Fire Control Centre (the people who answer the phone deal with your calls when you call 999 fire) has now been moved off the Isle of Wight to Surrey, despite many Islanders being concerned about the increases in risks this might cause.
Before the move, one of the main areas of concern was Surrey’s lack of local Island knowledge (eg Knighton/Niton) and that it wouldn’t be possible to identify where modern phones like VoIP (Voice Over IP) phones were located.
We’ve now experienced this as a problem on the 101 line first-hand, which we detail below.
Councillors have told us not to worry
When Islanders have raised those objections to members of the council – like elected Conservative Cabinet member Barry Abraham (who made this decision) – the council attempted to reassure people that this won’t be a problem – that technology would be able to fix this.
Despite the protests of members of the public, the administration currently in power at County Hall have pushed on with the changes and as we reported last week, the switch over took place on 4th March (last Sunday).
Our experience – location not recognised
We were recently taken-a-back to experience first-hand the problem of the location of our phone not being identified.
Calling the Police 101 number, we were met with a recorded message telling us that they “had not been able to identify where we were calling from”, despite us calling on our 01983 VoIP phone.
Not understanding Ventnor
This automatically diverted our call to an operator, who had difficulty understanding the commonly-used pronunciation of Ventnor (Vent-ner), causing us to have to re-pronounce it as Vent-nor to be understood. (This could be less so for Fire Control, as they have seconded three Islanders to Surrey).
Only after this were we then connected to the Hampshire Police line and it began ringing so we could start our actual call.
Delays like this at the time of a fire, would be most unwelcome.
Is moving Fire Control to Surrey best for the Island?
After that experience it made us wonder if the council’s decision to move Fire Control to Surrey, that’s been made on Islanders’ behalf, really what’s best for the Island?
The audio of our call
[audio:http://otw-audio.s3.amazonaws.com/101-not-knowing-where-phone-is.mp3]
Update 09:45 10.Mar.12: Changed the wording in the first para, to avoid confusion.
Image: Comedy Nose under CC BY 2.0
