Baroness Brinton (LD)

My Lords, it is a pleasure to support the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, on Amendment 427, and I have signed Amendment 428, which I will address. I come to the issue of mental health because I was present at and contributed to the debate the last time your Lordships’ House reviewed and improved the Armed Forces covenant. Mental health plays a vital part in that. I have friends and family members who are past and present members of the military, and I have seen how the military, over the last 15 to 20 years, has managed and improved its mental health. That is the position I took when trying to have a look at how our police, not just officers but ancillary staff, are supported when they face difficult circumstances that might put their mental health under pressure. The difference between the MoD’s approach and the College of Policing’s approach is really quite stark. To start with, the College of Policing—I looked at some individual constabularies as well—is all about signposting elsewhere to outside organisations. There is virtually nothing on what happens inside your own organisation if you are a police officer. The front page of the advice rightly refers to the Samaritans first; it then talks about Mind, social media support, and support for police officers and staff experiencing mental illness or distress. Then, and only then, on page four, does it start to talk about what happens inside your own place of employment and how you can find support there. The contrast with the MoD advice on mental health is that soon after the headline “Armed forces covenant and mental health”, it has a massive headline that says: “Getting advice or help urgently” for “serving personnel”; it goes through that and then it does it for “veterans”. It starts by saying that “your first point of call should be your chain of command, unit medical officer, welfare officer or chaplain if you are in the UK or overseas”, so if you are a serving member of staff you know instantly that your first place is the place in which you live and work, and you have your chain of command—the people above you and the people who may be junior to you. I recognise that the details of the Armed Forces covenant are different from the employment relationship that police officers have, but before I move specifically on to the amendment I want to say that one of the other things that the armed services learned as a consequence of the Afghan campaign was that they needed to get a much better dialogue going on between staff. They were almost the first people to start introducing mental health first-aiders. It absolutely transformed areas of the military where it was introduced with gusto. This idea about the chain of command meant that there was an instant response from somebody who, like a first-aid trainer, could go and say to a colleague, “Are you all right? Have you got some problems?”, or whatever. In policing, it appears very patchy as to whether mental health first-aiders are properly encouraged. In fact, the only thing that I could find online was that Staffordshire Police said in 2023 that it had over 50 mental health first-aiders. That is a really good standard, but there is no evidence held centrally about that level. It also indicates the seriousness with which a service, in its entirety, looks after its personnel. I looked at the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Doocey, which sets out some criteria to start to gather that information about the response to mental health—not just mental health first-aiders. Again, I could not find anything online that was solely about policing. However, there was a recent report by the King’s Centre for Military Health Research, jointly researched by King’s College London, the OU and the Royal Foundation, entitled Assessing the Mental Health and Wellbeing of the Emergency Responder Community in the UK. That obviously is not just the police; it includes the ambulance service and firefighters. In its very good research paper, the centre noted that, across the three emergency responder services, there was generally an absence of definitions and very little monitoring and evaluation. The paper talked about the importance of trauma support, including for PTSD. It emphasised, as I have already mentioned, the reliance on signposting to outside bodies and a lack of involvement inside police forces, and it certainly emphasised the lack of data collection and evaluation, including on self-harm, suicide, and alcohol and substance misuse. The paper noted that there was no real sense of how emergency responder services were going to address what worked and did not work, and therefore whether any training that they were doing was going to be relevant. The paper recommended a promotion of good practice, so that responders know what good practice is, as well as the promotion and extension of support for “mental health/wellbeing ‘champions’”, which I think means mental health first aiders and some of the other forms of that. The key thing the paper said was that there should be access to a single “Universal Gateway” website, analogous to the MoD page, and that to have that universal gateway there must be a single, universal collection of data and evaluation, so that across the board the police can understand what works and what does not work. The UK systematic review found 81 recent results of ad hoc research projects, of which 43 were from police forces. Frankly, everybody needs to work together much better to make this work. That brings me back to the amendment, which, at the very least, sets out a route to collect that data right across the police forces in England and Wales. It focuses on a series of issues that I have already mentioned, and it would be a good start to approaching issues of mental health in the way that the military does for its people, which is having success. I hope that the Home Office Minister will look at that when deciding whether or not this amendment should be supported.