Call handing within the single force has been criticised by a police watchdog which has issued 30 recommendations for improvement within the organisation.
The report by HM Inspectorate of Constabulary was ordered after the deaths of Lamara Bell and John Yuill, who lay unattended for three days after crashing off the M9, despite police having been notified.
And today investigators again told the single force to halt the plans, having urged it to do so in September’s interim report, and criticised the processes through which other call centres had been merged.
The report stated officers were often resorting to “scribble pads” instead of logging call information on the computer system, and that police officers were continuing to fill vacancies in centres.
When the service moved into Bilston Glen – where the M9 call was taken – there were “insufficient staff available”, inspectors added, and there was no formal system within Police Scotland for recording near misses or adverse incidents.
Other findings included that “governance of the change process has been weak with key risks and project issues not being highlighted through existing structures” and that the merger programme “focused on meeting deadlines and increasing productivity and savings at the expense of effective staff engagement”.
And while Police Scotland did achieve £1.8 million in staff savings, the report states, the force has still had to increase overtime costs to cover shortages.
However, Scottish Conservative justice spokeswoman Margaret Mitchell has also been critical of the report itself.
She said it was “full of management speak” and blasted the report’s “unjustifiable optimism”, including where it referred to the prospects of Police Scotland creating a “class-leading call handling service”.
Scottish Conservative justice spokeswoman Margaret Mitchell said:
“This report reveals a system in total chaos, and some of the findings defy belief.
“There is clearly a huge disconnect between what is happening in practice and what should be happening in call centres such as these.
“But the report itself also falls short – it is full of management speak and peppered with unreasonable and unjustifiable statements of optimism, not least that we could have a class-leading call handling service.
“Anyone reading the details of the M9 case would struggle to see how that could be the case under the current set-up.
“Given all we’ve heard already heard on this matter, what possible confidence can the general public have that call handling in Scotland is fit for purpose, and history won’t be repeated for other families like the relatives of Lamara Bell and John Yuill?”