Supermarket staff who reported a break-in had to wait for more than three hours – after cops were sent to an address 150 miles away.

Staff in the Aberdeen Tesco on Great Western Road called police at 5.30am to report a smashed-in door at the shop.

But call handlers in the newly-centralised call-handling centres sent police officers to an address of the same name in Glasgow.

Police turned up at the correct shop in Aberdeen at 8.50am.

Police Scotland Contact Command Control Division Superintendent Matt Richards confirmed the delay.

He said: “A call was received at around 5.30am on the morning of Monday, April 3, in relation to damage caused to a door on Great Western Road, which had taken place overnight.

“The call was graded appropriately based on the initial information provided and allocated to officers.

“After receiving further information about the location of the store, officers in Aberdeen were in attendance by 8.50am that morning. “Inquiries into the incident are currently ongoing.”

North-east MSP Lewis Macdonald, Labour, campaigned against the closure of Aberdeen’s control rooms in the Evening Express Stop the 999 Cuts campaign.

Mr Macdonald said the problem of losing local knowledge had been flagged up repeatedly well in advance of the centralisation.

He said: “This is exactly the kind of mistake we could see coming.

“Staff are under huge pressure trying to deal with calls from places they’ve never heard of – let alone been to – and that simply builds risk into the system.

“Individual mistakes can happen in any system but this system is treating Scotland as a single unit and assuming that local knowledge is of no consequence.

“Fortunately this mistake happened at a quiet time and was a routine incident, but you can imagine the consequences if it were a major incident at a busier time – the risk doesn’t bear thinking about.”