Merseyside Police is committed to giving its local communities the best possible service and to ensuring that we can provide a visible policing service within our communities.



And following the notification of changes to our General Enquiry Offices in October last year, we can now confirm that those changes will come into place tomorrow (Monday, 24 February). Details of the new opening hours can be found on the Local Policing Page for each area (Knowsley, Liverpool, Sefton, St Helens, Wirral) on the force website https://www.merseyside.police.uk/ and Facebook pages.

The GEOs in Sefton are:

• Southport Police Station on Albert Road, Southport,PR9 0LL, which will be open between 10am and 8pm Monday to Friday and 10am and 6pm on Saturday

• Bootle Police Station on Marsh Lane, Bootle, L20 5BW, which will open between 10am and 6pm Tuesday to Friday.

In addition there are two Community Police Stations (CPSs) at Maghull Town Hall, Hall Lane, Maghull, L31 7BB and Ainsdale Railway Station, Shore Road, Southport PR8 2RF, which hold regular surgeries for the public.

The changes have been made following an extensive review of the service provided by the General Enquiry Offices to see if they delivered the best service possible based on community needs, customer and resource demands and the changing use of technology.

The review identified that:

• Visitors to GEOs have fallen significantly with an average of only 1.2 visitors an hour.
• Only 17% of all enquiries dealt with by GEO staff actually needed the customer to attend in person.
• Our digital contact channels are becoming increasingly popular with 80 people an hour contacting the control room through social media, and fewer than 10% of them saying they would still have gone to a GEO if social media had not been an option.
• Front line officers were frequently having to provide cover at the GEOs, at short notice, to keep them open to the public due to support staff shortages, meaning they were not policing communities

By no longer using front line officers to cover gaps in GEO services the force has re-invested approximately 25,000 hours of their time back into patrol. This roughly equates to the ability to respond quicker to 20,000 incidents over the course of a year. In monetary terms this represents a re-investment of more than half a million pounds.

Chief Superintendent Matt Boyle, said: "A great deal of work has taken place in partnership with the Police and Crime Commissioner, who has been expanding a programme of work to open Community Police Stations in public buildings throughout the county. Whilst these stations are not operational replacements to our General Enquiry Office service, they do offer a regular and convenient place for the public to go and speak directly with their local policing officers about issues and concerns. At present there are 21 Community Police Stations in Merseyside with three more to open shortly.”

The staff in GEOs have had additional training so that when they are not engaged with enquiries from members of the public they can carry out other functions including the completion of crime and road traffic collision reports, which in turn increases the efficiency of our overall service.

Chief Superintendent Matt Boyle, continued: "My Local Policing teams have responsibility for the provision of the GEOs and Community Police Stations and this will ensure that their core functions are aligned closely to the community.

"We have also increased our ability to offer a range of transactional services, including reporting crime, setting local policing priorities, and obtaining advice through the new force website.

“Meanwhile our social media desk (@MerpolCC), which provides a facility to DM the force in relation to incidents of crime, is continually growing in popularity and we remain one of the only forces in the country to be taking contact in this way. This revised approach reflects the changing needs and preferences of the communities we serve and offers greater choice to the people who need us."

Or they could just be honest and admit that it is now their policy to provide the minimum that they think they can get away with.. I really don't think that what the public thinks or wants has had much influence on Police planning for a long time.

The tories are responsible for a 19% cut in police funding since 2010. They can only work with what they’ve got. Even broken Boris’s pledge to recruit 20,000 new officers falls short of the 21700 positions lost through successive tory governments.

“A senior police chief has said his force is having to let criminals get away unpunished because of the huge pressure his officers are under, with legitimacy and confidence in law enforcement eroded.
The comments from Dave Thompson, chief constable of West Midlands police, came as the emergency services watchdog warned that forces were under “significant pressure” and struggling to cope with the demands on them.” Guardian 1/5/19