Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what, if any, actions they intend to take to ensure that people suffering from mental health crises are not taken to a police custody suite.

We have announced the development of a new National Partnership Agreement between policing and health partners to ensure that the right agency responds to a mental health incident, removing police involvement earlier in the process where it’s not needed. This will support roll-out of the Right Care, Right Person approach, under which police will only engage in a mental health incident when there is a real and immediate risk to life or serious harm.

We have already achieved a significant reduction in the number of people taken to a police cell as a place of safety in recent years. In 2021/22 a police station was used as a place of safety 254 times in England out of a total of 36,594 Section 136 incidents. This represents less than 1% of incidents and is down from an estimated 8,667 times out of a total of 23,907 such incidents in 2011/12. The Draft Mental Health Bill contains provisions to remove police stations as a place of safety, so that people held under Section 136 will be in more appropriate health-based settings when in crisis or waiting for a place on a specialist ward. The Bill will be introduced when parliamentary time allows.

On 23 January 2023 we set out details on how £150 million of capital investment, first announced in the 2021 Spending Review, will be used to build mental health urgent and emergency care infrastructure. This includes £7 million for specialised mental health ambulances across the country to provide better care and support for people experiencing a mental health crisis.

We are also funding over 160 wider capital schemes including to provide and improve crisis cafes, crisis houses, mental health urgent care centres, health-based places of safety and broader improvements to crisis lines and emergency departments. This will mean care can be provided in more appropriate spaces for those in need, and will reduce pressure on wider parts of the system including accident and emergency.