Concerned by the worrying trend of mistakes being made following the closure of police and fire control rooms in Aberdeen and Inverness, North East MSP Mike Rumbles has tabled a series of parliamentary questions calling for an assessment to be made of the performance of the new control rooms.
Gaffes so far include sending police to Glasgow instead of Aberdeen and deploying firefighters from distant locations despite nearby stations on hand in Dingwall and Inverness, including directing one fire engine from Lairg over 100 miles to an incident on Skye.
Operators have also mistaken Thurso with a similarly named road in Dundee and only a few days ago it took several minutes for the police control centre to find an Aberdeen address on Google Maps, despite the caller having the correct postcode to hand.
The Scottish Liberal Democrats were the only party to stand against the amalgamation of Scotland’s police forces in 2011 and have opposed the closures of regional centres in the North East and Highlands.
Mike Rumbles said: “We told the SNP that their politically-motivated centralisation of police and fire would damage those services in the North East and North of Scotland, but they did not listen.”
Liberal Democrat parliamentary candidate for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine John Waddell added: “This is not the fault of the staff in Dundee; they have been given an impossible task. Dedicated and experienced operators and state of the art facilities in Aberdeen and Inverness have been shut down and replaced with centres in Dundee that are now responsible for directing police and fire for the majority of the land area of Scotland.
“It is time that the Scottish Government admits that this situation is not working and looks again at how they deliver this service at a local level.”