Lancashire police fail to keep promises about how quickly they will attend incidents to half of people who call the force's control rooms, a study has revealed.

Now call centre staff for Lancashire Constabulary are to be re-trained in a bid to ensure members of the public are not given misleading information.

The findings were uncovered in an internal audit of the force, which showed that call handlers were mistakenly marking incidents, typically anti-social behaviour, as having been dealt with on the crime log, even though no officers had attended.

This put any investigation of the report to the bottom of the pile and, in some cases, even meant it was forgotten about.

Insp Richard Hughes said: "Our customers expect four things to happen when they contact us.

"They want us to tell them what we will do a promise. They want us to stick to it.

"They want us to sort out any problems linked to their query.

"They want us to put things right if we get it wrong.

"A slow or poor response has a negative impact on how our service is perceived.

"The impact of this is that logs marked as having 'passed' (dealt with) are more likely to be forgotten about, or moved to the bottom of the pile.

"When viewed from the caller or victim's perspective this is much more likely to result in a broken promises, poor service and that we appear powerless to fix things."

The internal audit surveyed 895 crime logs over four days.

It found that most instances of broken promises were to do with reports of anti-social behaviour.

Up to 45 per cent of residents promised a police response in an hour were being failed, as well as 40 per cent who were told an officer would be there within eight hours and 66 per cent who had been given a 72-hour time frame.

The re-training of call handlers will focus on helping either to get an officer to the scene on time or ensuring a definite appointment is made.

The study was carried out in a bid to improve residents' satisfaction with police.

Current surveys show that up to a quarter of residents do not have much confidence in the force.