1. To ask the Scottish Government what it can do to increase the resilience of Scotland’s 999 emergency telephone service, in light of United Kingdom-wide technical issues over the weekend that rendered the service unusable for many users. (S6T-01482)

The 999 call platform is a UK-wide system that is operated by BT as an integral part of the UK telecommunications network. Responsibility for all telecoms infrastructure is reserved to the UK Government.

Scotland was not disproportionately affected by the issue. Police Scotland, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and the Scottish Ambulance Service promptly implemented business continuity arrangements, which helped to manage call handling and reduce the likelihood of a substantial call-queue build-up or excessive wait times for callers.

Because of the scale of the incident, the Scottish Government’s resilience room was activated for the incident’s duration. We have made clear to BT our concerns about the incident, and we await the outcome of the formal inquiry that ofcom initiated on 26 June. That should allow us to better understand the cause of the failure, the full impacts and any lessons that may be learned.

I thank the Cabinet secretary for that helpful update, and I thank the call handlers and emergency service workers who responded so quickly to events.

On the outage and resilience, has the cabinet secretary had any direct conversations with BT or Police Scotland in the past 48 hours about initial thoughts on what the cause was? I understand that, for obvious reasons, there will be a full-scale inquiry into that.

As a result of the 999 outage, the 101 service stepped up to take and respond to emergency calls. That is a relief, because just nine months ago the Criminal Justice Committee took evidence from Police Scotland’s deputy chief officer, David Page, who said that the service was under existential threat. Thankfully, the Government responded to that warning. Given the importance of the 101 service, will the cabinet secretary commit to on-going investment in it and confirm that it will continue to exist in its current form?

I reassure Mr Greene that, throughout Sunday, I had several conversations with my resilience officials, who also took part in the UK COBRA meetings to relay any concerns that we had in Scotland. Since then, we have had—by chance—a four-nations meeting yesterday, at which all ministers who deal with resilience were present. There is certainly a shared understanding of and shared support for ofcom’s inquiry into BT’s activity.

As for specifics about the UK-wide outage, I draw to Mr Greene’s attention the statement that BT made that it is nearing the end of a full internal investigation and expects to share the findings with the Government, emergency services and Ofcom by Thursday. The internal review will examine the technical aspects of what triggered Sunday’s incident, the process of moving to the back-up system and the timings of communications to emergency services, Ofcom and the Government. In the interests of transparency, BT will share key findings publicly at the same time, subject to removal of any information that might need to remain confidential for critical national infrastructure purposes.

I am glad that Mr Greene acknowledges the improvements in the 101 service. That certainly coincides with the views of His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland. The Scottish Government will continue to ensure that arrangements for the 101 service, as operated by Police Scotland and scrutinised by the Scottish Police Authority, work well.

I thank BT for the information that it has provided, which is now on the record. We cannot overstate the importance of our 999 and 101 services or the importance of the public having full confidence in them and getting through when they need to.

However, that trust has been eroded in many circumstances. Over the past five years, nearly 2 million calls to 101 have been abandoned by the caller, and waiting times for 999 and 101 calls have risen significantly. Last month, the longest wait for a 101 call to be answered was one hour and two minutes. That can be coupled with the recent unfortunate scandal in which we discovered that calls had been allocated fake call signs and had not been responded to at all. All of us in Parliament know the tragic consequences of call handling going wrong.

I seek reassurance that members of the public can have full confidence that all our blue-light services will be there for them when they are needed, and that robust infrastructure is in place—from the technical and resource points of view—to deal with emergency calls.

What is clear from Sunday’s unfortunate events is that the Scottish Government’s resilience arrangements worked well—as did the business continuity plans of all our emergency services, who deserve our grateful thanks for that.

I turn to Jamie Greene’s specific points on Police Scotland’s call-handling service, separate from the UK-wide outage for which BT is now being investigated. We continue to be hugely grateful to Police Scotland and its staff. It is worth remembering that it receives more than 2 million calls each year, and that it continues to prioritise 999 calls. The most recent figures, which are from April this year, show that Police Scotland has an average answer time of six seconds for 999 calls, which is in line with The Times of other large forces across the UK. In this year, up to the end of March, the average time that was taken to answer non-emergency 101 calls was four minutes and 27 seconds. As I mentioned in my earlier answer, the SPA closely monitors Police Scotland’s approach.

A number of improvements have been made. Police Scotland has highlighted that a number of actions on public-engagement system improvement and staff support have been adopted to strengthen performance further. However, it is a matter on which we will all continue to be vigilant. It is also one that has been helped by the increases that have been made in police funding, year on year, since 2016-17.

We can take further assurance from the HMICS review of the service’s contact assessment model, which has highlighted a number of successes in that area.

The Presiding Officer:

I would be grateful for concise questions and responses.

The downing of the phone line is a huge concern. I welcome the measures that the Cabinet secretary has outlined to ensure that, in emergencies, access to care is always available. Will she o utline what additional steps are being taken to raise awareness among members of the public of other means of accessing medical attention in non-emergency or non-urgent situations?

Over the past three years, NHS 24 has been completely transformed from a predominantly out-of-hours primary care service to a 24/7 system-wide service that provides triage to patients who require either acute or primary care Intervention, and ensures that they are signposted to the appropriate service. Public messaging regarding NHS 24 services runs on social media, along with communications campaigns on television, radio and digital platforms to promote such services in the run-up to busy periods such as bank holidays. There is also the NHS Inform website and the NHS 24 online app.