CDS News

Since the Defence Solicitor Call Centre (DSCC) expanded on 14 January, First Assist staff have dealt with an average of 2410 police and 1400 solicitor calls every day.

Performance for call handling and deployment has returned to good levels despite these call volumes.

What do the stats say?

Statistics for the first 15 days are shown in this table.

Preventing a dip in weekend performance

The first two weekends saw performance dip for two main reasons:

• peaks in call volume requests for own client work has differed both weekends making it difficult to manage staff rotas
• own solicitor availability is reduced at weekends resulting in more calls to locate a solicitor to accept the case from that firm.

First Assist is increasing staff capacity to halt the trend this weekend.

What are the outstanding issues?

First Assist have approximately 100 outstanding queries/complaints. These take several hours to investigate and respond to - five employees are working to clear the backlog.

The DSCC will have advised all those with outstanding queries of the latest position by the end of 29 Jan. 

Confirming your details are correct

DSCC staff have dealt with thousands of calls/e-mails/faxes from solicitors re contact details and these have been actioned.

They are proactively calling all firms (c2100) over the next couple of weeks to confirm details. They anticipate they will send an e-mail confirming details received to all firms by mid-February.

If we can bring this date forward we will do so but it is important that any changes are discussed and agreed individually with firms. Sometimes we have acted on written changes to find out these did not achieve what the firm intended.

Over the coming weeks First Assist will be developing and testing the recently piloted Internet tool. This allows firms to securely log on and amend their contact details in ‘real time’.

We hope this will be rolled out from end March/early April 08.

Revised guidance for police custody staff

Revised guidance has been issued by the Association of Chief Police Officers to all custody staff. This confirms custody should ask:

• do you want legal advice?
• have you a preferred solicitor?

The Home Office will very shortly issue a circular to all Chief Constables to confirm the position. Any instances where local custody staff are using an outdated script should be raised with the managers of that custody suite.

Software issues

In the first week of expansion DSCC suffered a bug in its IT system so own solicitor contact details were not displayed properly. This has now been fixed.

First Assist have a series of minor software amendments planned over the coming weeks to further improve the service they deliver.

For more information

If you have suggestions for DSCC please contact: solicitor.dsccfeedback@firstassist.co.uk

Read more about the DSCC including daily performance stats on the Criminal areas of work>Police stations pages.