South Yorkshire Police: 'There's a chicken in my garden' among 47,000 emergency calls made in one month

There was also a 999 call to report a chicken in somebody’s garden.

In a month that saw freezing weather for weeks and a spate of burglaries leading up to the festive season, South Yorkshire Police took 23,021 calls via the 999 system in December, as well as 24,095 enquiries to 101.

The busiest day was December 11, when the force took 892 emergency 999 calls in 24 hours midway through the period when England was in the grip of freezing sub-zero temperatures for two weeks.

Somewhere in all those calls for help were “I ordered a table on Marketplace and the wrong table has come,” and “there’s a chicken in my garden”.

It comes at the end of a year that also saw a caller ask for help because “the children upstairs run around all the time” so they couldn’t hear the TV.

Not to be outdone, another caller in March 2022 rang the emergency line because “I was refused entry into a bar”. In July, another timewaster called to say their wifi was not working.

In July 2022, a Doncaster man was convicted for making 100 unnecessary calls to the police in the space of eight hours. Then, in August, Helen Spencer, 57, of Westfield Close, Sheffield, was convicted for making 900 calls between 2020 and 2021, and a similar number of calls between 2021 and 2022.

Meanwhile, last month the average time for a 999 call to be answered in South Yorkshire was four seconds, against a target of 10 seconds. For 101, the average time was three minutes and 52 seconds.