Mental Health Act: Section 136

Kit Malthouse Excerpts

Tuesday 28th January 2020 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Crime, Policing and the Fire Service (Kit Malthouse)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Mole Valley (Sir Paul Beresford) on securing the debate. His long-standing interest in these matters is well known. I am grateful to him for raising this important issue, and I congratulate him on his persistence in repeatedly raising it. I have learned in my relatively short time in this place that persistence often pays. I am not sure whether it necessarily will on this particular occasion, but perhaps we could meet in the future to discuss where things may go.

I also congratulate my hon. Friend on spending time with his local police officers. I am encouraging as many Members as possible to do so, because a lot can be learned on the frontline, as the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith) said. I have met quite a few police officers over the last few months, and one thing that the response teams in particular have persistently raised with me is the amount of time they spend dealing with people who have mental health issues. It is a tribute to them that for many people they are the automatic first port of call for help in a wide range of situations.

Notwithstanding that, it is not acceptable that the police should be asked to cover the roles of other agencies out of normal hours simply because they are a 24/7 service, or because of staff or facilities shortages elsewhere. The police are not trained social workers, paramedics or mental health professionals, and assisting people who need these services also prevents the police from carrying out their own core tasks. Sometimes police involvement will be necessary in mental health cases, because either criminality or a threat to safety is involved. In such cases, it is vital that people in police custody have access to the support and medical care they need. However, it is clear that the best place for people suffering a mental health crisis is a healthcare setting, because the police cannot provide the specialist care they need.

There has been good progress through a number of initiatives to improve the way that the police and their partners respond to vulnerable people experiencing mental health crisis, but we acknowledge that there is still more to do. Provisions contained in the Policing and Crime Act 2017 designed to improve outcomes for people in mental health crisis came into effect on 11 December 2017. Those include removing the use of police cells as places of safety for under-18s detained under sections 135 or 136, cutting the use of police cells for adults and reducing the maximum period of detention to 24 hours. We have seen a continued decrease in the use of police cells as a place of safety since 2012-13. There were only 136 instances last year, compared with some 9,000 cases in 2011-12. The Department of Health and Social Care has already made £30 million available for health-based places of safety since 2015, and I will mention some of the other investments that it is making in a moment.

I know that my hon. Friend, as he has this evening, has previously raised concerns—sometimes echoed within the police service—that police officers do not have sufficient powers to act quickly in relation to people in private homes who are mentally distressed. In the NHS, home treatment teams serve to support people in acute mental crisis in their homes, so that they do not need to be admitted to hospital. But, of course, when a person does not allow services to help them, the burden often falls on police officers. They can often find themselves among the first to be called to assist a person in their home, as my hon. Friend has experienced, only to find that they have limited legal options to resolve the situation on their own.

Police officers do have the powers to act to prevent crime and to protect people and property from serious harm, but at the moment the Government do not believe they should be given the responsibility for removing people from their homes without due process. The police are not mental health practitioners, and it is essential that a professional assessment is made so that people get the support they need. At present, officers can support mental health professionals who have obtained a section 135 warrant to remove a person from a private address, and we believe that is the right and proportionate approach to those in their own homes.

Health and Home Office Ministers considered legislating for additional powers following their 2014 review of sections 135 and 136, but decided on balance that such new powers were not appropriate, a position that this Government continue to hold. Rather than circumvent the need for a warrant, I am clear that a more satisfactory response is to ensure that the necessary mental health crisis care services are in place throughout the country to provide the responses that people need. We wish, where possible, to reduce the frequency of detentions under the Act and to prevent people from reaching a crisis state. We will keep this issue under review and continue to work with the police, in conjunction with other partners, to better understand the precise scope and nature of mental health demand, and distinguish where the police may need to continue to engage and ensure that other services need to play a bigger role.

As my hon. Friend will know, there has been a huge rise in the demand for mental health services both within and outside the health service. Given what I have said about the amount of police time spent in engaging with mental health crises, missing persons or whatever it might be, this is definitely something on which we need to work. If he believes this—and he has allies, such as his friend Professor Rix, who may be able to sway minds—I would be more than willing to meet him in the Home Office to discuss what more we can do. It is certainly the case that, on top of the enormous investment in mental health provision through the national health service that we will be seeing over the next few months and years, we all need to look at and think about the legislation in this area, and I would be more than happy to do so in the future.

Question put and agreed to.