Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department is taking steps to ensure that police response times in rural areas are not consistently lower than in urban areas.

The Home Office does not currently hold a national dataset of average police response times to incidents in rural areas. However, officials are developing a nationally comparable response-times dataset, working with the National Police Chiefs’ Council, the College of Policing and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS).

The Government will set a national target for forces to attend 90 percent of the most serious incidents within 15 minutes in urban areas and 20 minutes in rural areas. This will establish a clear national expectation for the service the public should receive, wherever they live.

Performance against national targets, including incident response targets, will be published through the Police Performance Framework. Together with HMICFRS inspections, this will inform force assessments with the Policing Performance System, enabling the identification of forces requiring improvement. Forces will be offered targeted support and, where necessary, receive intervention to help drive performance improvements.