Criminal Justice Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Official Report 572KB pdf

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Policing and Mental Health

Our final item of business is consideration of correspondence on the issue of policing and mental health. I refer members to paper 4.

I thank the cabinet secretary for her helpful update and certainly welcome the creation of a cross-ministerial working group on this important subject. I hope that the committee’s interest in the issue, and the priority that we have given to it, is beginning to have an impact. We are beginning to see some progress on addressing the matters that we have highlighted.

Do members want to raise any points about the cabinet secretary’s letter or ask any further questions?

The letter is detailed and much of it is welcome, but I have noticed what is not in there. We have repeatedly raised the issue of officer suicide—with the usual caveat that suicide is a complex issue—and have said specifically that the complaints and discipline process appears to have been a factor in a number of deaths. We have heard from serving and former officers who believe that that process desperately needs scrutiny by the Government, the Scottish Police Authority, Police Scotland and the Crown Office.

The letter does not really address the concerns that have been raised by officers who have attempted to take their own lives or by families grieving the loss of a loved one who has completed suicide. It is perfectly proper for the Government and others to talk about the policing of people in the community who have mental health problems and to recognise the impact that that has on officers’ mental health, but there still seems to be a reluctance to properly look at the difficult issue of where the workplace issues experienced by officers have been a contributory factor in their deaths.

I remind members that we will be having a public evidence session next week on the issue of police officer suicide, which I hope will be an opportunity to raise some of the issues that Russell Findlay has outlined. I know that he is very interested in that particular issue.

I thank the cabinet secretary for the update and want to pick up on two points on the second page of the letter.

The first is about the Scottish Government distress brief intervention programme. That is new to me, and it sounds like a positive and helpful thing. It seems to me that that can be instigated only if a person presents via a 999 emergency call or some other call to the emergency services and that the issue is dealt with at the call handling stage. When the caller presents, or does so on behalf of someone else, a decision is made in the call centre about whether that call will be directed to Police Scotland or to the distress brief intervention programme, but it is unclear where that is.

Does the call go to Police Scotland and get flagged as a potential DBI, meaning that an officer does not attend? The letter seems to imply that it is one or the other. I am a bit unclear about that, so I would find it helpful to understand the logistics of how the call handling works and where the call ends up in relation to how someone is attended to. I had never heard of the intervention, and I do not know anyone who has. It is live in 20 health and social care partnerships, and it would be helpful to know which ones it is live in.

Progress is obviously being made in rolling the intervention out, but how is it working in practice, and how do people access the service? It sounds like a very good service, with two weeks of very direct intervention, possibly one to one, with somebody who needs that help. I know some constituents who would benefit from that immediately, but I have no idea how people access the service.

Secondly, there is a comment that I wish to question. The cabinet secretary’s letter says:

“Each Health Board is providing access to a mental health clinician, accessible to police officers, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week for those who require urgent mental health assessment or urgent referral to local mental health services.”

My conversations with officers and their representatives indicate that that is not the case—it is absolutely not a 24/7 service. I am intrigued to know what that access to a mental health clinician looks or feels like on the ground. Does it mean just a phone number, or will someone attend in situ? Does it refer to somewhere that the police will take someone to? Is it a physical environment? It is certainly not a 24/7 environment. If that were the case, the police would not be responding to such calls and spending so much time dealing with people with mental health difficulties. I am not entirely convinced that that statement holds true in the real world, and I think we should do a bit of work to investigate that comment further.

I know that DBI has been an option for a number of years, and it is relatively straightforward. My understanding is that police officers can use DBI as a referral option for somebody they encounter who is experiencing poor mental health. Ultimately, that would normally be routed to the person’s GP, who would pick up the referral and engage with the person. There may be some other points of contact along that pathway. I know that it is considered to be a successful, user-friendly and well-established option. If it is helpful, and if members are happy to do so, we can ask for some more detail on DBI. I think it is quite an important tool in the toolbox overall.

Jamie, was your second point in relation to the enhanced mental health pathway?

I was referring to the letter from the cabinet secretary, at the third substantive paragraph on page 3 in our papers. It states:

“Each Health Board is providing access to a mental health clinician, accessible to police officers, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week”.

I presume that that means that each board is currently providing access—that is what the letter implies. That apparent 24/7 provision is a surprise to me. The feedback is very much that that is not the case out of hours, that police officers must deal with mental health assessments and that there is not 24/7 access to mental health clinicians for every officer. I find it difficult to believe the claim that every health board is currently providing a 24/7 mental health clinician service. If it is true, that is welcome, but we could perhaps benefit from more detail on that.

Again, I am more than happy to pick up that point and ask for some more information and detail on it. Are members happy with that?

Members indicated agreement.

If members have no further points to raise, that concludes our business for this morning. I will now close the meeting, and we will take a short break before moving into an informal private session.

Meeting closed at 10:58.