

11. The Wave 2 roll-out will be managed in five stages as follows:

• Stage 1: Selection - Potential Wave 2 partnerships will submit expressions of interest, setting out their intention and capability to work as a partnership to deliver the service;
• Stage 2: Bidding - Partnerships selected from Stage 1 will submit a full proposal to deliver the service, based on detailed requirements from the Home Office;
• Stage 3: Approval and agreement - The Home Office will approve proposals and sign funding agreements with partnerships;
• Stage 4: Implementation Partnerships will set up the service in their area;
• Stage 5: Operation – Launch of service. The partnership will operate and manage the service in the selected area.

12. The timetable for Wave 2 is:

• 29 March 06 - ‘Introducing 101’ National Conference;
• 2 June 06 - Submission of expressions of interest;
• 16 June 06 - Wave 2 Partnerships announced;
• 28 June 06 - Wave 2 'Kick off' event for selected Partnerships;
• 28 June – 5 October 06 - Wave 2 development phase;
• 6 October 06 - Submission of Wave 2 Proposals;
• 31 October 06 - Funding Agreements signed.1 November 06 - Implementation of Wave 2 Partnerships begins;
• 1 January – 30 June 07 - Wave 2 Partnerships launch 101 service.

Stage 1: Selection

13. The procedure, which the Home Office will use in Wave 2, requires that prospective partnerships submit ‘Expressions of Interest’ for evaluation, and if these are agreed a limited amount of funding (100k) will be released to facilitate the preparation of full proposals that are a detailed blueprint for the proposed service.

14. At this point it is likely that any partnership formed will need to centrally coordinate six pilot boroughs centrally; this should be eligible for a Home Office grant of £600, 000. This is subject to confirmation.

15. Given London's unique size and complexity, developing the proposal for a pan London service is likely to require significant funding and early discussion with the Home Office about this are likely to be needed.

• Requirements regarding Expression(s) of Interest (EOI) (for 2nd June 2006);
• EOI must demonstrate high level sign up, describe the proposed partnership (it is likely that there will be a requirement that this partnership is in existence by the 2nd June), and commit to follow the service design, concept of operations and best practice gleaned from the evaluation of Wave 1 and lessons learned.

The SNEN challenge in London

16. The London SNEN will have to cope with a complex environment in order to be successful; it will need to address each of the following delivery issues:

• Cross border capability - people cross borders every day in London e.g. over 1 million people travel into central London each day - the London SNEN solution needs to be able to deal with calls made in one borough that relate to another;
• Consistency - given the cross border issues - Londoners need to be given a consistent service - particularly during the initial contact phase;
• Capital city capability - the volume of SNEN calls in London is likely to be very large. The service will have to cope with varying service delivery experience and skills within delivery partners;
• There will have a large number of Call Handling and Service Delivery Partners (32 MPS Police Boroughs, 33 London Authorities including the City of London), other Pan London Bodies). The selected solution will need to be scalable and flexible;
• Critical incidents - these occur frequently in London - the SNEN service must be capable of correctly identifying critical incidents out of the seemingly routine;
• The service is likely to need fast time intelligence within the SNEN point of contact function so that it can dispense information and deflect calls away from the Emergency service (e.g. the recent Thames Whale incident).

Progress to date in London

17. At this stage a partnership for London is in the very early stages of formation; it is not known by whom or how the service front-end will be delivered (single new facility, extension to an existing facility, virtual geographically clustered centres, etc.).

18. The ALG and GLA groups are both working to form London partnerships.

Current outline proposal for SNEN pan London

19. As call handling is not a core business of the MPS, we would look to other parties to provide the initial call handling function for the SNEN triage. The MPS would therefore be a service delivery partner for calls that are Police business.

20. The key points of the outline solution proposed by the GLA group has been summarised below:

• 101 call centre to be located in TfL call centre (centre managed by Ian Henderson);
• SNEN Call centre to deal with 10 items on Home Office list;
• Use the 6 sub-region areas which London is already split into - 1 Borough in each area has migrated to CCC (MetCall);
• 101 to be piloted only in Boroughs that have migrated to CCC;
• As MetCall is rolled out to other Boroughs in each area 101 will follow;
• All Boroughs to have 101 by end of 2008;
• All call centre agents will need to have additional training with the MPS to ensure the correct type of calls are transferred immediately to 999 if and when necessary;
• Training to also link in with London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority.

The GLA initiative is not the only option under discussion. There are proposals being discussed in the LA boroughs for alternatives to a single pan London bid, based on three or more sub regions (with varying degrees of independence). These options may be able to meet the Home Office and MPS requirements for a co-ordinated pan London service.

SNEN centre linkage into CCC (MetCall)

21. At this stage there is no developed concept of operation nor have the MPS explored in detail how the outline solution will be implemented or operated, and most of the key issues associated with service design and implementation remain to be resolved. It is likely that the service will work along the following lines:

• In the event that the call cannot be resolved within the SNEN centre (in the GLA group proposal this would be TfL). The SNEN service centre will either raise a service request for one of the service delivery partners to action or transfer the call to the service delivery partner. This arrangement will need to be developed and agreed amongst the London SNEN partners.
• The initial contact with the MPS will be through MetCall who will then properly action and allocate MPS resource to the service request or caller.
• Call Transfer:
  • In the event that the call cannot be resolved within MetCall it is likely that the agent (Communications Officer) will need to identify an appropriate borough resource and attempt to connect the caller or create a service request.
  • Each of the CCC migrated boroughs will have 20-30 public facing numbers (Front desk, CPO, CID, CJU etc). If the line is not answered the caller will be offered the opportunity to leave a message.
• Service requests from the SNEN centre:
  • The detail surrounding electronic data based service requests has not been worked through at this point.

Impact on MPS

22. We are in the very early stages of developing a service for London. It is very likely that there will be a large impact upon the MPS. The impact on both CCC and the 33 MPS boroughs is currently un-quantified.

23. The key issues all remain to be resolved:

• What type of services can be requested?
• Where would the service request be sent; how will the resulting service be delivered?
• What technical solution would support field service delivery; how will service delivery be tracked and managed against service levels?
• What level of systems or business change would be required to support effective service delivery?
• MPS and CCC capacity for this - especially training and recruitment etc.
• Appendix 1 lists a number of risks that need to be taken into account.

C. Race and equality impact

1. The 101 Service should provide greater access to the Police for all sections of the community – having a positive overall impact. Careful attention will be paid to possible negative aspects, which would include the cost of calls (10 pence per call in the pilot); access for the hard of hearing, and the needs of people for whom English is not their first language. These are not insurmountable.

D. Financial implications

1. Funding will be available from the Home Office. This will be through grant agreements with each partnership, until December 2010. However this will be subject to a comprehensive spending review during 2007/8, the exact nature of funding beyond 2007 is not currently known.

2. Initially, Home Office funding will cover the cost of the change process during the Implementation of the service.

3. Once the service is operational, an element of the funding will be transaction based, e.g. cost per contact, in order to limit the risk to partnerships as a result of volume and demand fluctuations. This will take into account existing local authority and police resourcing of call handling within the scope of the new service, as well as the additional demand from 101. The Home Office Benefits Management Strategy outlines the following assumptions:

• 20% reduction in total calls to 999 emergency call services;
• 60% reduction in cost per emergency calls in Police Emergency Contact Centres;
• Cost of Service delivery for in scope services reduced through efficiency savings by 20%;
• Suppressed demand released: a 25% increase in non-emergency calls post rollout.

4. At this stage the MPS financial implications remain un-quantified. There is likely to be an impact on both the CCC and the 33 MPS boroughs. It is likely that the impact will be through:

• Project team resource costs for the feasibility/design and implementation of the service;
• Business change / process re-engineering;
• Development and application of technology to support call handling and service delivery;
• Resources required for the delivery call handling and borough based service delivery. It is likely that call volumes will grow with public awareness. It likely that this will lead to higher levels of reporting will require higher levels of service delivery within boroughs.

5. A project initiation document (PID) is currently being developed for this project.

E. Background papers

The following references have been used to develop the content of this paper and GLA - SNEN Update 15 March 2006.

F. Contact details

Report author: DAC McPherson, MPS

For more information contact:

MPA general: 020 7202 0202
Media enquiries: 020 7202 0217/18

Appendix 1

Risks

• Operation at ‘go-live’ must be sustainable both in terms of operation and reputation risk and provide a quality of service that is at least equal to the existing services provided by both the local authority and Met police today.
• Difficulty in reaching financial and Legal between the Met police / LA.s
• Delay in 999 call reaching Met police. Worst case, this could result in loss of life that would result in liability and loss of reputation issues.
• Safe transfer of out of scope calls to Met police (which are not related to antisocial behaviour). Worst case, this could result in loss of life that would result in liability and loss of reputation issues.
• Contact centre capacity. 101 will replace current local authority and Met police non-emergency numbers for some services. The simplicity of the number and accompanying marketing campaign is likely to lead to an increase in total call demand, which may not be easily estimated.
• Public confused by limited scope and revert to MPS/LA numbers or 999.
  • Public confused by limited geography during roll out and lose confidence in 101 service availability.
  • The branding and marketing of the 101 service will drive call demand. Due to the transient nature of the borough, it will be difficult to market the service to borough citizens only.
• Timescales and volume of newly recruited 101 Advisors needed for 101 operations in competition with the recruitment campaign currently underway for Met police for MetCall.
• Short implementation time: technical development and integration with other platforms, business change and process implementation, and staff training.
• Poorly trained SNEN call-takers create incorrect expectations of MPS response.
• No reduction (or an increase) in demand because reduction by filtering outweighed by increase due to raised public awareness and resolving few calls at first POC.
  • Narrow scope of SNEN covers only a very small proportion of MPS non-emergency demand.
• SNEN progress chasers make many and constant progress demands to MPS operational units.
• Cost of SNEN service is top sliced by Home Office from MPS budget.
• Real implementation costs not covered by SNEN funding and savings not realised.
• New SNEN CRM systems demand integration with MPS systems, disrupting MPS IT programmes.
• MPS required to deploy CRM system components that don’t fit/work well for the Met.
• SNEN seen by public as a face of the Met and loose confidence in lightweight/poor service.
• Sustainability of funding Insufficient funds awarded and delivered
• Impact on partners' budgets of potential increased service demand
• Failure to correctly forecast /provide acceptable evidence in Support of bid
• Lack of partnership agreement leads to ineffective partnership
• Partners data protection registrations inadequate for 101 Operation
• Raises unrealistic public service expectations
• Divergence of views between local elected members on SNEN Project
• Low data quality of call volume info leading to inaccurate Resource planning
• Partnership unable to agree and sign off proposal within Timescales.

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