Policing and Crime Bill

Debate between Bob Stewart and James Morris

Monday 7th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[James Morris]

The Minister makes an excellent point. We need greater integration between policing and health. It should not be part of policing for police officers to make crucial decisions about an individual’s psychiatric state.

[Bob Stewart]

Street triage sounds ideal and superb. Am I correct in assuming that the psychiatric nurse and the police officer both have negotiator training? My hon. Friend mentioned an incident in which someone was threatening to throw himself off a roof. Is negotiation part of the training of the street triage team?

[James Morris]

Such teams find themselves in extremely difficult and often dangerous situations, in which they have to deploy negotiation skills, as well as assessing the condition of an individual. That is vital work being done at street level.

I very much welcome the changes and the reduction in the time that somebody can be detained under the Mental Health Act but, as my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne and others said, we should aspire to reduce it further to less than 24 hours. We should seek an appropriate length of time for somebody to be assessed psychiatrically for the nature of their condition. The reforms in the Bill should be considered as part of a cross-government approach to dealing with people with mental health problems.

The changes that the Bill introduces should be seen not in isolation, but in the context of the availability of places of safety, which my hon. Friend talked about. The £12 million or £14 million identified by the Home Office in conjunction with the Department of Health is a start, but we need much more emphasis on further funding to provide acute psychiatric places, including the roll-out of liaison psychiatry in accident and emergency departments.

The crisis care concordat introduced by the previous Government has been an effective mechanism for bringing together various partners to improve crisis care. Much more work across government is needed to increase its effectiveness.

Although the number of deaths in custody has not been high, some of those have been of people detained under section 136 of the Mental Health Act. We should be mindful of the issues raised by the use of restraint by police officers in such cases. I highlight that to the Minister as an issue that needs to be considered. There is some evidence that in certain circumstances the police have used excessive restraining powers when dealing with people under sections 135 and 136 of the Act.

I welcome the broadening of the definition of a place of safety under section 135, which can mean somebody being kept in their own home, or in close proximity to where the crisis incident took place in order for them to be assessed appropriately.

These are changes which many people have called for over many years. I am very pleased that the Home Secretary and the Front-Bench team have listened to the representations made by police officers on the ground and by health care professionals. The way we treat people in a state of mental health crisis says much about the sort of society we want to build. These are significant steps in improving our approach to dealing with people in mental health crisis, but they are only one part of the story.

We need to do more work to achieve parity of esteem between mental and physical health, and we are some way along the route. The Government have made a series of welcome announcements on mental health in the past few weeks, particularly on crisis care and community care, but we must go further. People in mental health crisis should receive compassionate care. They should be taken to an appropriate place and dealt with with dignity and humanity, which is very important to the way that we treat mental health in Britain today.

Trident Renewal

Debate between Bob Stewart and James Morris

Tuesday 20th January 2015 Commons Chamber

[Bob Stewart (Beckenham) (Con)]

Plato, among other Greek scholars, is reported to have said:

“If you want peace, prepare for war”.

That is the fundamental principle behind the theory of deterrence, and why the United Kingdom has to maintain its independent nuclear deterrent. We need one now and in the future. Our independent nuclear deterrent is the ultimate guarantee that a potential aggressor state—possibly possessing nuclear weapons itself—will not attack us. As we have heard, over the past 10 years or so we have watched the Russians greatly enhance their military and strategic weaponry. They most certainly are not scrapping their nuclear weaponry. Indeed their military presence, around our shores, in the air, on the seas and under it, is increasing not decreasing, especially around Scotland. Why are they doing this, and why should we abandon a defence against such a latent threat?

No other nuclear state has given up its nuclear deterrent, with the possible exception of Ukraine, but that is a fairly good case study—is it not?—and a warning too. After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, about one third of the Soviet nuclear arsenal remained within an independent Ukraine. Then in December 1994, Ukraine, Russia, the United States and the United Kingdom signed a memorandum to give Ukraine security assurances if it gave up its nuclear arsenal, which it did. Twenty years later—last year—Crimea was seized back from Ukraine by Russia, and then Moscow fomented discontent and military action in eastern Ukraine. Hardly surprisingly, some Ukrainian leaders and outside commentators have argued that if Ukraine had not removed its nuclear weapons, Russia might have been deterred from its aggression in Ukraine. Do they have a point? Is there a lesson there for us?

Once given up, we will never realistically be able to reactivate a nuclear deterrent capability. Our nuclear know-how has been built up since the second world war, with, of course, considerable American support. But once gone, it is gone for ever. I accept that international terrorist groups may well be trying to get their hands on a nuclear device and that they may not act rationally, as is a normal requirement for the strategy of deterrence. However, even international terrorists such as the Daesh in Iraq and Syria may—just may—think twice about exploding a nuclear device, assuming they get their hands on one and have the specialised knowledge required to use it. After all, the so-called Islamic State may not face its own obliteration with the same enthusiasm with which they murder countless people.

[James Morris]

Is not the crucial point, which was also made by my hon. Friend the Member for New Forest East (Dr Lewis), that the deterrent needs to be sufficiently credible, as in the point about Hitler, to deter even an irrational actor from the thought of using nuclear weapons against us?

[Bob Stewart]

I agree absolutely. Armageddon is seldom faced by anyone with equanimity.

I was an officer who spent several years in the 1st British Corps in Germany, supposedly preparing to face a Soviet threat from the east. We knew that the group of Soviet forces in eastern Europe had a huge conventional advantage over us and realised that our chances of survival would be very slight if the balloon went up. But we also trained and practised the use of tactical nuclear weapons. The Soviets knew that full well and it gave those of us due to be positioned right up against the inner German border some comfort. We felt that our possession of nuclear weapons was definitely a deterrent that the Soviet Union would have to take seriously. Most of my fellow front line officers agreed with me. Some did not, but the majority did.

Remember: smaller NATO countries such as Denmark also have aeroplanes fitted with bomb racks to pick up tactical nuclear bombs from American stockpiles to fly and to use them. It is not just the nuclear members of NATO.

Most of us in 1st British Corps felt that our possession of nuclear weapons was a very sound insurance policy. Of course the situation is different today, but I use the example to explain how possession of a nuclear capability can help conventional forces.

I hate the idea of war. Who doesn’t? All my friends in the military are of the same mind as Winston Churchill, who once said that “jaw-jaw” is better than “war-war”. But in truth jaw-jaw often depends on the ability to have war-war. In the 1960s, I remember the US strategic nuclear bombers had a special motto that they painted on the noses of their B52s—“Peace is our profession”.

Nuclear weapons are a fact in our world and potential enemies may use them whether we like it or not. So I believe that we as a nation must also possess them. If you want peace, prepare for war—so that you deter it.