Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she has made an assessment of the potential impact of police decision-making in cases involving individuals with serious mental health conditions on the number of prosecutions for assaults against mental health nurses.

The Home Office has not made such an assessment. The police have a duty to pursue all reasonable lines of enquiry, as set out in The Code of Practice to The Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996.

However, the police are operationally independent from Government and would be best placed to make decisions on the most appropriate course of action according to the specific circumstances of a case they are investigating.