ONE of Scotland’s main police control rooms used a fake system to manipulate response time targets for eight years, according to documents seen by the BBC.

Thousands of calls to the Bilston Glen control room were allocated to a fictitious call sign known as DUMY.

Internal systems would register that the calls had been passed to officers – but instead they were parked on a list.

This meant a police vehicle would not have been dispatched quickly to calls which had been judged as high priority.

It appears that many calls were not attended at all.

The practice, according to official police documents, was designed to “provide artificial levels of incident management performance”.

The documents reveal that the DUMY call sign was used at Bilston Glen in Loanhead, Midlothian, from at least 2007 until the system was discovered in 2015 and stopped.