Police Scotland is introducing a new way of assessing calls to its 101 and 999 service to improve the way they respond to contact from the public.

Frontline staff and police officers in their forces service centre and police offices are currently undergoing specialist training to make an enhanced assessment of threat, risk, harm and vulnerability for everyone who contacts the service.

The information provided through this enhanced assessment will be used to determine the most appropriate and proportionate police response.

Assistant Chief Constable John Hawkins, who has strategic responsibility for Contact, Command and Control said: “Every caller is different and our response should be too.

“The new approach will ensure we can provide better service to the public by taking more information from the caller so that we can make a more robust assessment of risk, threat and harm and vulnerability.

“The new model will also increase our ability to despatch police officers to urgent incidents, which means we can get to the people who need us most when they need us most.”

This new approach will be introduced in phases, starting with Lanarkshire, and Dumfries and Galloway in summer 2019, before a proposed roll out across Scotland.

The new method of assessing calls is the next step in the development of call handling services and was a recommendation made by HMICS in their 2015 Independent Assurance Review into Police Scotland call handling in which it recommended that Police Scotland adopt a more formalised risk and vulnerability assessment model for service advisors.