Policing and Crime Bill

Baroness Meacher Excerpts

Report: 1st sitting: House of Lords
Wednesday 30th November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Howe of Idlicote (CB)]

My Lords, I would like to support Amendment 117, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, which would eradicate the practice of police cells being used as a place for safety for people in crisis. It is an important amendment, both because people who are experiencing a mental health crisis and being detained under the Mental Health Act have committed no crime and because, for those in such a distressed state, being linked into health support is critical.

People who are picked up by the police under the Mental Health Act are detained because of a real risk of harm to themselves or others. Regardless of their age, no one should be made to feel like a criminal simply for being unwell; these people are in need of help and support. They are detained in order that a mental health assessment can be made and for any further treatment and care to be put in place. When you are in a mental health crisis, you are likely to feel overwhelmed and extremely distressed. Your behaviour may seem aggressive and threatening to others, but nevertheless you still need support and compassion. In fact, the people who display the most challenging behaviour are often the most vulnerable—those most in need of health support.

Health-based places of safety need to be equipped to manage someone’s challenging behaviour, and areas such as Merseyside and Hertfordshire are able to do this, where police cells have not been used at all for the past year. This amendment acknowledges that achieving a total ban on the use of police cells in some areas is not yet possible, so it gives the Secretary of State the power to determine a date for implementation. This is important because it sends the message loud and clear that all parties agree that people who are extremely unwell should never be taken to a cell. The amendment will be a lever to ensure that health-based places of safety are invested in and that staff are trained to manage challenging behaviour.

Police cells are clearly never appropriate for people in crisis, and we need to challenge the assumption that sometimes they are. We have already come some way in improving the lives of those with mental health problems, so ending the outdated practice of taking someone in crisis to a police cell is an obvious, achievable and important next step. I hope that the Minister can accept the excellent amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, first I must apologise that I was not involved in the earlier stages of this Bill due to a family health problem. However, I want to speak briefly but very strongly in support of Amendment 117, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley.

This House was responsible for ensuring that parity of esteem between mental and physical illness is enshrined in law—a point already referred to by the noble Baroness. This was rightly heralded as an important advance which, over time, should transform attitudes to mental illness and change the treatment of those suffering from mental health problems. Is it conceivable that we would send a patient with a severe physical illness, perhaps cancer or a heart problem, to a police cell because no suitable bed was available locally? Of course not. We would all regard that as utterly inhuman.

But to send a patient in a mental health crisis to a police cell is even more inhuman than doing that to someone who is capable of understanding what is going on. The patient will probably be frightened enough by their own thoughts and the voices going on in their head. They may not understand what is happening to them. Handcuffs and strange people in uniform will be even more terrifying to such patients than they would be to a physically ill person. I do not know the figures, but I do know about the extreme distress that these situations generate and I have no doubt that a good proportion of those who survive—not everyone does—will end up with post-traumatic stress disorder.

I draw on my experience of mental health services over many years and my supervision of investigations into deaths in custody during my years with the Police Complaints Authority. I want to refer to a couple of cases from that time that come to mind in the context of this amendment. A young man of about 20 years old was detained under Section 136 with no mental health professional available to him. The plan was to take him to a police cell. The police had been warned that the young man could be violent, so a firearms officer was made available, which is perfectly reasonable. The patient had delusions that the people around him were all dead and that he was the only one who was alive. He said to the police officers, “You are dead”, who took this comment to be a threat to life. The firearms officer took out his pistol and shot the young man, who died.

The other case I want to refer to involved a very unwell man taken, again I am pretty sure under Section 136, to a police station, where he was restrained on the floor. We do not know what terrible thoughts the patient had in his mind, but the more he was restrained the more he struggled to get free, and understandably the more force was used by the officers to control him. The patient died on that floor. These patients would probably have recovered reasonably well over a period of a few weeks and might have lived full lives for many decades. We can imagine the feelings of their relatives.

The police officers suffered terribly during the lengthy investigations. I have to confess that those investigations were always lengthy and I am sure that they still are. They did not know whether they would be found guilty of murder or manslaughter. That is an appalling thing to happen to a young man who had gone to work that day assuming that he would do his duty as always, but without the mental health skills he needed to deal with the challenges confronting him. This situation is not fair either to patients or to police officers.

Along with other Peers, I very much welcome the ban in this Bill on the use of police cells for those aged under 18 and the plan to reduce their use for adults. Without Amendment 117, my fear is that it could be many years before the aspiration to end the use of police cells as so-called places of safety is actually achieved. The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, has been sensitive to the resource pressures, which I certainly understand, in proposing that April 2019 should be the date by which this aspiration must be achieved. This is a modest amendment that simply reinforces the direction of travel of the Government, which I applaud. I hope that the Minister will give it the serious consideration it deserves and bring forward an amendment at Third Reading.