New agreement to share information between New Forest verderers and police

A NEW information sharing agreement has been drawn up between Hampshire Police and the verderers after concern that details of animal accidents were not being passed on.

The issue was previously raised at January’s meeting of the Verderers’ Court, when commoner and New Forest Road’s Awareness campaigner Gilly Jones claimed agisters had been struggling to get accurate information from police call handlers.

She revealed: ”A few weeks ago an agister was called to an incident and was told by a police officer that it was a hit-and-run.”

“When I went to put a sign up, I came from the other direction and found the taxi at the side of the road wrapped in police tape - but the agister wasn’t contacted by the police.”

Ms Jones went on to claim that on other occasions, agisters had spent hours on the phone trying to get information from police call centre staff.

She said: “The verderers do have a data sharing agreement with the police and it should be easy for agisters to get the details of the drivers involved in accidents, but it is not.”

Ms Jones went on to claim that one call centre operative had said that it was “not normal practice to share information with agisters”.

The court heard this lack forthcoming information could potentially lead to incidents being incorrectly classified as hit and runs.

Ms Jones demanded: “Are commoners missing out due to call centre mishandling?”

Following Ms Jones’ representations, a meeting was held between the verderers and Sergeant Kevin Pearson and PC Sam Chapman from Country Watch based at Lyndhurst Police Station. A new information sharing agreement had now been signed between Hampshire Constabulary and the verderers.