FRONT-LINE police officers have warned that calls from the public are not being correctly interpreted and that the problem will increase under a move to a single force across Scotland.

Officers at the annual conference of the Scottish Police Federation in Aviemore warned that failures in priority coding could mean an emergency being dealt with the following day rather than immediately because of problems of "interpretation".

There are growing concerns that call-handling will become more problematic with the move to a single police force in April next year.

Civilian staff deal with calls, but official figures suggest some 2000 support personnel will be cut as part of efficiency savings for the new single police service. There are also concerns that control rooms will be further centralised.

During the past decade forces have centralised control rooms within their force area, and officers say this is causing problems for front-line staff and the public.

Strathclyde Police used to have more than a dozen control centres to handle calls in local areas. Now it has three.

Acting Sergeant Gary Mitchell, of Strathclyde Police, warned that in some instances information from the public was being misinterpreted and as a result, blue-light inquiries are not always treated as emergencies.

He said: "We had excellent people but they used to come from the area they controlled, and that is what the public expects.

"We are a public service, not Amazon or John Lewis or Sky, and although IT systems have their benefit they are no replacement for what we know used to work.

"Police control centres have become too much like commercial call centres. It is a touch-screen programme with pre-programmed questions. It is an IT solution that is being heavily relied on to answer a question, rather than an individual with experience dealing with it."

Sgt Mitchell said that, generally, calls are handled very professionally but there are times when they are wrongly interpreted and calls from officers go unanswered.

He said one of the major concerns is that, under the new single force structure, control rooms will be further centralised. The risk to the public, he said, is that if there were a mistake in coding, there would be a danger to the public in relation to the time of arrival of the police.

He added: "The interpretation that used to be there and the level of knowledge has reduced because of centralisation.

"There is a lack of appropriate reporting of failures as well.

"We want to see if on a national level it is a similar experience across Scotland, and once that discussion is done we want to pass it on to the Scottish Government to see if smaller, more locally based control rooms is a better way to go.

"We are very fortunate in Strathclyde that if you phone the police, then 99.9% of the time you will get the police.

"The difficulty comes between the first point of call and the interpretation.

"It may be the member of the public not explaining fully, and the first person they speak to, through lack of knowledge base, experience and interpretation not being able to recognise it might be very serious and the coding all goes wrong.

"When the fire service went to central control rooms, what they found was that an experienced local controller might have knowledge that a road is blocked off or you might take a short cut. When you take that level of understanding away you reduce the effectiveness of the response you might get."