A SYSTEM failure at the main police call centre is causing havoc this afternoon.

West Mercia Police announced via Twitter that its control room at Hindlip had suffered an outage.

This means calls are having to be picked up by neighbouring forces.

The police force reminded residents to only dial 999 in a genuine emergency.

Their tweet said: "We are currently dealing with a system outage in our control room.

"999 calls being made within our force area are being picked up by neighbouring forces.

"We are working hard to resolve this issue. Please only dial 999 in a genuine emergency."