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Police have issued a plea to the public to use the 999 emergency number responsibly - after a man called up in an argument over 3p.

The caller to Nottinghamshire Police explained he had gone 3p over when filling up his petrol tank and said he didn't have the extra 3p to pay.

The control room operative told him it was not an emergency but she would take the call after explaining he should have called 101, the non-emergency number for police.

The caller then says he has notes on him but not the 3p change, to which he is told to use one of the notes to pay the 3p.

He replies: "That's ridiculous. So why am I going to break into a tenner for three pence? I'm not gonna pay him three pence to break a note."

Between April and October 2018 alone, Nottinghamshire Police's busy Control Room has taken over 241,498 calls to their 101 non-emergency number, as well as a further 108,258 calls to its '999' emergency number.

In the last few weeks, the force has had 999 calls because someone found a hair in their food, asking the control room to book them a taxi and to find out why buses were running four minutes late.

Superintendent Paul Burrows, from Nottinghamshire Police’s Contact Management department, said: “The vast majority of the public understand that 999 is only for emergency calls but, despite the work we regularly do in the media, online and over-the-phone to explain to people how to use 999 responsibly, we do still receive a high number of misplaced calls to our emergency number.

“While some of the misplaced calls we receive range from honest errors of judgement to the more unusual, there is a serious point to be made here as every misplaced call our emergency call handlers receive has the potential to delay us from responding to genuine emergencies.

“All we’re asking is that people only call 999 in genuine emergencies and remember that there are other ways to contact us for less urgent enquiries, with the Nottinghamshire Police website offering advice on hundreds of policing and non-policing issues and the 101 non-emergency number also available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”