Police bosses have admitted that residents are waiting too long for calls to be answered after the average response time increased in the wake of a surge in demand.

The average time to answer emergency 999 calls more than doubled, from 11.3 to 24.1 seconds, according to performance figures for 2021. And the average wait for a 101 call to be picked up was 614.7 seconds – just over 10 minutes – compared to the 591.4 second average during the previous 12 month period.

A police performance meeting heard on Wednesday that staffing levels had been affected by Covid and there had also been a substantial increase in calls to the force during the 12 month period between December 2020 and November 2021.

Dozens of new call handlers are being recruited to swell the ranks this year to meet demand. And improvements are being made to resources to improve the experience for callers.

Staffordshire Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner Ben Adams said residents greatly respected the professionalism of the police service.

But he added: "Where they have been frustrated is with some of their attempts to initially connect to the service and in that first line of response.

"I know that over all of this there is a filter which we need to apply due to Covid. With the best will in the world, if your team is decimated by Covid, pingdemics and the rest of it it's very difficult to offer the level of service you want to do.

Chief Constable Chris Noble said: "From a policing point of view, in the past a lot of our contact was face to face. The vast majority of our contact now is over the phone and Staffordshire are probably one of the leading forces around the 'digital offer', where people can contact us by email or on Facebook or Twitter by way of direct message.

"That said, being honest, we're not where we want to be at the minute whenever you ring; 999s are getting significantly better but especially around the 101 service, people are waiting far too long. People are giving up and ringing off and that's not what we want because within those calls will be people who need us, there will be key bits of information, there will be bits of the jigsaw we need to solve crimes.

"It's not just about dropping calls, it's about missed opportunities. And we know we need to be better at that."

He added that there had been some "positive indicators" since Christmas however, that needed to be sustained.

On Wednesday alone (January 26) Staffordshire Police received almost 500 999 calls and on average these were being answered in fewer than six seconds. There were nearly 600 calls to the 101 service and a longer wait of 10 minutes to answer. Mr Noble explained that 999 calls were prioritised and a callback service was available to those dialling 101.

There were 37 online crime reports made over the 24-hour period, as well as almost 170 messages via Facebook and Twitter. Fifty contact staff were on duty across the 24 hours. And there were more than 700 "incidents" created that police had to respond to, whether in person or by another means, including 67 relating to mental health concerns for the public and 63 associated with antisocial behaviour.

Mr Noble said: "There is no doubt that other organisations are under massive pressure – the ambulance and mental health facilities and other partners. This is by no means an excuse, it's simply explanation. Policing is very often an agency of both first and last resort."

The meeting heard that from April to November there was a significant rise in 999 calls and an increase in the time taken to answer them. There was a 17% increase in calls compared to the same period during the previous year – and 26% more than the service was structured to deliver.

Chief Superintendent Elliot Sharrard-Williams said: "It was a national surge in calls, linked to some changes in Covid restrictions that saw communities acting in a slightly different way. That surge was linked to another challenge we had not come across before around the way those calls presented – the volume presentation of calls.

"We would have more 999 calls on a Tuesday evening than New Years' Eve. And it became very unpredictable for several months. Now what we are seeing is that is starting to stabilise and turn back to what we would expect.

"Our ability to react to those surges was challenging for several reasons; one was around the availability of staff we had. We lost 900 working days to Covid during that period. We had to work quickly to flex some of our 101 and digital call handling staff towards the 999 service, which had the knock-on effect of that delay with answering 101 calls.

"Through some quick work we have done towards the end of the year around better prediction and reskilling and training staff around contact we have seen our performance start to improve.

"If I look at December, where we saw a 30% increase in the volume of 999 calls compared with December '20, we answered them in 18.8 seconds on average, which is still longer than we would want but better than what we managed to deliver since before April. In January, where we have received just short of 3,000 extra 999 calls so far than the year before, we're at 16 seconds to answer."

An extra 50 call handlers are set to join the team by September, Mr Sharrard-Williams said, with the first 12 being deployed next week.

He added: "We're making significant technology investment into contact as well to improve our digital offer by making the structure of our IT more stable and introducing systems that will improve our workforce planning, allow us to get more real-time understanding of how a caller felt the service they received went and systems that will support our understanding of identification of vulnerability of people that call us."

Mr Adams described the improvement seen in recent days as "encouraging".

"The average times (to answer 999 calls) in those recent months were not where we want them to be so it's really important we continue that trend to improvement", he said.