Policing is not the problem here: the extent to which we rely upon policing – that’s the problem. This doesn’t not mean the police have no role to play, that the police are perfect and that we should never rely…

This is an opportunity to comment upon a draft strategy for policing and mental health, which is being put together by Chief Constable Mark Collins, the National Police Chiefs Council lead on mental health. Please feel free to distribute this…

I said about eighteen months ago, that once the Mental Health Act was amended to unambiguously allow the use of s136 of the Act in any place that was not someone’s home, we’d see police officers considering its application in…

I woke up this morning to a tag on Twitter from Australia drawing my attention to questions being asked following an encounter between Victoria Police in Melbourne and a mentally vulnerable man referred to as ‘John’. Police officers had been…

You’ll remember I’ve been banging on for a number of years now about the problem of people being in police custody for many hours or even for many days, waiting for Mental Health Act assessment, or more usually waiting for…

Norman Lamb MP wrote to his local police force recently, asking about those kinds of cases I’ve been banging on for years now: people being held in custody for hours and hours, if not days and days, following their arrest…

I heard the Health Secretary Jeremy HUNT deliver a speech at today’s Crisis Care Concordat Summit in London, the first major speech he’s delivered on mental health, we were told. Almost the first thing he did was praise the police…

We hear this word ‘Beds’ a lot when we hear discussion of mental health services and it can get very confusing because the word is used to mean different things, not all of them literal. It happened earlier today during…