Mr Ruffley: To ask the Attorney-General what CPS Direct's target for answering telephone calls made to it is; what the average response time was for telephone calls made to CPS Direct in each of the last three years; and how many telephone calls CPS Direct received in each of those years. [131468]
The Solicitor-General: CPS Direct's target to answer telephone calls from the police, as agreed with the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), is to answer more than 75% of calls within three minutes.
The numbers of calls received by CPS Direct and the response times for the last three years are shown in the following table:
| Number of calls | Percentage of calls answered within 3 minutes | Average queuing time | |
| (1) Note: A different telephone call handling system was in operation in 2009-10 and this figure only represents the time it took for an operator to respond rather than for the police officer to be in contact with a Duty Prosecutor. | |||