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I wonder whether it is about how you actually make it structural. There must be a way of recording it when someone says, “I’ve been told by a clinician that I can go.”

It strikes me that a lot of what you have spoken about touches on a much wider response to supporting people with their mental wellbeing and mental health, which is commendable. Clearly, the NHS should be looking at that, and you have said how it works with Police Scotland to ensure that police officers better understand the processes and the options. Again, that is commendable and welcome.

However, we are here to talk about the impact on Police Scotland. When I speak to officers in my area—indeed, when I met a local inspector not so long ago, we touched on this—the primary concern, which we will touch on when we speak to the Scottish Police Federation and Police Scotland, relates to how much time is occupied when officers feel that they have no course open to them other than to take a person to hospital. If they think that a hospital is the most appropriate place to take an individual, they might find themselves having to wait there for a long time, because hospitals are obviously very busy.

The key question is what more can be done to accelerate the process of assessing whether an individual who has been brought to a hospital needs to be admitted for some form of direct intervention or assistance and then admitting them if that is required. As I said, I recognise that hospitals are busy and deal with multiple things, but there is clearly an issue in the time of other professionals being occupied when they have a wider job to do. They are not able to get back to that job because they feel that they have to wait with the person they have brought to the hospital. How can that process be improved and shortened?

Good morning, David. You listened to the previous evidence session, and I am interested in following up on some of the areas that I explored there. You set out one of the main challenges, which relates to officers taking a person into hospital to see whether they can get assistance and perhaps finding a lack of appropriate clinician expertise or personnel.

I thought that Dr Steel made an interesting point in the previous session. He has encountered, and it has been reported to him, that some of the challenges—he was not saying this in a critical sense—might also be at the Police Scotland end and their protocols, which, I am sure, have been put in place for good reason. In that scenario, clinicians might be saying to individual police officers, “You’ve brought this person to hospital. We’ve got this person—they are in the hospital environment—and we can now deal with this.” However, for whatever reason, the officers are saying either that they do not feel that they can leave the person on their own or that they are being told not to leave the person on their own. Clearly, there will be circumstances in which that is sensible—for example, the person might have committed a crime—but that scenario included instances in which that was not the case.

Can you say whether you recognise that as an issue? If you do, can you speak to what any of those processes might be and whether they need to be looked at?

It sounds to me as though this is part of the equation. You have taken the person to hospital, presumably because you think that that is the environment in which they will be safest and is the appropriate place to go to. I understand that an officer is accountable to, and will take their orders from, the superior officer—the supervisors, as you described.

However, I am thinking about what happens if a qualified clinician says, “You’ve brought the person here; it’s now safe.” How do we get to a place whereby officers, including supervisors—it sounds like they might be the key players here, from what you have said—are confident enough to say that they, or the officers on the ground, have been told by an appropriately qualified medical professional, “You can go now—you’ve brought them to the right place”? I can understand that the human instinct, in any profession, is to say, “I’ve got to cover my back here”. What needs to be done to get to that place? It sounds as though you are saying that some of the issues are at the operational end of Police Scotland.

I want to pick up on an area that I explored with the other witnesses, which you have touched on already. It is the bottleneck whereby officers will take someone into a hospital environment—more often than not, A and E—and then feel that they have to wait there with them for a long period of time. David Threadgold talked about the issue sometimes coming down to a superior officer not enabling officers on the ground to leave. You touched on that, ACC Paton—by the way, is your name pronounced Pay-ton or Pah-ton?

That is what I thought. You said that officers and staff should have the confidence and be empowered to leave a person in a hospital or a place in which they are comfortable. We heard directly from Dr Steel—I do not know how frequent an occurrence this is—that there are circumstances in which a qualified clinician will literally say to officers, “You can go now. You have brought this person to this place, and it’s safe to leave.” Yet, for some reason, they will not do that.

If officers have taken a person to hospital, they presumably think—or, at least, they thought in the first instance—that it is an appropriate place to leave them in the care of someone with professional expertise. That begets the question, at what stage should the officer think, “Well, that’s enough for me. I feel confident, now, that this person who understands mental health challenges better than I do is saying that I can go”? Why does the officer not leave at that point? Why are they not thinking, “This is the juncture at which I can leave”?

That speaks to human instinct. I think that it is an understandable human instinct. However, we are hearing about challenges that mean that officers are not able to be diverted to other forms of activity that we would expect them to be doing. I suppose the question is how we get them to move beyond what would be an understandable human instinct—I know that it is hard—and say, “Right. I’ve got a job to do, so I now need to trust this person who has told me I can leave,” so they can then do so.

I suppose that we have to be a little cautious when we are talking about removing offences, which is what we are literally doing in this process. People out there might suddenly think that those offences will not exist any more, but, as you say, they will clearly still exist in law and have legal effect. No fixed-penalty notices have been issued, but are we aware of whether people are still being charged under those offences?

Sorry, I mean outwith the fixed-penalty notice scheme.

I understand that—that was the basis of my question. Are we aware whether people are still being charged under those offences?