The UK Government has this week published a White Paper on Police Reform, “From local to national: a new model for policing.”
Cards on the table: I’ve thought for years that we don’t need more restructuring and reform, we need a full Royal Commission on Policing and this White Paper gives us more reasons to think so, in my view. You can read a summary of it on the government website, which gives aspects but it’s only when you read the actual document for yourself, you might be able to understand why.
POLITICS
We DO NOT KNOW what we want from our police service and this White Paper is not really about policing, at its heart – it is about politics. Now, despite many people saying policing should be apolitical or even just not party political, that’s rather difficult to achieve, isn’t it? What could be more political than equipping agents of the state with uniforms, legal authorities and asking them to go about doing various things for us using physical force up to and including them having the right to shoot us dead, if the circumstances are thought justify it.
What could be more political than that?! The usual response to this is to point out that by ‘political’, people mean the police should not be party political and that’s fair enough to an extent, except in the sense that we ask these people to go about their business, actively giving effect to the legislative and other social ideas of elected governments.
If you don’t think the police is in trouble at the moment because of the extent to which they’ve chosen (yes, chosen) to embrace the nonsense non-crime hate incidents where they turn up on your door to “check your thinking” on conduct which is entirely lawful, then you’ve missed a large part of what has been going on in recent years, and spread across all three colours of government who have deliberately done nothing about it. And don’t get me going on the politics of what has unfolded in Birmingham in the last six months because of a football match.
THE WHITE PAPER
So give it a read – it is, I should warn, two hours of your life you’ll never get back but you will get insights in to what the Home Secretary is prescribing as good for us. It’s rather spectacular in all the wrong kinds of way because it misses rather a lot of important points, it plays undergraduate essay games with what policing actually is and what the public want it to be, and yes: it touches upon mental health as it’s primary example of the police doing non-police things which need to be cleared out of the way so they can “fight crime and catch criminals”.
So we can start with paragraph 98 –
“Police officers spend too much time dealing with issues outside their core responsibilities, such as responding to people with health and social care needs. People in a mental health crisis need professional medical support and this is best provided by healthcare professionals rather than police officers.”
You can see straight away the trick they’ve played here – positioning those “in a mental health crisis” as outside the police’s “core responsibilities”, despite Lord Adebowale pointing out, with explanation, why that’s impossible. There are loads of reasons why – sometimes, mental health crisis is wrapped up in disorderly behaviour (a crime), threatening behaviour (a crime) or situations demanding use of s136 MHA (a police only power). Already we can see how this politics unravels and renders the authors as naïve and ignorant of what the police actually do, what the public would expect the police to do when such things occurred.
And what goes entirely unmentioned in this report, is the reality that mental health issues are disproportionately affecting the very vulnerable people that paragraph 28 tells us the police should be protecting – victims and witnesses. That’s before we get on to the subject of violence against women and girls (VAWG) and domestic abuse (DA) – both subjects where victims of crime AND perpetrators are more likely to have a history of mental health problems. A recent study of domestic homicides put that figure at around 65% of offenders. So you’d better think really carefully about declining to attend a mental health crisis incident involving a man who has a history of domestic abuse in a situation where the crisis itself does not amount to a immediate risk of death or serious injury – and incidentally, we are awaiting inquests later this year or early next year for a domestic homicide-suicide incident.
THE CORE ROLE
You probably guessed I wouldn’t make it through a post like this without mentioning Right Care, Right Person – and you were right, because the White Paper mentions it.
Five times. The first mention in paragraph 86 tells us everything –
“To make sure that officers are free to focus on fighting crime, we will:
Work with key criminal justice partners to explore how to reduce
the burden on policing, including continuing to support the roll
out of Right Care, Right Person to all parts of the country.”
And just to make it truly clear how much emphasis the government is placing on this premier example of ways to refocus the police on their “core” role, this quotation is taken from text wrapped in a purple box and the bold emphasis is not mine – it’s theirs. No mention of the fact this program remains unevaluated, no mention of the various deaths which have led HM Coroners to issue Preventing Future Death reports – just nothing. It’s almost as if no-one knows the police service is misapplying its own ‘threshold’ to the call it receives sufficiently often to mean we now need to talk about it before too much more goes awry.
The White Paper keeps mentioning the “core” role of the police, without ever really saying what it is in credible detail, but paragraph 86, above, is the closest – “free to focus on crime.” I’m not the first person to react to this White Paper who hasn’t read it whilst screaming internally “POLICING IS MOSTLY NOT ABOUT CRIME!“
Honestly, it is exasperating. In few months’ time, 40 undergraduates on my policing module are going to have to give me 3,000 words on a topical policing issue and I’ve already told them, if you characterise policing as being just about “fighting crime and catching criminals”, you’re going to struggle. Of course it includes that, but it’s about 20% of demand coming in to police forces and if people haven’t realised there is a correlated link (NB: not usually a causal link) between mental health and crime, they’re missing something important.
CRIME PREVENTION
Even this White Paper makes the observation “Crime prevention work remains far too ad hoc, rather than being a core part of the mission of the police or other public services” (paragraph 53) as if responding to mental health crisis incidents can’t be expressly crime prevention work. Any other (former) officers had experience of crime committed by someone who had been engaged with by police or other agencies earlier and not been helped in a timely, relevant way? I can certainly say that.
Paragraph 60 tells us “communities are too often left with reactive policing that merely
responds to crime after it occurs rather than prioritising prevention and early
intervention.” What do we think s136 of the Mental Health Act 1983 actually is?! – it’s an ability to intervene early in a situation which looks like it may get worse but remember this: the RCRP threshold, effectively relied upon in paragraph 99 to summarise where the police still should respond to mental health crisis incidents imposes a higher threshold on police attendance than is required to justify police intervention under s136.
You can have a situation where someone may have legitimate hope and need for the police to turn up and consider use of s136 but then be met with a response that there is no “immediate risk to life or risk of serious harm.” They’ve paraphrased the RCRP threshold, incidentally, “immediate risk of death or serious injury.” The threshold in the Government’s own National Partnership Agreement (2023) is “immediate risk to life or immediate risk of serious harm.” It’s not pedantry to point out these are different things, not least because the latter has precise caselaw sitting behind it to help define and interpret what this means.
An “immediate risk to life”, in law, can exists where there is no immediate risk of death.
STAY IN MY LANE
I’m not going to get in to the other aspects of this proposed reform. I want to stay in my lane, others already have started doing that better than I could and I do want to make this post excessively lengthy. Suffice to say, I read the paper from cover to cover and just shook my head and felt a sense of gratitude I won’t have to experience how badly they are going to do this – and most of that will be predicated on the fundamental misunderstandings I’ve hinted at here in the way they’ve failed to consider what the core role of the police is and how they’ve used mental health – yet again – as their principal example of what policing should not be. And you’ll notice as this White Paper is being released, nothing is being said by the Health Secretary about increased funding and resources for health and mental health services to actually be able to deliver what may be required to give them a realistic chance anyway.
“Policing is what happens when something’s happening which ought not to be happening about which somebody ought to do something now.”
Always has been – always will be. I’m off for some coffee to steady myself.
Awarded the President’s Medal, by
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, 2026
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 