I was wondering to someone only last week whether there had been any equality impact assessments for Right Care, Right Person and whilst googling searching for something else entirely, I stumbled across the Metropolitan Police equality impact assessment, completed in 2023.
Naturally, I was quite intrigued to read it!
I had to stop reading after the very first paragraph, open a draft blog and start making a few notes which grew into this post. Starting with the first sentence of the first paragraph, there are several problems which prevent us reading on –
“Right Care, Right Person (RCRP) is a model developed by Humberside Police to ensure the right agency deal with health related calls. It has shown to improve outcomes, reduce demand on all services, and make sure the right care is being delivered by the right person.”
- Ensure – it doesn’t ensure anything of the sort. A decision by the police not to attend does not make any other agency do anything in particular. It may end up meaning someone gets no response at all, depending on what other agencies agree or decline to do. We know, for example, the ambulance service has declined to attend incidents sent to it by the police because the location of the patient was not known and nothing else happened after that. There are Preventing Future Death reports from Coroners about exactly this.
- Right agency – is the ambulance service the “right agency” to deal with someone at home in mental health crisis? Depends on your point of view, but there are plenty of paramedics and ambulance service managers who think it is not. 80% of the RCRP referrals to the London Ambulance Service by the Metropolitan Police do not require an ambulance – so you can argue about whether you want the police or ambulance left untangling something neither are appropriate for, but what you can’t do is say that paramedics are required even a quarter of the time.
- Health related calls – we don’t always know whether calls badged as “mental health” by the police are in fact, mental health related. Plenty of evidence that even where officers are in direct personal contact, they often suggest something is mental health related when it’s not. The evidence, in case you’re wondering, is found in s136 MHA outcomes – and even the EIA we are discussing here makes this clear! … more on that in a moment.
OK, that’s the first sentence over with! – let’s move on to the second whilst remembering it’s all still just paragraph one, page one and the document is many pages long. You might want to put the kettle on –
- It has shown to improve outcomes – has it? … where?! RCRP has not been properly evaluated by anyone before being rolled out. We simply do not know what outcomes are experienced by the public because literally no-one has looked at it. The former Chief Constable of Humberside admitted this in his appearance before the Health & Social Care Select Committee on 19th September 2023.
- Reduce demand on all services – no, no, no – not at all. We know for a fact, as we said above, the London Ambulance Service stated in February 2024 at the London Assembly, they were receiving an additional 250 calls per day as a consequence of this new policy. So even if you want to argue it has reduced demand on the police, which we will shortly see is a dubious claim, it has certainly not “reduced demand on all services”, which is the claim in the EIA.
- The right care by the right person – again, it simply doesn’t do that. We know some of the decisions to ‘bounce’ callers to the ambulance service or 111 (option 2) or a GP are not correct – mental health professionals in some areas have had to point out the police are sometimes deciding callers need a mental health crisis team, when the patient is not yet under secondary care mental health services and therefore outside the scope of the crisis team. “Mental health crisis” does not necessarily = mental health crisis team. Other crisis routes are open to people not known or open to mental health services, like 111 (option 2).
This post is over 500 words long already and that’s just page 1, paragraph 1 of a 29-page EIA. Let’s get summary –
SELECTED HIGHLIGHTS
I was next most interested in the claim –
“There are three pillars that make up the RCRP policy –
– Concern for Welfare
– Medical support
– Walk out of Health Care/AWOL.”
RCRP began life in Humberside with four aspects and none of them were “medical support” – I admit I don’t even know what that means in such a way as to apply it to any operational decision-making. Suffice to say, it raises (again) the question of what RCRP actually is? If you compare what Humberside originally said with what the College of Policing still say on their website with what we have here for London, they’re all different. The National Partnership Agreement is different again!
But we’re here for equality, aren’t we – it’s literally an equality impact assessment? –
The Met’s assessment of which protected characteristics are affected by the RCRP policy believes that it only affects age, disability, race and “other issues” (not specified). There is, apparently, no impact on the protected characteristics of gender reassignment, marriage and civil partnership, pregnancy and maternity, religion or belief, sex or sexual orientation. That’s quite difficult to fathom – we know from various NHS programmes that mental health difficulties are disproportionately experienced in certain racial groups, and amongst those who have undergone gender reassignment processes (social), or are pregnant and whose sexual orientation is non-heterosexual.
It’s difficult to take seriously the idea those groups would not be differentially impacted by a policy change on mental health responses.
DISPROPORTIONATE IMPACT
Policing has a disproportionate impact on various demographic groups in society because of how it is structured and how it is deployed, in addition to the various decisions individual officers make whilst working. This stuff compounds to create the disproportionality – both structural and specific – on minority groups, so it’s pretty important if policing is trying to shed the “institutional” discrimination allegation which is often thrown at the police and the Met in particular.
I always thought EIAs in policing were the very epitome of the ‘tick-box’ exercise and rarely done seriously. I never served in the Met but I’d be surprised to learn it was anything different to my experience of something you had to do as part of getting policy approved by a governance committee and rarely scrutinised closely or questioned.
This document just isn’t a serious document, for me – of course there are disproportionate impacts for various groups and not just for protected characteristics (but policing never talks much about non-protected characteristics). But the extent to which this document looks like propaganda is disappointing – it’s replete with demonstrably fallacious claims and whatever people think of policing or of RCRP and the need for it, we need better than this to justify it.
We deserve better than this.
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 