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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

Dr Robby Steel (NHS Scotland) Watch on SPTV

The number of times that the police are called by the general public to respond to an incident that fits the lay concept of a mental health emergency has not gone down dramatically. It has plateaued and is coming down, but the public’s behaviour and their awareness of what options are available will probably be the last thing that changes. People still phone 999 and ask for the police when they are in an emergency.Where real progress has been made over the past few years—in particular, in the past year, since the collaborative was established—is on the options that are available to the police once they have been called. The enhanced mental health pathway allows the police to say that a person would be better dealt with by the NHS 24 hub. Data shows that that has saved 17,000 hours of police time already. Data is available only for the past 10 months, but, in that period, 17,000 hours of police time has been saved. That means that more than 20,000 hours of police time a year is saved by that one initiative.The second thing is the distress brief intervention programme, which has now been brought in across Scotland. It gives the police an option that does not involve taking the person to accident and emergency or getting them a mental health assessment. A DBI involves saying that a person would probably benefit from support and advice on how to manage their own distress more effectively, and finding out what the root causes of that distress were. That has now helped up to 100,000 people.On the issue of police officers arriving with someone at accident and emergency or the mental health assessment service and how they hand them over, there is a very good pilot going on in Lothian, in the Royal infirmary of Edinburgh’s A and E department, on how the guidance for police officers can be operationalised and how the handover to clinical staff can be documented and explained. That pilot is still to be evaluated. The evaluation is taking place at the moment, and it will be published this month. The pilot is not perfect—it is a first attempt—but it has the potential to be rolled out.That work is about giving police officers the ability to structure why it is not appropriate for them to continue to stay with a person and why it is appropriate for them to hand them over to the clinical staff, and to ensure that the rationale behind that is well documented. It is about ensuring that the clinical staff are aware that the patient has been handed over and that the police are leaving. The pilot has the potential to improve that interface. The process will never be perfect, but the pilot has the potential to improve it. I happen to know the people who have been involved in the pilot in Lothian, and it is very promising, so there are reasons to be optimistic.The collaborative is coming up with real solutions that are making a difference on the ground, even though it has not yet translated into stopping people phoning the police as their first point of contact when they are in crisis. I hope that, as awareness of what is on offer increases, the behaviour of the public will change in response to that.

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Criminal Justice Committee 18 February 2026 [Draft]

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