Police blamed after human error led to M9 tragedy

Sheriff Williamson’s FAI determination said Mr Henry did not deliberately ignore the call and appreciated that it should be acted on.

He made hand-written notes in his “Pot Book” but it is thought that while checking to see if the incident had already been logged he was interrupted.

Mr Henry became involved in other phone calls for the remainder of his shift and never went back to check the entries in his notebook.

The report said the system, which did not check incoming calls against outgoing actions, meant that there was a risk of human error going undetected.

It said Police Scotland could have ensured all call handlers – even non-core staff like Mr Henry – were trained to use the Aspire system at all times.

Police Scotland accepted it failed to train Brian Henry and other non-core call handlers.

The report said the force’s failings gave rise to circumstances in which such an error such as the one made by Mr Henry could occur.

The sheriff said Police Scotland was an entirely different organisation now than it was in 2015.

He said the force and other experts were confident that the type of error that led to the deaths of Mr Yuill and Ms Bell being repeated were remote.

“So remote that only wilfully ignoring a call would give rise to a call going unactioned,” it said.

Police Scotland has previously admitted criminal liability and pleaded guilty to a contravention of the Health and Safety at Work Act that their failure to record and action a a call materially contributed to the death of Ms Bell and was fined £100,000.

Deputy Chief Constable Alan Speirs repeated his apology to the families and said the police had done everything they could to stop a terrible incident such as this being repeated.

“Sheriff Williamson’s findings highlight the significant improvements which have been made to our call handling systems,” he said.

“How we respond to 999 and 101 calls now is incomparable to how we dealt with them in 2015.”

He added: “We are studying the determination in detail for any learning which will form part of this continuous improvement.”