Policing and Crime Bill

Debate between James Morris and Mike Penning

Monday 13th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[James Morris (Halesowen and Rowley Regis) (Con)]

I rise to speak to the new clauses tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker) and by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk (Norman Lamb). As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on mental health, I start my remarks with the caveat that the changes the Bill makes to sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 are very substantial and significant. Over the past few years, there has been considerable improvement in the way in which police forces and police officers deal with people in mental health crisis.

New clauses 42 and 43, tabled by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne, relate to police officers being deployed in psychiatric wards. New clause 42 raises some important questions about occasions when police officers are requested to take action within health-based settings, particularly acute psychiatric settings. That speaks to an important developing relationship between the police and the health service. Sometimes, because of the particular nature of an individual’s condition, or other circumstances, it may be appropriate for police to be deployed in psychiatric settings, but that should happen only in very exceptional circumstances. We might need to look at how acute psychiatric units go about risk-profiling patients who are currently in acute psychiatric settings in order to ensure that it is very rare and exceptional for police officers to be called on to take action within those settings. I broadly support the intentions of the new clause tabled by my hon. Friend, who has done a lot of very important work in this area, of which he is a champion.

I also have a lot of sympathy for my hon. Friend’s new clause 43, which is about Tasers. I agree that only in the most exceptional circumstances should Tasers be used within acute psychiatric settings and that we should have very clear guidance and guidelines as to the appropriate time for the deployment of that kind of force.

New clause 58, tabled by the right hon. Member for North Norfolk, who has not yet had an opportunity to speak to it, raises important issues in relation to implementing the changes to sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act. It refers to the controversial idea of a person’s private dwelling being characterised as a place of safety. This speaks to the relationship between policing and the health service in terms of the operation of places of safety. We need to think about how we can provide a broader range of alternative places of safety, some of which might be based not in the national health service but in the voluntary sector or in crisis houses, and about the capacity of the system to provide appropriate places of safety.

[Mike Penning]

This is a really important point. To be brutally honest, unless we say, “No, we will be the port of last resort”, we will continue to be the first place that people come to, and that then pushes other Departments into getting their act together to do something. The police are now having to say, as we are saying in the Bill, that they will not hold people in police cells inappropriately, as they have been doing for too many years. That will force other Departments to do exactly what my hon. Friend is talking about.

[James Morris]

I thank the Minister for that intervention. There may be a role for police and crime commissioners to explore the need to work more closely with the health service and others to provide the capacity for appropriate places of safety such that police officers do not have to make the sorts of decisions implied by new clause 58.

The overall changes to sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act are essential and quite transformative. We have to be very clear about what we mean by the exceptional circumstances in which people are detained, perhaps moving to a system where it becomes inappropriate in all circumstances even for adults to be detained in police cells. I recognise that there may be a need to define the exceptional circumstances in which that might happen. The proposed changes are positive. The new clauses I have discussed raise important questions that the Minister should consider in summing up.

Policing and Crime Bill

Debate between James Morris and Mike Penning

Monday 7th March 2016 Commons Chamber

[James Morris]

We have a very close relationship.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne has pointed out, in my role as chair of the all-party parliamentary group on mental health I very much welcome the parts of the Bill that relate to sections 135 and 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983. It is an issue in which I have long taken an interest in this House, and I had an Adjournment debate on it in Westminster Hall in 2013.

A number of people have influenced my thinking about the importance of the changes in the Bill, particularly as regards some of the work that has been done by West Midlands police. In particular, I want to mention Inspector Michael Brown, who has an interesting blog that other hon. Members might wish to look at. He is a mental health blogger and came to see me in my constituency office four or five years ago to talk about how the nature of policing was changing in society, the importance of dealing with mental health on the ground, and how the nature of policing meant that police officers were putting themselves in situations in which they were essentially having to make decisions about whether or not to use the powers under the Mental Health Act, as well as about whether they had the ability, knowledge and training to make such decisions.

If we look at the history of the Mental Health Act, we can see that it was initially conceived to cope with people who were absconding from asylums. It was updated in 1983, including through the section 135 and 136 provisions, and today’s changes are very important as the Mental Health Act needs to reflect the more modern experience of policing and of working with health professionals. Sometimes, we need to question whether we should go further in changing the Mental Health Act, because one downside of police officers specifically being given powers to detain people is that that raises issues to do with liberty and whether somebody is capable of making their own decisions, even when they are in mental health crisis. The fundamental point, which my hon. Friend also made, is that I do not think that any civilised person would say that there should be any circumstances in which a child suffering a mental health crisis ends up in a police cell. I welcome the changes to section 136.

The Bill also confers regulation-making powers on the Secretary of State to define when an adult should legitimately be placed in a police cell.

[The Minister for Policing, Crime and Criminal Justice (Mike Penning)]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way, and particularly commend the speech by my hon. Friend the Member for Broxbourne (Mr Walker). Through the Bill we are trying to say—including to the other agencies to which the shadow Home Secretary referred—that a police cell or a police vehicle is not the place for someone in a mental health crisis. As the Ministers responsible for policing, we have to say that we are the port of last resort, not the port of first resort, which, I am afraid, is a situation that the section 135 and 136 legislation has got us into in some parts of the country. We need to get away from that.

[James Morris]

I thank the Minister for that intervention. He makes a powerful point. I have been a strong advocate of the street triage schemes that have been rolled out across the country. I was taken out by the street triage team in Birmingham and sped on a blue light to the centre of Birmingham, where a man was threatening to throw himself off the new Birmingham library. As the Minister knows, street triage is an effective combination of a police officer and a trained psychiatric nurse, both of whom present themselves at the point of crisis. That is the way we need to go, where we do more to get the police working with health professionals.

[Mike Penning]

I apologise for further delaying the House. Where it has not been possible for whatever reason to get the street triage team to the scene, we can have mental health professionals in custody suites. That point of entry gets around the data protection issues and people, who often know the mental health professionals, can be treated in a completely different, more civilised way, as we would expect our constituents to be treated.

[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.