A national agreement between the NHS and the 43 police forces in England and Wales has been agreed whereby health services will be responsible for call-outs relating to people suffering a mental health episode, provided no threat to life or criminal offence is involved.

Chris Philp, the policing minister, said that officers should not be expected to deal with mental health cases and be a “stopgap” for other agencies. Officers are “not mental health specialists” and should not fill in for other emergency services where there was no risk to life and no offence had been committed, he said.

Philp said he expected the arrangement to be implemented by the summer and that it would help free up police officers to respond to crime.

Festus Akinbusoye, PCC for Bedfordshire, commented on the arrangement: “This is excellent news, and is long overdue.

“Police officers are often not best placed to deal with person going through a mental health crisis.

“I look forward to the implementation of this agreement.”

A Home Office evaluation has calculated that 880,000 hours of police time is spent on non-urgent mental health call-outs. Saving these hours would be the equivalent of freeing up about 450 police officers a year, according to the Home Office analysis.

The national introduction of the partnership with NHS trusts follows a trial carried out by Humberside police. Philp said that it had helped the force save an estimated 15,000 work hours a year by passing mental health calls to other services.

Philp said: “Police officers are many things: first responders, protectors, problem solvers and investigators — but they are not, for example, mental health specialists.”

He also announced “common sense” changes to the way in which the police record crime, allowing them to cut red tape and claw back 443,000 hours of officer time every year. The initiatives will simplify the recording of criminal offences.

Officers will no longer record cases of messages that might offend someone but have no identified victim, or cases where a public disturbance occurred but has been resolved.

It will also be made easier to cancel the recording of a crime where there is enough evidence that none was committed. This will require differing levels of authorisation depending on the gravity of the offence.

The Home Office said that the changes would bring a consistent approach and more accuracy to the recording of all offences.

It comes after the ongoing police productivity review, which is being led by the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC), found that 443,000 officer hours a year were spent filling in unnecessary forms and on burdensome administrative tasks. The amount of time spent was the equivalent of attending 270,000 burglaries.

Philp said: “Victims must always be at the centre of our response to crime. Listening to forces and cutting unnecessary red tape will mean police officers can focus on solving crime and delivering justice for victims, as well as preventing it from happening in the first place.”

He said that police would become more effective “with less unnecessary admin”.

Gavin Stephens, chairman of the NPCC, said: “Police officers must be totally focused on keeping people safe and ensuring they feel safe.

“We want to provide the best possible policing to the public, and the work of the police productivity review is aimed at removing barriers and improving effectiveness.

“Any move to free up our front line to serve our communities is welcome.”

The Home Office said that posting messages that might offend someone, but where no victim had been identified, should no longer be considered a crime.

Police will also be allowed to decide whether to record cases where communications such as text messages or letters are malicious or rude but not threatening.

Counting rules will be changed so that when a victim reports a string of offences, officers will investigate all of them but only spend time recording the crime that has the most impact.

The Home Office said: “For example, under these changes, where a victim has experienced stalking with criminal damage occurring to their property, police will now put stalking at the forefront of their investigation.”

(Source: The Times)

(Image: Wikimedia, Southbanksteve from London, UK, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)