Locke Keith: Urgent Debates — Police 111 System—Review 
Locke Keith: Urgent Debates — Police 111 System—Review 
[Volume:625;Page:20466] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is pleased to speak in this debate because this is a very bad situation. The report on the operation of the Communications Centres Service Centre is very damning. It is good that the Government commissioned an independent review. I congratulate it on that and I hope it will fully implement the findings of the review which does not pull any punches. 
One of the problems—which the review panel perhaps does not deal with as much as it should—is the implication that the people in the call centres are seen as people who are at the bottom of the heap. Unfortunately that runs throughout our society. If one looks at the treatment of call-centre staff one sees a lot of rebellion going on in call centres in different big agencies across the country because the pay is very poor. The pay rate is basically the minimum wage—up to $14 per hour. I am not talking about the police call centres because the report does not specify the wages rates but it does state that at the junior level—the new entrants into the police call centres—staff are paid at comparable rates to those of staff in other call centres so there must be very low wage rates. 
The dissatisfaction the lack of morale the absenteeism and the high turnover rate mentioned in the report indicate that wages are low and that a whole lot of other things are wrong with the way the police call centres operate. There would not be a 17 percent turnover rate as referred to in the report if there was not dissatisfaction about that among call-centre staff. The issue is not that they are bad people; the report actually states that the staff are dedicated people. The call centres have access to good information technology. There are various suggestions for improvements to that technology but the problems are more in the basic conditions such as I suggest the wages the training and the whole organisation of the places. The picture painted in the report is of an agency moving from crisis to crisis with very little managerial direction or proper training and with no real systems for looking at the errors in the system and ironing them out. 
The performance of the police call centres is clearly not adequate. The target of having 90 percent of calls answered within 10 seconds is not being met according to the review body. There did not seem to be any clear direction as to how to meet that target and quite a lot of calls actually take ages to be answered. The report states that between 3 and 6 percent of calls are not answered within 75 seconds of being made which is pretty disastrous for an emergency system. If someone is lying on the floor and bleeding to death or is being beaten up by somebody or if someone’s place is being invaded 75 seconds is a long time. If that time goes by and still nothing has happened it causes massive upset and trauma all around. 
What happens to the calls that are not answered within 75 seconds? The Telecom system bounces them to another call centre and that system itself is not working very well according to the report. One of the problems that has come through and it is not necessarily addressed in detail in this report is that if calls are bounced all over the country and are answered by people in another location—let us say a call comes from Nelson and after being bounced around ends up being answered by someone from Whangarei who does not know the streets in Nelson—there is all sorts of confusion. I think that over the months there have been reports of that happening. Sure information technology systems can improve that and the report talks about new global positioning system mapping systems and all the rest of those systems which are good. We have a company Navman New Zealand that has a whole new system to bring details of streets all around the country up on screens at the touch of the right buttons. No doubt technology like that has the potential to improve the call centres significantly but it is very distressing that no real performance standards are being operated in the present system. 
In terms of the problem of overload of the system I tell members that in the past there have been suggestions which are being partially implemented bit by bit to have an alternative line for non-urgent calls. One of the problems is that around the country the only number in people’s minds is 111 when they are in some sort of crisis. It may not be a high-grade crisis—it may not be life-threatening or really frightening—but instead a crisis able to be resolved in a few hours rather than immediately. So is quite important to have a back-up emergency system number in people’s minds. The report states that an alternative number—0800 311 311—is reserved for non-urgent reporting and that it will come into use at some point in the future. But clearly there should be a whole campaign either to use that number or to fix a simpler number in people’s minds so that when a situation is not really life-threatening but they want a response and when they are not near a phone book or anything else they can call the non-urgent number. That may take a bit of pressure off the 111 system. We already know that the ?555 system for people on the roads is working quite well so we perhaps need another system to be brought in as well as that. 
I have talked about the problem of the lack of training that comes through in the report and about the probable underpayment of call-centre staff. I think the whole point with service centres particularly with the police ones as they are emergency centres is that they actually have to have surplus staff rather than a shortage of staff. Today that rubs a lot of management people up the wrong way. They get their bonuses and rewards by cutting staff and by cutting corners whereas something like these centres actually has to have surplus staff. For a lot of the time there have to be people sitting around and doing nothing—which is anathema to management—so that when the peak really hits the staff are available. Sure that can be fine-tuned so that there is not too much of a surplus in staffing by reassigning stuff and bouncing it to other centres provided that is done properly. But we do need to move towards a system that has a few surplus staff. 
The report states that the extra staff requirement suggested by the review panel and in a survey done by a subsidiary body to the people making the report is for 21 extra staff. That is not a lot of extra staff to serve the needs of the nation in dealing with people in crisis. Mistakes cause loss of life as we have seen in the recent Piha case and such cases are only the ones that reach the top in the media. For every case that reaches the media in that way there are generally hundreds of other cases of people who have felt real problems in terms of failing to get to a hospital in time—of their injuries getting worse etc. because of the lack of proper standards in the emergency phone agency. 
So the Green Party supports the Government in looking at the recommendations—and there are a huge number of them—in this report to improve the staff improve the management and improve the levels of payment for call-centre staff. Those people should be treated seriously in order to convey the attitude which I think the public has that they are valued. I support the idea in the report of having a public reference point and engaging the public in the process of improving the service is important. It is quite important to have that channel there. 
One of the sections in the report is quite devastating. It describes how the panel observed behaviours such as poor questioning techniques little rapport being established with callers little clarification to callers of why questions were being asked long silences from call-takers during data entry which led to callers querying whether anyone was still on the line with them lack of consistency in what was being asked and expressed anger and frustration etc. 
Debate interrupted.