Criminal Justice Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, December 7, 2022

Official Report 532KB pdf

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Policing and Mental Health

Our next item of business is consideration of some recent work that we have undertaken on policing and mental health. I refer members to papers 2 and 3.

Before we begin our discussion, I record our thanks to all the police officers who spoke to us privately. Their brave and incredibly helpful testimony is really invaluable to our ability to question Police Scotland on how it supports its officers and staff.

In paper 3, the committee is invited to agree to a series of recommendations on follow-up actions as a result of our conversations. I invite members to comment and give their views on the suggested actions.

I put on the record my appreciation for the officers who spoke to us. Some of the accounts were truly harrowing and they really brought home the nature of what the police do day in, day out on our behalf.

I have long had concerns about the response from Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority. Way back—I think that it was at some point last year—I asked them about police officer suicides. First and foremost, I asked whether those were even counted. We were told that they did not have that data and that they would perhaps provide us with it, but I have not seen anything to that effect. I also asked about the number of police officer suicides reported in the public domain that have been subject to fatal accident inquiries. No FAIs have taken place, as far as we can establish, which seems absolutely staggering.

There was a particular exchange in which Police Scotland told the SPA that, in effect—I summarise—none of the suicides reported in the public domain was due to work-related issues. To be frank, that is just not true. Suicide is complex; no one is saying that it is black and white. However, I know about cases where what certain officers were experiencing in relation to work and, indeed, the complaints and disciplinary process was absolutely a factor in their taking their own lives. The lack of curiosity from Police Scotland, the SPA and, indeed, the Government around that is highly questionable.

As well as the officers who have, tragically, died, we have heard first-hand accounts both in committee and outwith it of officers coming close to taking their lives due to exactly the same pressures of regulation, discipline and so on.

Police Scotland, the SPA and the Government are all saying the right things now, but I do not have entire confidence in what they say. I do not doubt their intent—I absolutely believe that they have the officers’ welfare at heart—but the systems as they are set up clearly do not work. If they do not radically change them, more officers will die. That is inevitable.

I have some suggestions for follow-up work in addition to what has been proposed. We should go back to the Crown Office and ask it why the deaths of officers, some of them on duty, from suicide or suspected suicide have not been subject to fatal accident inquiries, which would have helped to establish the facts and whether lessons can be learned. We might want to engage with His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary in Scotland, which I understand is doing work on this right now and speaking to officers who have been impacted.

We might also want to revisit Police Scotland and the SPA, given the exchange that I mentioned, to ask whether they record officer suicides and whether they have done any meaningful work on the number and nature of these tragic cases. We know from the accounts that we have heard that police officers see and do things that most people in society do not, and they deserve proper support.

I want to clarify something. Are papers 2 and 3 part of the publicly available pack of meeting papers or are they restricted to members?

The clerk has confirmed that they are public papers. That will save me some time in my comments. The summary notes in paper 2 go into great detail on the nature of the meetings that we had. It is worth putting on the record our huge thanks to the officers and ex-officers whom we spoke to, and to the Scottish Police Federation for mediating and attending meetings with them.

The evidence that we heard is all fairly self-explanatory. Many of the issues that were raised were no surprise to us, but they still came as a shock. I was struck most of all by the sheer scale of the trauma that the individuals whom we met had experienced and the effect that it has had on their lives and the lives of their families.

As Russell Findlay said, we have unfortunately lost a number of officers who have seen ending their lives as the only way out of their trauma. Others are still suffering. It is clear that, in so many aspects of how the police assist officers not just in their day-to-day work but in dealing with post-traumatic stress, so many have been let down. We met only half a dozen officers, which is probably a drop in the ocean. That was reaffirmed to me last week, when I attended the Scottish Police Federation awards just across the road. I spoke to officers there who repeated quite a lot of what we heard, although I think that what we heard was often at the extreme end.

On what should happen next, it is really important that the SPA and Police Scotland read in detail the notes that the clerks have produced about our sessions, and that they respond specifically on the many issues that we have raised. I will not go into them all in detail, but they include dealing with the trauma and stress of the job; the organisational culture; how the SPA and Police Scotland deal with complaints; lack of resources; lack of time off; financial pressures; mental health; how the human resources systems, including the employee assistance programme, deal with the issues; and how HR deal with people who are on sick leave. We heard a number of frank—and quite shocking, actually—comments about how such people are dealt with. A private employer in that position would be looking at a number of serious civil cases being brought against them.

Paper 3 asks us to consider what we should do next. All the questions that have been posed are relevant and it is really important that Police Scotland responds to them in great detail. I do not want to get a one-page response that thanks us for our work. Police Scotland really needs to be open and frank with itself. We have had evidence sessions where quite senior people from Police Scotland and the SPA have sat in front of us and said that they hear what we are saying and they hear the feedback. They told us about a range of steps that they are taking to make things better, but that was very high-level feedback. I would like to see much more detailed, in-depth information on how they are addressing each of the issues that we are presenting to them and their direct response to the criticisms. That is key.

It is only fair that Police Scotland and the SPA are given the opportunity to respond. They may not agree with everything that we report or with the assumptions in the summaries that we will give them in the papers, but it is entirely appropriate that they at least say so. If they agree and accept responsibility in some of the areas, it is important that we give them the opportunity to say what they will do moving forward, because it is the moving forward that is really important.

We know that mental health and work stress are among the key drivers for retirement and early retirement from the force. We have had a lot of discussion around that. It is really important that that plays into our wider remit of keeping a watching eye on police numbers and churn and generally supporting those who are on the front line, which is important to all of us on the committee.

I hope that those comments are helpful in some way and that they set the bar for what I would like to see from Police Scotland and the SPA.

I broadly agree with what Jamie Greene has said. The response to our letter was a wee bit defensive. It did not show much in the way of actual understanding of the issues that we presented, even in the case of the part in the notes about the employee assistance line. Somebody called it and was told to phone back later, but when he phoned back, he was told that they could not help him because he did not meet the specific criteria.

David Page described the trauma risk management model as a proactive model of support that officers and staff are expected to access by self-referral. We heard that that was not working, but he has not really addressed that in his responses. Those are just a couple of examples. We need to dig deeper. I agree with Jamie Greene: we need some recognition that there are problems and that we need to fix them. We have not really had that.

I back up what others have said. The notes are really good and they capture what we heard from officers, which needs to be taken really seriously.

I will keep my comments brief, because the key points have been clarified and they are in the public domain, but I want to mention the issue that came up about police treatment centres. The one at Castlebrae at Auchterarder was talked about in particular. The consensus is that those centres are really helpful, and I wonder whether their expansion could be looked at. The point was made that, although the centres are there for people who experience any of a range of health issues while they are in the police, that is not necessarily the case when they retire. I think that the help is available only for officers who have retired on physical grounds, although I might be wrong about that. Perhaps that could be clarified in any response. However, if that is the case, will the police consider making that help available to people who have had to retire on mental health or emotional wellbeing grounds as well?

12:00  

I missed a bit of what you said, Fulton. Did you suggest exploring opportunities for retired officers and staff to access the treatment centres?

Yes. My understanding is that they can already do that in some instances but, given that the information that we received says that the centres are not for everybody, perhaps they could be expanded.

I felt that the response that we got was inadequate. It could have been written by anyone, but it should have been responding to the police officers who, we have heard, are serving on the front line in specialist units where, without even hearing the evidence, you would surmise that being in those undercover situations or dealing with weapons would be challenging mentally. There is no acknowledgement of that. I would have expected the Scottish Police Authority to recognise in its letter that it is responsible for a service in which police officers, who are in a profession that is on the front line, are probably more challenged than people in other professions. It is certainly among the professions that have the most far-reaching mental health challenges. There is no admission of that.

The SPA’s letter is very dry, in that it responds to some of the administrative issues. It says that it will review the situation. I would say to the SPA that if it is going to review the situation, it should take a different attitude from the one that it is taking with the Criminal Justice Committee. I want to hear more from the SPA about how it understands what we have heard from officers. Obviously, that is a snapshot. I want to hear more from the SPA that shows that it understands.

As I have said before, the fact that police officers were not categorised as a priority by the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation always astonished me. That probably had a psychological impact on the police officers who served in the middle of Covid. Nobody seemed to bother about the fact that they were not vaccinated. I want to hear more from the SPA than what is in the letter. We should send a strongly worded response.

I would like to come back in briefly to touch on what I said before and to put it into some context. The exchange in committee in which I asked about officer suicide numbers was on 18 May. The later exchange was on 7 September, when I quoted from a letter from the SPA to the committee. It stated:

“Based on the information available at that time, there was nothing to suggest that any of the recent cases were caused directly by the pressure of work.”

I disagree with that point, because there is an abundance of accounts and evidence to hand that completely contradict it. That is the kind of thing that a fatal accident inquiry should and would have looked at.

I have one other small but important point. There are other cases—at least one—in which an officer attempted suicide and was then required to sign a non-disclosure agreement. We are told that non-disclosure agreements are being used properly, in line with the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service guidance, and not to keep people quiet. Again, that is part of the problem.

I have a request for information. I wonder whether the clerks could perhaps assist us in liaising with the SPA or Police Scotland. In today’s press coverage pack, there were a few articles relating to statistical data around exit surveys. The figure that was quoted is that one in five officers have exited the force because of the effect of the job on their health, mental, physical or otherwise. Those articles point towards freedom of information data that had been requested and subsequently published. That sort of information would be helpful to the committee—20 per cent is quite a high statistic—rather than our just taking what we read in the newspapers at face value. The two stories in The Times and The Scotsman are clearly from the same source.

I wonder whether we could get that information, provided that it would not breach individuals’ confidentiality. If the numbers are low, for example, that would be difficult, but I would really like the police to be transparent about their exit surveys and their findings when people leave the force, retire early or leave for health reasons and have not just come to the natural end of their career. That information might help to back up all the points that have been made today about the scale of the problem. One in five officers is a huge number. It should be a concern if the statistics that we read in the newspapers are true. I wonder whether we can ask for more information about that.

My ever-helpful clerks have just confirmed that that appears to be connected to a freedom of information request that was submitted by our Liberal Democrat colleagues. It should be in the public domain, but we will see whether we can find it, circulate it to members and incorporate it in our on-going correspondence.

I have jotted down some of the points that members have made. It is clear that concerns still exist about the response that we received from Police Scotland. In relation to that correspondence, I still have questions about training, which I am very interested in, and, in particular, supporting operational supervisors to recognise and respond to changes in a member of their staff, and to instigate the appropriate support before things escalate for them.

In the correspondence from the SPA, I noticed that some of the timescales for processing retirements seem exceedingly long. That raises a concern, particularly where there is a health and wellbeing issue connected to that. For me, the other question that remains is around access to, and referral to, specialist support in circumstances in which the mental wellbeing of an officer or a member of support staff has declined to a point at which referral and access to more specialist support is appropriate. The timescales around that are difficult. Those are some of the issues that I am interested in continuing to scrutinise.

We have covered a number of issues: obtaining data on suicides; establishing whether there is a link with officers’ work roles and the collection of data on that; and the possibility of FAIs. It is important to acknowledge that HMICS, the SPA, Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Federation are committed to addressing the issue, but the view that there is a lot more work to be done is loud and clear. Fulton MacGregor spoke about widening access to the police treatment centres, which is a good point, and the situation with regard to vaccinations, which Pauline McNeill raised, is an issue that has attracted scrutiny and criticism in the past.

Going forward—to pick up on Jamie Greene’s point—it is important that the SPA and Police Scotland have an opportunity to respond. I am happy to propose that we give them some time to respond on the notes of meetings with officers and the suggested follow-up. We could also invite the federation and even the Association of Scottish Police Superintendents to comment, perhaps in 2023. In the meantime, I am keen that we write again to Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority to request a full and detailed response to the correspondence that we have sent them.

I also propose that we engage with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service, perhaps on cases around FAIs, which Russell Findlay raised, and suicides, and raise those issues with it. As I said, we can certainly track down the information around the FOI that was referred to earlier.

Are members happy with that proposal? There is still a wee bit of work to do, but it is all important stuff.

Can I quickly pick up on what our paper says about the summary case management pilot? It says that the testing of the new system is not due until 2023.

Are you looking at the correct paper?

I am looking at page 28 of our papers, where there is a section on rest days. [Interruption.] I am sorry—I am way ahead. I apologise.

You are way ahead of us.

I am sorry.

No worries. Thank you.

We will ask the clerks to support that follow-up work and to keep on top of that piece of work into the new year.