Fire and Rescue Services: Suicide Prevention Training

David Simmonds Excerpts

Thursday 12th November 2026 Westminster Hall

[David Simmonds (Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Durham (Luke Akehurst) on securing this debate, and it is a pleasure to be opposite the Minister. It is a tribute to his intellectual breadth that this morning I heard him on the “Today” programme talking about youth unemployment, and this afternoon he is here to talk about fire services and suicide training.

This is an issue that most of us, as constituency Members of Parliament, will hear about when we engage with our local fire services. When I visited the station in Pinner, it was one of a number of concerns that seemed to emerge from the experience of those fire crews and the changing nature of the call-outs. They said that the job used to be predominantly about rescuing people in emergencies and attending house fires, but that they increasingly have to deal with things such as motor crashes and crises when a person has called the emergency services, uncertain about the exact nature of what is going on and the firefighters are the responders summoned. They therefore find themselves dealing with an individual in a moment of crisis, perhaps facing a situation that is outside the normal breadth of their training; my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) set out a powerful constituency example showing how important that is.

The Government need to consider carefully how to roll out an appropriate level of training. One issue, and also perhaps a learning opportunity, is the way that the whole range of our public services addresses emerging issues. On suicide prevention, social workers, police officers and workers in various parts of the NHS have a high degree of personal expertise and will have had high-quality training and the opportunity to make a good assessment, based on the evidence, of what works effectively to prepare those individuals for the situations that they may come across. We must avoid reinventing the wheel for fire service professionals, when we may be able to use the learning from effective programmes in place elsewhere to ensure that what is provided is focused and appropriate, and gives firefighters the skills they need when dealing with members of the public in a moment of crisis.

It is important in such a debate to remind ourselves about the risks, particularly when we are talking about mandatory training and what that involves. Those of us who have spent a long time in local government dealing with issues such as child sexual exploitation will be very conscious that when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority any more. Recent estimates on the new Oliver McGowan training in the NHS, which is designed to raise awareness and skill levels about people with learning disabilities and how they interact with the health service, describe a potential bill of as much as £1 billion for a day and a half of mandatory training for every single member of staff—3.7 million people across the NHS and social care. That will also have a service impact due to the unavailability of those staff to deal with patients because they are being abstracted to undertake that training.

I know that the Minister and the Government will quite rightly have in mind—and the Opposition support them in this—ensuring a proportionate approach and making sure that the people who are in the best position to help individuals going through that moment of crisis are the ones who get the most focused training, but that the general level of awareness across those organisations is raised to the right level.

[Marie Goldman]

The hon. Member is making an interesting point about proportionality of training. He mentions the cost of doing the training, but I have not heard anything about the subsequent impact on the NHS—for example, if people are in better mental health because they have been helped by somebody who has had training, what positive knock-on impact might that have on the NHS? Has he made any assessment of that?

[David Simmonds]

I think proportionality encompasses exactly that question—a question that our public health professionals and our public services have to address every single day, with every patient that they see and with every organisational review that they undertake: what is the cost, benefit and consequence of this, especially when it involves taking a member of staff away from dealing directly with someone who might be in a moment of crisis, to undertake training on a different subject? What is the overall impact, and how do we make sure that those resources are best used?

Quite rightly, the hon. Member for North Durham and other contributors focused mainly on the impact on the public—the fact that this is a public service and what it means to those people who may be in a moment of crisis. However, it is also valuable to remember the contributions that touched on the impact on the firefighters and public servants more broadly. I am very conscious, from the work that I did on the impact of child sexual exploitation that it was about both making sure that people understood the signs in children and in families, and the indicators of risk that meant intervention was required, and also understanding the cumulative impact of dealing with incredibly difficult issues on someone’s mental health and wellbeing, and on their ability to do a professional job to a high standard.

The hon. Member for North Durham very nicely encompassed this point and my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley touched on it as well: this is also about us, as employers of public servants, making sure that we exercise an appropriate duty of care for the people who are doing this incredibly difficult job on behalf of our society, and that they have the skills, tools and training that they need to cope with the things that that will require them to do.