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Criminal Justice Committee 18 February 2026 [Draft]

18 Feb 2026 · S6 · Criminal Justice Committee

Item of business

Policing and Mental Health

Stephen Gallagher Watch on SPTV

First, the framework for collaboration was published in February 2025, a month after the last committee meeting on the subject, and with that came the collaborative commitments. We are talking about a journey of improvement, and you are right to highlight that it has taken place over a period of time.Let me talk for a moment about partnership working with the police and the various systems and hand-offs that are appropriate there. I will set that within the slightly wider context of what we are trying to achieve with the mental health and wellbeing strategy, in which we have a focus on combating and reducing stigma, on the prevention of mental ill health and on supporting people in communities, as well as on improvements to services. You are right to highlight that there has been significant investment over a period of time across the whole spectrum of the mental health service offer.Prevention is an important aspect of all our work. We have invested £164 million, part of which has been spent on investment in services for children and young people in the community—£15 million per year of that money is baselined into the local government settlement—and £15 million goes through third sector organisations, third sector interfaces and down into local communities to support adults with their mental health and wellbeing.Moving on to stigma reduction, I think that you will be aware of our see me campaign work with Scottish Action for Mental Health and its impact in reducing the stigma around mental health issues. Finally, there is also the significant development agenda for services.In the period that you mentioned, which takes us back to 2020, we stood up the mental health hub within NHS 24 and, in recent years, we have extended it to provide 24/7 coverage. The hub now reaches 10,000 people a month. In other words, more than 120,000 people per year use the hub, which did not exist previously, as their gateway into mental health service provision.The adult prevention schemes that I mentioned reach 300,000 adults in Scotland per year, while the latest figure for children’s services is that more than 60,000 children receive support through children and wellbeing support services. We have also been developing services as part of the implementation of the mental health strategy, as well as working through the interfaces between existing services and the new services that we have established. It takes time and partnership working to identify what can be improved and then to work on those improvements, but that is what we are committed to doing.What have we achieved? I have probably touched on a few of those achievements when I talked about the establishment of the mental health hub. Something that I have not mentioned yet, but which I know is contained in Caroline Lamb’s letter to the committee, is the creation of the enhanced mental health pathway, which connects Police Scotland to the mental health hub. Around 300 to 350 calls per month go from Police Scotland contact centres to the hub, through which a range of services can be accessed. I should also say that, under the programme for government for 2025-26, we have a commitment to expand the offer of the mental health hub to allow direct access to psychological interventions, and we hope that that will allow another 1,700 interventions per year.We have supported the establishment of safe spaces, but I will not go into that in any detail, as I know that the committee spent considerable time talking about the safe space approach at its previous meeting. We have resourced triage car services with the Scottish Ambulance Service in Inverness, Dundee and Glasgow, and those pilots are currently being evaluated. Our review of psychiatric emergency care plans was completed in December, and we are now working on guidance that will go to partners and the NHS.Our distress brief intervention programme, which is a key facet of the support that we can give to people who appear to be in distress, has reached a landmark 100,000 referrals. Incidentally, the community model of distress brief interventions achieves a 9 per cent referral rate from front-line policing. Policing can also access distress brief interventions through a national pathway that is available as part of the transfer that I mentioned between police control centres and the mental health hub. Finally, more than 2,000 front-line police officers in Scotland have been trained at level 1 distress brief interventions.I could go on, but I hope that that gives the committee a flavour of some of the improvements that the mental health strategy has brought over the six-year period to which you referred.

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Criminal Justice Committee 18 February 2026 [Draft]

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