My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, for explaining the rationale for this amendment. I feel sure he would agree with me that we are already seeing how much of a difference the concordat is making in developing and improving the response to people who experience a mental health crisis. This includes improving the accessibility of local preventive mental health services and reducing the number of times a police cell is used as a place of safety for a person detained under the Mental Health Act. As the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, stated, we shall have an opportunity to debate that issue further when we reach Chapter 4 of Part 4 of the Bill.
These are important developments that should be supported and encouraged, and I recognise the noble Lord’s intentions in proposing such a requirement. However, we must also recognise that the strength of the concordat is the flexibility that comes from it being—here is the nub—a local voluntary agreement. This means that all local partners who can make a difference can be involved, which will vary from area to area, and enables every local concordat partnership to agree actions that make sense in its area.
I will give some examples of how it is working. In Greater Manchester, local concordat partners have worked with the charity Self Help to create three places of calm where people with mental health concerns can go at unsociable hours and receive the support that will hopefully avert a crisis. In Sussex, which sees the emergency services respond to a particularly high volume of crisis incidents, the partners are working
directly together in street triage schemes in most of the main towns. The triage approach has saved lives, notably at Beachy Head, where, as we know, a lot of suicides have been recorded. In the West Midlands, the police, ambulance and mental health trust share details of people who frequently call them in distress and jointly review the care being offered to them. In many cases these people are now following a constructive care plan instead of phoning in at least four times a day.
As the concordat is a voluntary agreement and does not, as such, impose specific duties on its signatories, we believe that this amendment is misconceived in suggesting otherwise. I would also question the appropriateness of singling out mental health crisis care in the Bill to the exclusion of other areas where collaboration agreements could lead to improved efficiency and effectiveness in the delivery of front-line services.
Our local emergency services are acutely aware of the need to appropriately and compassionately respond to those in mental health crisis. I have already pointed to a number of excellent examples of collaboration between emergency services. The provisions in the Bill will encourage and support further such collaboration, and although the noble Lord is right to flag this as an important area where local agencies need to work better together, I am not persuaded that adding this amendment to the Bill helps to secure such an outcome.