Surrey Police spent almost £60,000 on an eight-week advertising campaign to discourage residents from dialling 999 for non-emergencies while announcing hundreds of job cuts.

A further £3,000 will be needed to internally assess the programme’s effectiveness, Surrey Police said.

The campaign includes television, cinema, radio and back-of-bus adverts – as well as an online game – for a £59,532 outlay.

In November Surrey Police announced a cut of 400 jobs and £25million over the next four years, despite rising reports of rape, domestic abuse and incidents involving vulnerable people.

However the force argued the ‘Policing Matters’ campaign needs to reduce the number of phone calls which result in officers attending an incident by 830 per year to break even.

This is part of a wider campaign – Policing in Your Neighbourhood (PIYN) – to resolve 25,000 more calls without sending officers out, which Surrey Police said would save £1.8million.

These figures are based on an average of 1.8 officers per deployment at a cost of £40 per officer.

A Surrey Police spokesman said: “To give context around the decision to launch this campaign, analysis completed in 2015 showed that over a one year period Surrey Police attended 10,270 incidents which weren’t policing matters.

“An estimated cost of £739,440 was incurred by responding to calls that are the responsibility of another organisation.”

Examples of incidents which the police hope will be dealt with by other agencies include fly-tipping and motorists who steal petrol.

A police spokesman also said issues related to mentally ill people would be best resolved by healthcare professionals because police officers and call responders are not trained to deal with such incidents.

Dia Chakravarty, political director at the TaxPayers' Alliance, said: "Taxpayers are always sceptical about expensive campaigns like these which often end up wasting a huge amount of money, achieving very little.

"Local residents will want to keep a very close eye on this campaign to see if it really has saved money and freed up police time.

"Innovative cost cutting solutions are to be encouraged, but only if they actually succeed in saving taxpayers' money."