North Yorkshire and Devon and Cornwall are the latest police forces to become ECHO-connected having joined in August and November 2024.

The addition brings the total number of ECHO-connected police forces in the UK to 13.

ECHO enables the handling of over 70,000 ‘Intruder and Hold-up Alarms’ incidents annually, improving police response times and outcomes for victims.

ECHO-connected alarm receiving centres (ARCs) including ADT, Secom, Cougar/K-SOC and Banham are now delivering automated alarm signal service levels in excess of 90%.

The company claims that ECHO will allow quicker police response and faster, more effective action.

“Efficiency and accuracy”

James Sharp, Operations Director, Cougar Monitoring/KSOC explained: “Using ECHO to contact the police has provided several benefits, particularly in enhancing the efficiency and accuracy of our response.

“The uniformity of the data being sent to the police has meant a consistent response and timely dispatch. It has also enabled us to keep track of our live URNs (alarm incidents) in a more efficient way.

Sharp added: “The speed of (alarm signal) delivery to the police has made a marked improvement. The time taken to pass alarms significantly reduces and gets a more accurate and instantaneous response.

“This allows for better scalability, reliability and time efficiencies overall. We are also able to better report against activations as our AMS (Alarm Management System) logs the case in a step-by-step sequence removing the need to listen back to call recordings to investigate an incident.”

“There are zero downsides”

Roger Kay, Associate Director, Banham elaborated: “Banham were very excited to be a part of the proof of concept for ECHO in the early days testing the passing of URNs to Essex and the Met via ECHO.

“It’s true to say we’ve never looked back: there are zero downsides to the ECHO process and it’s quicker and more accurate than calling the Force Control Room.”

Kay added: “Any associated cost more than repays itself; ECHO makes it as simple as possible to declare URN elements by the associated force and customers benefit from officers attending as quickly as humanly possible.

“Our regular internal URN audits are a good thing too, more than offsetting our time saved in operations.”

Expansion

Eight additional police forces including Dorset, Durham, Gwent, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Merseyside, Surrey and Sussex, have installed the ‘Alarms Interface’ and are currently awaiting activation.

In 2025, ECHO is planning to:

• Further enhance its alarms interface package to include the Unique Property Reference Number (UPRN) data some forces rely on
• Track police responders ‘time of arrival’ (at incidents)
• Include incident reason codes to better inform ARCs and their customers about incident status in real time
• Improve links between ARCs and its police counterparts, whilst saving call handlers’ time