Saturday, October 28, 2006

Government spins different lines on non-emergency 101

The other night on 18 Doughty Street I spotted a story in the Daily Telegraph about the Government's "non-emergency" alternative to 999, 101. The Telegraph reported that they'd seen a leaked letter stating the entire scheme was being shelved after the "Wave 1" pilots had proved rather unsuccessful.

According to an article in the Evening Standard examples of this failure were calls to 101 in Hampshire with request such as "Do you know when the next bus leaves for Southampton?"

The cancellation of Wave 2 has apparently annoyed the Police in Wales, and in Lancashire the Government wasted £100,000 preparing to set it up before changing their mind and scrapping it. The line from the Home Office is that any decisions about the projects future "will be deferred pending the outcome of a full evaluation of Wave One in the autumn of 2007."

What's interesting though is that the Government's official 101 website doesn't say this? It still states that the "second wave areas will start work during 2006 with the aim of launching in 2007, and the service will be available across all of England and Wales by 2008".

Is it on? Is it off? Does the arse know what the elbow is doing?

3 comments:

Benedict White said...

"Is it on? Is it off? Does the arse know what the elbow is doing?"

No, and they couldn't fimd there arse with both hands with out a map either.

youdontknowme said...

What do you expect? It's Labour

Ross said...

101 is quite a good idea. I spent a good five minutes trying to find my local police station number to report some yobs smashing a fence down last week. Mind you, I was on hold for twenty minutes when I did call the local station, so reverted to 999 in the end.