PETER HITCHENS: How my bid to be a good Samaritan showed me the 999 line is no longer fit for purpose

How much longer can we rely on the 999 system for emergency calls? Is it, in fact, so overloaded that it is nowadays very nearly fictional?

Last Sunday much of the emergency phone service broke down, with uncounted 999 calls failing to connect, and one county council actually advising people to go to their nearest fire station if they wanted to alert the fire brigade.

This suggestion met with a chorus of jeers on social media. One resident responded sarcastically: ‘Ah yes! Excellent advice here from Norfolk County Council. None of this namby-pamby calling for help here! No siree. We are so tough we visit the fire station whilst in flames.’

Another suggested: ‘Maybe you could drag your burning house to the fire station.’

Obviously, they could not go to their nearest police station to report a crime, since most UK police stations have been closed down over the past 20 years; and those that remain are open only part-time, and are often miles from town centres.

How much longer can we rely on the 999 system for emergency calls?

It seems obvious to me that these cannot all be properly handled. And yet, how do we know if they are important if they cannot all be dealt with properly? It is an insoluble problem

But in any case, how much use is the system? Apparently most of us can expect to dial 999 once in an entire lifetime, or so it used to be thought. Yet about 33 million 999 calls are made in this country every year, roughly 90,000 a day.

It seems obvious to me that these cannot all be properly handled. And yet, how do we know if they are important if they cannot all be dealt with properly? It is an insoluble problem.

Most of them are made to the police. Obviously, not all such calls are real emergencies, but the alternative ways of reaching the police are notoriously slow and — in any case — what is an emergency?

A few weeks ago, for instance, I encountered a confused elderly woman dressed in hospital clothes, standing by a busy main road, trying rather vaguely to flag down passing cars.

She had no idea where she was and very little idea of where she wanted to be or ought to be.

I saw in my mind’s eye a horrible possible outcome to this. So I called the police through 999.

Was this irresponsible? You can decide. Was it any use? Not in the slightest. A polite and apparently helpful person took down all the necessary information from me, then put me on hold, and finally told me to start again and call the ambulance service.

Did this mean, I asked, that they were going to do nothing?

She was reluctant to answer this but it was clear it was exactly what it did mean.

I have some experience of waiting for the ambulance service, thanks to an episode in another town a few years ago, when I and others tried to help a man who had collapsed in the street.

My fears were confirmed when I called that service and was swiftly put on hold, listening to repeated recorded messages telling me that I’d be in trouble if I became aggressive. Well, thanks. I didn’t become aggressive.

In the end, I used my ingenuity to set the poor elderly woman on the path to where I think she wanted to be.

I was a Bad Samaritan rather than a Good Samaritan, I think. But it would have been worse if I’d done nothing, and I’ll know if it ever happens again to rely on myself rather than on 999.

Have we just decided to cast all our cares on the 999 service, the NHS and the police? And can this be sustained? Can we seriously expect all these millions of calls to be dealt with thoroughly?

In the 1950s, there were fewer than half a million 999 calls in the UK every year. By the 1960s, as more people could afford phones at home and there were reasonably plentiful public phone boxes, it had risen to 2.5 million a year.

It was nine million in 1978, 19 million in 1988 and 23 million in 1998. The explosion in the use of mobile phones took the total to 31 million a year in 2001, and it has remained round about that level ever since.

In the 1950s, there were fewer than half a million 999 calls in the UK every year

I have no idea how the operators or the emergency services cope with this. I rather think they can’t. But most of us do not realise how bad things are until the day comes when we call 999 ourselves and discover what has happened to what was once a brilliant and inventive scheme.

That is to say, we find, in moments of real need, that the 999 service does not really work.

The 999 system is a genuine British first, introduced in the capital, and then in Glasgow, in 1937. The innovation followed a terrible tragedy in Wimpole Street, London, on a November night in 1935. Five women died in a fire (one of them was seen by neighbours calling for help from a window as the house burned furiously behind her).

The Fire Brigade turned out (summoned through one of the special fire alarm boxes which in those days dotted the streets of London). But they arrived too late to save anyone.

The tragedy turned into a scandal after a near neighbour, Norman Macdonald, wrote to The Times to describe how ‘awakened by cries of “Fire!”, I rushed to the window, saw smoke . . . and could hear groans. In a matter of seconds I picked up my telephone and dialled “0” [back then the way to reach the operator]’.

But there was no response, and Mr Macdonald was still holding on for someone to answer when the fire engines arrived, too late. ‘It seemed entirely futile to continue holding on and listening to the ringing tone,’ he wrote.

Someone had the brilliant idea of pioneering the use of an unforgettable three-digit number, impossible to ring by mistake and easy to find on the dial in the dark or amid smoke.

But it was not until after World War II that it spread to the whole country, and then, in slightly different forms, worldwide.

And yet it is already a relic. In its heyday, it worked partly because there were so few phones, and people were nervous of using them. But there was another huge difference between then and now.

Until the late 1960s, the police in this country were directly available to everyone. Uniformed constables patrolled the streets regularly on foot and could easily be approached. Hundreds of local police stations, manned day and night, were open to passers-by.

This excellent system — which required much lower levels of manpower than the police enjoy today — provided permanent reassurance to the law-abiding, and a constant deterrent to criminals and anti-social louts.

It also allowed the confused, the distressed and the frightened to make easy contact with authority without cluttering up the emergency lines.

If we want to take the pressure off 999, the reintroduction of regular police foot patrols is the best way to do it.

The withdrawal of these patrols was not done because anyone had shown they were no use, or obsolete. Far from it.

All the research demonstrates that a visible police presence is the best deterrent to crime known to man.

It was the whole basis of our uniquely effective system of ordered liberty.

There is less and less excuse for refusing to return to it.

You might say that it was an emergency.

Source: Read Full Article