Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment she has made of the potential effect on the number of police call-outs of reductions in staffing in (a) mental health units, (b) hospitals and (c) social care services.

Decisions on the deployment of a police force’s workforce in relation to local requirements are operational matters for individual chief constables, working with their Police and Crime Commissioners. However, a range of initiatives at both local and national level including the Crisis Care Concordat partnership arrangements and street triage scheme have already helped to reduce inappropriate mental health demands on the police.

The use of police cells in England as places of safety under the Mental Health Act, for example, reduced from 8,667 instances in 2011/12 to 3,996 in 2014/15. Legislative changes being introduced in the Policing and Crime Bill currently before Parliament, to prohibit the use of cells as places of safety for children and further limit their use for adults, as well as reductions in detention periods, will ensure progress in maintained.

In addition, the Government has committed to invest an additional £1 billion in mental health services by 2020 to ensure improved mental health support in the community and for people in Accident and Emergency, as well as crisis response provision and treatment options for both adults and children. In the last Autumn Statement, the Government also gave local authorities access to up to £3.5 billion of ne support for social care per year by 2019/20.