The Home Office has caught us all unawares this year with very early publication of their police powers data, which includes use of s136 of the Mental Health Act 1983. It normally comes towards the end of the calendar year but the last data took until after the New Year to publish. It came out a week ago for the period 2023/24 and it’s extremely interesting.
The headlines are –
- Use of s136 MHA is down 10% nationally on 2022/23, which itself was a 5% reduction from 2021/22 – down from 36,621 to 31,213 over the last two years.
- But this varies by area: from a 27% reduction in London to a 32% increase in Derbyshire.
- Most forces recorded a reduction in use of s136.
- Emergency Departments were used an astonishing 42% of the time as the first Place of Safety –
- I should imagine the Royal College of Emergency Medicine have some thoughts on that because it points to serious under-commissioning of any alternative PoS services in mental health settings and it is a rise from 2022/23 when ED was the first resort 35% of the time.
- The use of the power is down but the proportion going to ED is up – an obvious anomaly.
- I still suspect this is for non-medical reasons most of the time and the Home Office should ask for that: was ED chosen because of additional complications like an overdose, lacerations, etc., or purely because there was no PoS in a mental health setting available?
- Police vehicles were used just over half the time (51%) to transport people to a PoS and ambulances 35% of the time.
- The ambulance data needs examining locally, though – see below.
- We don’t know what method was used to transport almost 2,000 times.
- Police stations were used as a PoS just 1% of the time (322 times out of the 31,213 occasions overall) but there are reasons we need to talk about this and question it, see below.
RIGHT CARE, RIGHT PERSON
The National Police Chiefs Council are quoted in some media as (quite fairly) stating the reasons behind the drop will be complex and will include the RCRP initiative, which makes some sense. If the police are now deploying to fewer mental health related calls, we can expect their use of a mental health related power to drop.
It does still leave a few questions however which I’d be interested in seeing answered about why the power has reduced in some forces implementing RCRP like the Met but not in others like Humberside where RCRP began and who have seen a 10% increase in their use of the power. Other forces implementing it have seen rises like West Midlands and as RCRP remains entirely unevaluated, it’s difficult to understand the immediate resort by NPCC to saying “RCRP” for the reduction, when some significant forces adopting the programme have seen increases. In fairness, the Met’s substantial reduction will be significantly skewing the figures because they account for over a sixth of all national usage and if that slice has reduced by 27% it will impact the overall data in a significant way and the national reduction will be much less than 10% if we leave out the Met … someone else can do that maths if they’re interested in detail.
Last year, the 2022/23 data was interesting and I blogged about it.
In particular, two forces stood out to me when it came to the use of police custody as a Place of Safety: Greater Manchester Police and West Midlands Police.
- 2022/23 – those two forces accounted for half of the use of police custody as a PoS.
- GMP used police stations 55 times where the statutory regulations were satisfied out of a total of 67 occasions across England and Wales as a whole.
- That’s worth thinking about: one police force doing accounting for 82% of something and forty-two other forces accounting for the remaining 18%.
- WMP used a police station 149 times as a PoS where the person was “arrested for a substantive offence” out of 196 occasions nationally.
- Again, worth thinking about: one force accounting for 76% of something and the remaining forces account for 24%.
No-one was quite sure what the HO meant by “arrested for substantive offence” and that was confusing. Did it mean, for example, the s136 power was used somewhere, then something happened or became known the person needed to be arrested for an offence and both detentions were legally ‘live’ by the time they arrived in front of a custody officer? … OR, did it meant someone arrested was detained in police custody and then subsequently detained under s136 whilst in police custody, either during the arrest-detention or as they were being escorted out having been released from arrest? We never did have that cleared up and I suspect that’s why the 2022/23 data was all over the shop on this point.
THIS YEAR’S DATA
This becomes relevant when looking at 2023/24 data because the Home Office have changed what they count. Instead of that “substantive offence” thing, they now record use of a police station in four ways: conveyed to custody with conditions met; conveyed without conditions being met; s136 used in custody with conditions met; s136 used in custody without conditions met. So two of those categories are recording something which will usually be unlawful detention in police – the law prohibits the use of custody for adults unless conditions in regulations are met and here are two categories where they aren’t.
2023/24
- We see those two forces (GMP / WMP) featuring prominently in the new data, albeit for slightly different reasons, partly connected to this new way of recording.
- GMP still detained 39 people in custody with regulations met but ALL of them were people already in custody – presumably under arrest for an offence and this makes me wonder whether their 2022/23 data related to that. Did they record “Regs met” for people already there under arrest, detained during arrest processes or as they were being released?
- Ultimately, we don’t know but given there were 322 uses of police custody overall, 39 detentions still means GMP accounts for 12% of national use of police custody.
- WMP state they used s136 in police custody 122 times where the Regulations were met and they never used the power in custody where Regulations were not met.
- This is 38% of national use of police stations as a Place of Safety in one force.
- And all I can really say is, on information known to me, I really question the claimed total usage and the data’s accuracy about the Regulations being met and I’ll leave that there.
I hope someone’s looking at this.
AMBULANCE SERVICE
Transport is contentious for s136 and the national data gives us a picture, but when you examine the detail of why ambulances were not used, it needs to be read locally for each ambulance service.
Some highlights –
- In the north-east, the ambulance service conveyed less than 8% of the time, which is pretty low – but 21% of the time nobody requested an ambulance!
- Same picture in the East Midlands region: conveyed 20% of the time, but ambulance not requested 29% of the time.
- Who knows what might have happened if officers had requested it – as they always should?!
It’s always the big aspect of the ambulance part of the data: police officers not requesting an ambulance at all 25% of the time they end up using police vehicles, meaning the ambulance service convey 38% of the time and police officers 51% of the time. If you look at the proportion of times the ambulance service did not respond to a request (35% of the time which is significant, but not the majority of occasions) we might reasonably wonder whether our heroes in green would be responsive most of the time if the officers only asked for it?
Makes me shudder to think about any inquest where complex medical factors were in play and the officers had made a choice not to ask.
Overall, this is the second year in a row use of this key police power under the MHA has reduced but it’s showing us even more dysfunction than before and some doubtful accuracy in recording, pointing to an overall system under incredible strain and perhaps a little gaming being used, misused and abused to make something “work” but I’m unable to take this data too seriously because of my own lived experience.
Winner of the President’s Medal, the Royal College of Psychiatrists.
Winner of the Mind Digital Media Award
All opinions expressed are my own – they do not represent the views of any organisation.
(c) Michael Brown, 2024.
I am not a police officer.
I try to keep this blog up to date, but inevitably over time, amendments to the law as well as court rulings and other findings from inquests and complaints processes mean it is difficult to ensure all the articles and pages remain current. Please ensure you check all legal issues in particular and take appropriate professional advice where necessary.
Government legislation website – www.legislation.gov.uk
Mental Health Cop 