The telephone number for emergency services, 999, is very easy to remember. It was deliberately made that way long ago so that people who urgently need to contact the police, fire brigade or ambulance service can do so without having to search around for the right number.

The snag with this system is that the longer and more complicated non-emergency numbers are less easy to remember and the response less immediate, so that even when the situation does not demand rapid action many people still dial 999.

This causes a major headache, particularly for the police, whose emergency lines can at times become choked with non-emergency calls. They have to take details and work out priorities, and meanwhile people who are in a real emergency situation can find it difficult to get through.

West Yorkshire Police's head of communications, Superintendent Chris Barnes, is right to remind people to dial 999 only in a genuine emergency. The scale of the problem is revealed in the latest statistics, which show that the number of 999 calls rose from 361,222 in 1998/9 to 480,824 in 2002/3.

Unfortunately for the police, what a distressed or frightened victim of crime considers to be an emergency might not be based on the same criteria as those they use, so there will always be a number of non-urgent calls made to the 999 number.

However, it would surely help the situation if a short, national non-emergency police telephone code was introduced which came to mind even more easily than the present West Yorkshire number of 0845 6060606.