 Felly, wrth gyrfa'r cymaint, rwy'n gwybod i fod yn dynnu yr edrych y Gwyrdgwladau ym 2017. Rwy'n gwybod i'r cyfrifio, mae gyrfa'r ddweud i gael John Finlay i'r Margaret Mitchell. Rwy'n gyrfa'r gydag ymlaen, mae'n gael i'r cyfrifio'r gwaith i gynnwys ymlaen i gael i'r cyfrifio 5 i 6 yn gwahydol. Yr cyfrifio 5, mae'n cyfrifio'r paper o'r llimdau erbydd y Limerwyr, child who has abused Scotland Bill and item 6 is in consideration of the committee's work programme. Are we agreed? Agreed. Can I also ask members if they are content to consider the draft report on the legislative consent memorandum on the criminal finances bill in private at next week's meeting? Are we agreed? Agreed. Thank you for that. Item 2 on the agenda is a round table evidence session on demand-led policing, the service of first and last resort. That is an informal session, and it is primarily aimed at giving us the information that we need as part of our report. I think that probably the best way to start is to do a wee round table so that everyone can introduce themselves and we know who everybody is. If I can start with myself, I am Rhona Mackay, MSP for Strathkelvin and Bair Sten, and I am convening today's meeting. Sorry, there are other people in between, but of course I did not need to introduce themselves. I am Amy Dalrympole, I am head of policy at Alzheimer's Scotland. Fulton MacGregor, MSP Co-Bridge and Chrysyn Hi, I am David Little, chief executive of the Scottish Drugs Forum. Good morning everybody, Ben Macpherson, constituency MSP for Edinburgh Northern and Leith. Good morning Bob Leslie, I am representing social work Scotland and I chair social work Scotland mental health subgroup. I am Liam McArthur, I am the MSP for Orkney. I am Calum Steele, I am the general secretary of the Scotland Association. Douglas Ross, MSP Highlands and Islands. Oliver Mundell, MSP Dymfresher. Good morning, I am Malcolm Graham, assistant chief constable with Police Scotland. I am Mary Evans, MSP for Angus North and Mearns. Good morning, Peter Benney, I am the chair of the British Medical Association in Scotland. Stuart Simpson, member of the Scottish Parliament, Bamshire and Bachon Coast. Good morning, I am Cameron Black, from Bethany Chrysyn Trust, and I work with Ross Leequers and the Cure Van and the Cure Shelter. Good morning, I am Mary Fee, MSP for West Scotland. Thank you, thank you everyone. Although it is informal, it would be helpful if you address, if you want to speak, if you can catch my eye or the clerks eye just so that it runs a bit more smoothly. I would like to start off, if I may, by asking presumably Mr Graham just if you could maybe outline the extent and the nature of police work which is not primarily concerned with the prevention of detective or crime work. If you could just give us an overview of that and what we can go into further as we go along. Okay, thanks very much. Probably for the first time in the course of the last year we've undertaken some dedicated work as an organisation to better understand the nature of the demand that falls on policing. It's perhaps a little bit surprising that that hadn't been done previously, either before Police Scotland existed or certainly in the early years. What we found when we did that work over the course of last summer and it's continuing to try to improve that picture probably didn't surprise the vast majority of front-line police officers and staff who have seen a picture of changing demand over a number of years I think that that changing demand has resulted in some some sort of key findings in that demand analysis and I want to put a little bit of context around about that so that it's not open to misinterpretation. One of the things that we found in terms of the calls for service that are made to us was that about only one in five of the incidents that we attend results in a crime being recorded. That doesn't mean that four out of five were necessarily not crime-related incidents at the point that they came in but that when officers attended a crime wasn't recorded. Now to put a little bit of substance around about that, the most time-consuming incident that we deal with is still domestic abuse so that's a combination not of just how many incidents there are but the length of time that those frequent incidents take as well. The other thing I would say about the four out of five incidents that we attended, if we take last year, it's a real broad spectrum of needs that people are calling us for. Some of those would be instances where people perhaps thought a crime had been committed but on attendance and inquiry that wasn't the case. Many of those calls will be in relation to a concern for a person. This might be the substance of some of the discussion today, a concern for somebody who finds themselves in distress. It may be that the cause of that distress isn't necessarily clear at the point that somebody is phoning the police and it may be that it's an absolutely legitimate use of police time that the first people to be called are the police because in many of those instances it's something that the police are always going to be responsible for responding to. So if it's somebody that's gone missing or in circumstances where people are very concerned about them, if it's a concern because somebody is causing alarm in a public place or in a private place because of some sort of mental distress, whether that's temporary through some sort of emotional distress or whether it's through some sort of recognition of a mental health issue, it's absolutely right if somebody poses a risk to the public that the police should be called. The breadth of concerns that people phone us about is enormous, about children, young people, about adults in different circumstances and points in their life and about an increasingly elderly population. Within that 80 per cent of demand that doesn't result in a crime being recorded, there are a whole series of incidents, some of which take a large amount of time for an officer to deal with and some of which may be dealt with in a very straightforward way working with other people. So I could speak longer about the detail of it. I think that the key point I want to get across is that it's not necessarily representative of how we spend our time in terms of the one in five because actually when we're dealing with crimes, particularly serious crimes, the most serious crimes take the longest time to deal with and even less serious crimes still commit a lot of officer time both in terms of response and subsequently and that's always going to be a primary and important role of the place. Further question on that point, do you feel that you have the necessary resources and the skills? Do you think that your officers have the skills to deal with some of these issues with vulnerable people and some of the things that you've referred to? I think that the skills that a police officer requires are constantly changing. I would say that policing has always been a profession requiring a large number of different competences. In my view, it's always been a caring and compassionate profession and it hasn't just been about dealing with crime and criminals. I said that whenever you deal with a crime or a criminal, you're always dealing with a victim and that's primary in our response. I think that what we have probably become more aware of in recent years and in a more sophisticated way with some of the training that we're doing now is the ability to recognise what it is that's driving anybody's behaviour if it is a mental health concern. We've done a lot of training across all of our officers and staff. In fact, over the course of the next few months, we're going to complete training over 17,000 police officers, which is all of our front-line officers, in mental health awareness. We've done a lot of other training around about recognising the impact of trauma. We've done a lot of partnership working in terms of getting the right response for people when these things are identified. I think that the skills and the capabilities of officers are always increasing, but it may well be the case that when the police are called, the police aren't necessarily always the best organisation to meet that person's needs at that time. Can I just open it up? Does anyone else want to come in on some of the points that Mr Graham has been using? Callum Steele. I think that I would like to supplement, rather than contradict to some extent what Malcolm Graham has said, principally to highlight that police demand is not just about calls for service. There are many things that the police deal with that don't originate from a call from a member of the public. If we look, for example, at some of the complex criminal enquiries that we have, where victims may be identified through the police as a consequence of stumbling across a piece of evidence in another inquiry, and it can take many, many months, in fact, on occasions, years to go through the work to help to identify further victims, and particularly in child sexual exploitation would be an area where that would be relevant. Police also deal with incidents and events such as the Commonwealth Games, demonstrations, celebrations such as the Jubilee. We have festivals, we deal with political unrest, weather-related emergencies, we provide policing for our road networks. Maybe soon even our rail network highways and byways, we deal with the security of our infrastructure, the policing and delivery of democracy through the management of elections, royalty and VIP protection and, of course, things like the on-going response to the terrorist threat. It is not just a case of policing in isolation as delivered in response to service calls from the public, although that is clearly a crucial part of it. There are many more inherent complexities associated with policing than just those calls that come to the police service itself. Thank you. Stuart Stevenson, followed by Douglas Ross. Thank you very much, convener. This can be dealt with fairly briefly, but I just want to explore what sense we have as to when the police started to take on responsibilities beyond just purely pursuing criminals. I do that in the context. I have in front of me the front page of the Police Gazette from 1831. For example, it has a story about a stray horse, so it is not necessarily criminality, so it is perfectly clear even then, nearly 200 years ago. When I was a child in the 1940s and 1950s, I am substantially the oldest person in the room. The old saying was, if you want to know the time, ask a policeman. It was clear that 60 years ago, the police were a source of information, a source of assistance in a very broad and general sense. I wonder if you have a sense of how that has happened and how it has changed over a long time. Although we are engaging with it for the first time, now, as an issue that has to be resourced and so on and so forth, it does not strike me that it is a particularly new issue in the generality, if not necessarily in the detail. In particular, Mr Gremm could say something on that. I would agree entirely with those comments. Police have a long and proud history of evolution and change since the early 1800s in Scotland setting some of the standards for policing across the world. It has always been the case, as I said earlier, that people have expected the various organisations through which policing has been delivered, of which Police Scotland is just the latest of many, to be caring and compassionate about the service that we provide. There is a painting that hangs in the Scottish Police College, the headquarters of Police Scotland, which I think represents very clearly the modern mission for policing, but it was actually painted in the 19th century. It is of a constable holding a small child in a snowstorm close up on his shoulder and the child has no shoes on and a torn looking dress, possibly destitute. For me, it sums up very nicely the mission of policing in the days that that painting was painted. If we move forward to the purpose and the mission of policing in legislation up until Police Scotland was created, which was in an active parliament from 1967, the key purpose of policing was to guard, watch and patrol so as to prevent crime. That withstood the test of many decades. However, when Police Scotland was created, the mission for policing was substantially enhanced, I would argue, in the 2012 act that came to create police and fire reform. The purpose of policing is to improve the safety and wellbeing of people, places and communities of Scotland. To me, it could not get a broader mission in terms of working in partnership with other services to try to improve wellbeing and safety, which can be defined in many different ways. It is now through this work and through having discussions like that that we are starting to fulfil the promise that comes with that purpose that was laid out for us. Would it be fair to say in 2012 that statement in the legislation was more reflective of the police's mission prior to that than a resetting of the mission? I think that it was a mixture of both. I would agree with that. I think that those are things that the police has always been involved in, not just through calls for service, but through everything that we do. Society in general, and policing as a part of that, has recognised what it is that drives people's behaviour in terms of mental health, for instance. We have a better understanding of how society has changed, whether it is through the changes in demographics, the changes in the population or the changes in the way that people live their lives, increasingly through online means, as I see people resorting to their phones. We have a network of communities that are not necessarily defined just by where we live but are defined by the people that we connect with. That is a challenge for many organisations, particularly policing, in terms of both wellbeing and safety. Douglas Ross, followed by Mary Fee. I will ask a question to Mr Graham, and perhaps a question to all of our prospective guests from their particular organisations. First of all, why did the discussion and investigation into demand-led policing not take place at the start of Police Scotland? You said that that would make sense to have done it then. Why didn't it at that time? What was the trigger for doing it recently? If we could briefly hear from all the other groups in here today, when I read through the evidence, everyone accepts that there is a problem. Everyone accepts that there could be better collaborative working. The cabinet secretary said that to the sub-committee that he was discussing working together with the third sector mental health community services, local authorities and the health service in general. However, no-one has suggested that here is how we could do it. We all say that we have to do it. We all say that this is the problem and that this is where we want to get to. However, there is a big gap to bridge as to how we overcome those problems. I wonder from each of the sectors, do you have a suggestion if you had a magic wand on how you would achieve the better balance between the current demands on the police and how those other organisations can help to relieve some of the pressure? In relation to the timing of the work, I think that it would have been good, it would have been nice if we had the capacity to do everything at once. However, as you will be acutely aware, there was not a huge degree of notice in terms of creating the national organisation. We had to prioritise very carefully what we did and the focus in the early weeks and months in standing up Police Scotland was to ensure operational competence, to maintain critical services, to respond to emergencies and public need. Going through that transition period of bringing the service together, bringing the legacy organisations into one, took a period of time. As we paused to look at what were the opportunities for the future, it became clear that we needed to better understand the evidence base on which we should shape the transformation that we can now realise from the journey that we are on. It is a description of a journey rather than an event, being able to do everything at once simultaneously. In relation to the second part of the question about the general agreement that we face, those challenges and that a greater degree of collaboration would be more successful in addressing some of them, I agree with that. I think that there are extremely good examples, many of which I could describe, where we are working in many different ways in local areas, specific to local needs, building services that meet the demands and the expectation of the people in those communities, whether it is roundabout. Elderly people who are suffering from dementia and specific pilots that we are running, where we are gathering information from families and those people that will assist if there is a likelihood of people going missing repeatedly, to the mental health triage services that we have put in place jointly with health boards. We have had some great successes in terms of better meeting needs and directing people more appropriately to services across a large number of different local authority areas by working in partnership. I think that there is an opportunity as a national organisation for policing to take a leadership role in substantially moving on some of those issues at a national level where that is appropriate. I finish by saying that a lot of the successes that we are seeing rightly are based on local need and local partnership working that best fits the circumstances in each local area. Would you accept, however, despite some of those very good examples, that, when it comes to a situation where someone witnesses something in their local area, that they still believe is an emergency, despite what you are doing locally with dementia patients and a number of other organisations? If someone still thinks that it is an emergency, they are still going to call 999 and ask for the police. How do you get that message across that yes, it is good work but perhaps the police should not be the first protocol? I am not necessarily that I agree with the notion that we should be trying to dissuade people from phoning Tribal 9 if they think that it is an emergency. If people think that an emergency response is required, I would encourage them to phone Tribal 9 and allow the professionals to make an assessment about what the best response is. If it means that the police need to attend to assess what that is, that can not necessarily be a straightforward task to work through what has actually happened, what is underlying, what has happened, then that is entirely appropriate. It may be that, during the course of the exploration of events, there are decisions that can be taken that are going to lead to better outcomes for the individuals than there being a criminal justice response. It is identified that there has not been a crime committed, but it does not mean that somebody should not have phoned the police. What it means is that the police can be an effective route to accessing other services on occasions that are going to better support people to try and prevent that from happening in the future. Amy, sorry that you are not the first person to have done that. It is okay—three letters. I do not hear Malcolm Grant describing it as a problem just in response to Douglas Ross's question. I do not think that, in our written evidence, we have described it as a problem either. It is an issue that we need to decide as a society jointly how we are going to work together to address it. The police are a really important part of that solution. I think that they accept their role there. I do not think that they are saying that they should not have a role. We are delighted that we are working with the police around the Herbert protocol, which is what you are describing around making sure that the police have the information about people who may well go missing. We have been working at a national level on something that is not ready yet about a system whereby we might have a more community-based response using social media that can support the police and other agencies in helping out when there is an issue with people with dementia. What you can do to reduce demand is to make sure that people with dementia are supported appropriately and therefore do not feel the need to leave where they are living in a way that is not known about by the people who are supporting them, whether they are living at home or whether they are living in residential care or whether they are in a healthcare facility. If they are supported appropriately wherever they are and their stress and distress is minimised and the right environment is put in place, they are enabled to walk if that is how they wish to do that. None of us would want to be locked up in a nicer facility if we wanted to get outside. People with dementia who want to go outside will try to do that, and if they are prevented from doing so, that might create an incident. However, if people are supported appropriately and that situation is in place and the right environment is in place, the right activities are in place and the right supports are in place for them to live their lives in the way that they want to, we may end up reducing these incidents. The discussion that I am hearing today about people with dementia is calling the police inappropriate. I also hear this discussion quite a lot around calling paramedics and calling an ambulance and people being admitted to hospital. Preventing these inappropriate hospital admissions is very similar to preventing these incidents where people are missing and the police need to be involved as well. However, we are working really well with the police. Many of Malcolm Graham's colleagues in Police Scotland are, as many of the members of the committee are now, looking around the table, dementia friends and taking part in the dementia friends Scotland role. That is the beginning of it, the beginning of dementia awareness, but we are looking forward to working further with the police in terms of being able to support them, work with them and bring together the other agencies. Social work is really important and residential care facilities to make sure that people are properly supported. People with dementia deserve the same protection as everybody else. That is the fundamental of it. We have to make sure that we, as a society, are working together to make sure that we get it. Mr Benny, can I ask you to come in on the second point of Mr Ross's question about integration? We will do. First, I want to put it in personal context. For me, I chair the BMA in Scotland, but I also work clinically as a consultant psychiatrist in Paisley. This is day-to-day bread-and-butter for me. I was talking with police just yesterday when they brought someone across from A&E in circumstances that were not quite as good as they would normally be. We had a strong response from our council members when we put the question to them from across many different specialties. The headline before we go any further is to say that the general experience of doctors in those situations is that the police are doing a very good job in difficult circumstances. I echo the sentiments that have been spoken about already that what we are talking about here is a key police role. There is no other agency that is able to deal with someone who is in distress in public than the police, and they have legal powers to do so if that appears to be a mental illness. In terms of how we should be taking things forward, I think that it is simplistic, but you can divide those incidents into two. Incidents that occur with people who are already known to have vulnerability often as a result of a mental health problem, whether that is dementia or a diagnosed mental illness, and incidents that arise with someone who is not known to the services at all. Where someone is known to services, it is essential that there is pre-planning because we know that people with mental health difficulties are going to present in emergency situations. We should be able to predict what those emergencies will be and, at least to some extent, have a care plan that outlines the way in which we would want to deal with that. I have to say that, from my experience, you simply cannot write a care plan that covers every possible eventuality, and if you try to, it will fail. However, you can and should think about what is likely to happen with a person and work out who is available to respond to that both during normal working hours and out of hours. The second group that presents with no history at all, you obviously cannot predict what is going to happen at an individual level, but we know that people will present in a crisis, whether that is as a result of intoxication or acute mental illness. You know that that is going to happen, and what is crucial there is that there are very good links between the police who will be the first point of contact in many circumstances. They are not quite right, too, but there need to be good links with well-resourced local facilities, including out-of-hours general practice, psychiatric services, social work services and emergency departments. I heard the magic wand language, and the other language that is often used around this is money trees. The bottom line is that we are all of us, every agency around this table, working in a very tight financial situation. That means that we have a responsibility to do the best that we can with the available resources, but it also means that we have a responsibility to say that it requires more resourcing to do that job well. I think that the question as to how we are the what is one that is much more inherently complex and complicated than the one-word question in its own right might suggest. Clearly, how you deal with the demand for the purposes of this session on the police service does not just sit with all of the agencies around this table. Demand comes in a whole variety of different areas. I do not think that I have heard any dissent so far, but the solution to that is not going to come from a single point. It has got to be a community-based assessment, a holistic view as to how we deal with the individuals that might need help and assistance in whichever guys that might manifest itself, whether it is medical, whether it is care, whether it is policing or whatever it is. I think that there are a couple of fundamental things that have to be recognised in all of this. While we are dealing with particularly challenging financial environments, I think that it would be remiss of me to not say that austerity is a choice. It is not a necessity. The imposed austerity that is being visited upon all of the services and third sector organisations in this room and others makes it very difficult for us all to deliver services and protect the vulnerable people in our community. When we look at the cuts that are being visited upon all agencies in the public sector and when we look at the knock-on effect that that has for third sector organisations, we then cannot sit in a very middle-class way and have cups of tea and chat about how we might make things better. We have to make sure that the resources are available to make real differences and changes to people's lives. Whilst we all talk about partnerships and collaborations, we also have to ensure that we have the capability and the capacity to make sure that those are more than 9 to 5 partnerships or, if I am being kind, more than 8 to 8 partnerships. When crisis occurs, by the very nature of the word, it tends to be unpredictable. Care plans or whatever that might be aside, the likelihood of those that were involved in the drawing up of the care plan is being responsible for their execution at the point that someone comes to police attention is pretty slim indeed. Ultimately, we are going to need a phenomenal amount of resource to make sure that all of the services have the capability and capacity to do all that we need. It was really to follow on from Douglas Ross's question. I want to thank Amy for clarifying some of the issues there. From reading some of the evidence, I think that it was some of the comments initially from Superintendent Croson. It wasn't entirely clear what was being looked for and whether it was a case of right or we're trying to move the police away from being the first responders and we need to see if there's another way of dealing with people who have mental health issues. In which case, I've had exactly the same questions as Douglas Ross. Just that, if it is a case of that, how do people become aware? Obviously, it's not always apparent what mental health issues somebody might be going through if they're presented with a situation where they are in crisis. It's been interesting to hear all of your takes on that and some of the suggestions that you've had around that too. I know that Douglas Ross talked about it if he had a magic wand, but it was just really to tease that out a bit more to see what extent—I believe that Malcolm Ewing talked about some pilot schemes that we're on going just now—any of the agencies here today are involved with projects that are looking at how we can better operate with things. If you had any suggestions for the committee on how we can progress this work, that's a wider question that I have for the committee members here, too. How will we be taking this forward? Is it a case of us working with the health committee as well to try to progress those issues? I think that it's really important that the issues that we discuss here today aren't just left to the meeting today, but that we do progress with them and move them on. That's a good point, and I think that that will definitely be in mind after today's discussion. Further supplementary from Stewart Stevenson. I just wanted to follow up on Callum Steele's quite proper eight to eight reference. I just wondered if there was academic or other research that actually gives us a profile of across the schedule, where the demand and the different demand. I think that we all—and I'll put it in quotes—know, for example, that alcohol-related demands increase at the weekends, although I haven't seen that kind of research that tells me that. Of course, we also know that there are other people who are the first point of contact besides the police. The one that sprang to my mind that isn't in the room, for example, would be the Samaritans, where it might be that the police or others will get psychiatric support, might get involved. I just wondered if there'd been any research that might help us to plan better all of us, not just the police but all who might end up supporting. I do remember when I was at university research done on, and this was before induced births, when a children born, because the myth was that they were always born overnight, and it turned out that academic research confirmed that the peak birth time was 3am in the morning. I just wondered in this context if there is actually some good underpinning research that might help us all to do better planning. I don't know who might have the answer, if anybody. Malcolm Greer. This is part of the work that we're going to develop over time about better understanding demands on policing and where they come from. As Callum quite rightly said, that isn't just about calls for service, but it is a large portion of our work. You're right that a lot of calls for service that are unplanned come to policing out of ours and over the weekend. There's two reasons for that. One is that the nature of some of that demand happens during those times disproportionately. For instance, nearly 50 per cent of the missing people that we are called to look for are reported on a Saturday or Sunday. It was one of the figures that arose out of that, which was very interesting. The other reason that could underlie some of that data that we don't have any certainty about is that perhaps people phone the police out with ours or at the weekends when they might otherwise have access to other services. We're starting to look at that in a little bit more detail to see why it might be that calls, for instance, about people who are mentally distressed in a public place might increase out with ours and at the weekends and how that relates to the availability of services, but we don't have any sound data around that. Just one anecdote that I could finish on, and I don't have evidence around this, but it's a consistent theme when I'm speaking to officers and staff who deal with these calls specific to children and young people. An anecdote that was relayed to me over the course of the last couple of weeks in relation to a call where officers went to deal with what was reported as being a domestic abuse incident. It turned out that it wasn't, but that it was some people who had children, a couple who had a history of mental health issues that were well understood, and there had been some planning for it. It was relatively straightforward at that time to access support for the adults, but the children who were also identified as potentially needing some mental health assessment and care couldn't access that support at that time and indeed went into a different system. That felt to the officers that were dealing with it, as if that wasn't necessarily the best service for that family at that time. It is an anecdote, but it is a powerful anecdote that I would hear repeated to me on many occasions, which I think would be a useful area in exploring the availability of services specific to children and young people. A final supplementary on this from Oliver, before we move on. I was really following on from Stewart Stevenson's supplementary, because I wondered going back to the four out of five figures, because I know that there isn't a lot of data there, is whether there was any breakdown on those incidents in terms of how often the police are called out to non-crime incidents outside of office hours and whether that would help the committee at all in understanding that. Again, whether there was any regional or geographical variance within them, because one of the things that concerns me is that there is lots of good partnership working on with the police, but I look at my constituency with a large rural area where services are not right next door to each other or the police really are the only organisation that has that geographical spread in terms of where it is based. If there is any further way of breaking down those numbers to give us a bit more of an insight. There is a breakdown in terms of all the calls for service, the way that we did demand analysis work. We broke it down using four criteria, which broadly is analogous with Callum Steel's earlier point. We looked at public and incident demand, which is really people contacting the police or in many occasions another organisation contacting the police on behalf of somebody, whether they are a statutory service or a third sector organisation. Protective demand, which is more our proactive capability. Preventative demand, where again we will be working with others to prevent things from happening before there is a call. The preplanned activity, which covers all the events and various calls for police to be present for a preplanned purpose. There is a breakdown at a national level in relation to the calls for service that come in through the call centre route. We are still working on that in terms of trying to break it down into local areas. There is a breakdown round about what those different call types are, but some of them are quite large baskets, things like call for assistance, which covers all sorts of different things that people would call us for, which makes up quite a large proportion of those. Concern for an individual, which covers all sorts of different concerns that people would have, some of which would be very serious. I am concerned that somebody has died and they are in their house. I have been watching an elderly person who is my neighbour, and I am a bit worried that they are not getting on so well. I have just seen them going into their house. All the other crime types that would be within that as well, which are more clearly categorised, is work in progress. Mr Gray, I wonder if I could start with you on the aspect of planning. We know that the policing 2026 strategy is being developed. If you could give us any update on when that is liable to be completed and how you will take forward the specific piece of work in relation to the 2026 strategy to ensure that you have the capacity to properly care for the people that you come into contact with? The development of a 10-year strategy for policing has been in progress. The work to understand where we are at now in terms of demands was what started that work off during the course of last summer and autumn. Over the course of the late autumn and through the Christmas and New Year period, we have been developing what we would like to present as a public consultation, as a start to a conversation about what the long-term future of policing looks like. Although the police have a view and we have a better understanding of what the demands on the service currently are, we strongly feel that the shape of the services that people receive needs to be based on being able to listen to what people say. That public consultation is still planned for later in this financial year. We would like to use that to develop the next three-year policing plan, and that needs to coincide with the investment that we will need to make that happen. Therefore, we are timing the development of the public consultation with our understanding of the budget planning process for next year. You have a more specific date. When you say it later in the year, do you mean in the spring the financial year? Do you mean the financial year, so it will be before the end of March? Yes. That is fine. That is very helpful. The other question that I wonder if you could perhaps come back to is how you will ensure that you have the capacity to deal with the incidents that we are talking about today. There is no one-size-fits-all, so while you can plan a strategy, how will you ensure that you always have the capacity to deal with vulnerable people within that, and who will you work with? That is a key plank of the strategy, working in collaboration, in partnership, focusing on the different communities that we serve. That will form the basis of the public consultation and the conversation longer-term that we would like to have with people. I go back first of all to a point that Callum Steele made about austerity, which I do not necessarily want to get into, about what I would say is that we would be needing to do this anyway. Whether we were feeling more or less financially constrained, it would be the right thing to do to be working in partnership to provide better services with people. We will always need to make choices about how we prioritise the limited resource that we have. Our view has long been that the best way of providing services for people is to work in partnership, collaborating to work around the outcomes that we are seeking to improve in people's lives, and to make sure that they are shared particularly as people feel financially constrained. How will the police make sure that we are making the best use of the resource that we have is the question that I would seek to answer. One way that we are approaching that is a piece of work to redefine the way in which we prioritise our response based on the threat and the risk and the harm that we think will be caused to people. If I go back a number of years, it might be that we had a less sophisticated approach that we would have responded to what we thought a person's needs might be based on the way in which the call came to us. If somebody reported a crime, if it was a minor theft, for instance, we might respond to that based on, as our blanket approach of it being a minor theft, the approach that we are seeking to develop through training of staff at the point that calls come in and through a different way of triaging the priority of that response is based on the individual threat and risk and harm that comes to that individual. An example might be that if I was to be subject of a minor theft when I go back to my car after this session and I report it to the police because I am looking to make an insurance claim, it might not have a particularly significant impact on my life. I am able to deal with that and I am able to navigate my way through the police and the insurance company. If, however, I am an 80-year-old man who is suffering from dementia and I do not have terribly many people around about me to support me and I am subject of the same theft or a minor theft in different circumstances, the response that the police need to put in might need to be very different, it might need to be faster, it might need to be in with people attending in person, it might result in a range of different links into services and outcomes for that individual. That is an example of the approach that we are seeking to develop over the course of this year and next that hopefully answers the question about prioritisation of resources. I wonder if I could just ask you a further question. You mentioned in an earlier answer about the training that you were going to give to 17,000 officers. Can you explain a bit more about who is doing that training? Is it in-house training? Are you working in collaboration with outside agencies and how will that be developed? It is a training programme that is based on our early experiences of the mental health community triage systems that we have set up in most areas of Scotland now. That has all been done in conjunction with local health boards and NHS areas and some other third sector organisations who have supported that. The training is being delivered in-house, but it is based on a team of people in Police Scotland who have led that work with NHS professionals. It is about raising awareness of what the issues are, the appropriate responses and making sure that people are aware of the various different choices that there are in terms of accessing services for people. My final question relates to homeless people. We have focused a bit this morning on people with dementia and mental health problems, but people who are homeless can be homeless for a number of reasons. They could have mental health problems, they could have drug and alcohol problems, and there could be other problems that they are homeless. I wonder whether Mr Black would be a good person to start with. How do you think that homeless people get? How good are they? Are there some changes that you would like to see? Good question. We work with the police a lot. We have a shelter here in Edinburgh and services across Scotland. The police will bring individuals to the shelter very often. At most nights, they will be in attendance for some reason, open 28 weeks this year. We are very happy to work with the police, and the police are very good at dealing with individuals for whatever reason that they might be homeless, be that mental health or relationship breakdown through drug and alcohol problems or rent arrears or other reasons relating to foreign nationals as well. We are a catch-all net in the shelter, so we look at anybody who would not have anywhere else to stay that night who would otherwise be sleeping on the street and come to us. We are often brought people by the police because they know that we are open. Sometimes there is a difficulty there, because sometimes we are brought the wrong types of individuals. Over recent years, last couple of years, we have been very full. There is a crisis in rough sleeping that we would see on the streets. Three seasons ago, for example, the police brought us 96 individuals of the 763 that stayed in the care shelter for the 24 weeks that was open then. The last couple of years we have not been able to take as many individuals, because the police are bringing them later on. When we are already full, we would be very happy to work with the police on that. The problem is not necessarily to do with policing in that instance, but there is a broad spectrum of things that are going on there, including the fact that there is not available housing for people who are even eligible to be housed by councils, under statutory duties, to provide accommodation and to further move on. Social housing is full, and we are seeing these things backlog up to us. Thank you. It really comes in on the back of what Cameron was saying. I suppose I understand potentially how police demand could be reduced. I think that this vulnerable population that Cameron is talking about is useful for us to define that in a bit more detail. Certainly, our focus is obviously people with drug problems, of which there are 61,500, but within that you have a huge crossover of people with drugs and alcohol problems, mental health issues, offending homelessness. This is a group that, by and large, are known to services, as Peter was saying in terms of this group, they are not hard to reach, but they are hard to engage with in various ways. I think that that as a group is a group that we need to, and certainly we have reflected on this a lot in terms of things like drug-related overdose deaths and other things, that this population is the most vulnerable. They drop in and out of services, in and out of prison. If they are on a prescribing programme, they tend to be on it for a short period of time and then drop out. All of these issues of inappropriate or care that does not stick by people over the long term are things that need to be addressed so that, if you like, the police are not picking up on these casualties, which is actually an issue for the services. Certainly that, in terms of going to Douglas Ross's question about specific solutions to that, I suppose, is that certainly one of the things that we have been looking at is in England that they have got one or two approaches called making every adult matter, which is actually looking at most vulnerable populations and having much more intensive long-term care for those individuals. They are not just left to drop in and out of services on a regular basis. Maybe add to that in terms of people with drug problems in particular, which I say form quite a significant part of this most vulnerable population, is that what we are seeing is an ageing population with increased vulnerability. For example, of that, 61,500, over half or over 35, and that will continue to increase in terms of some of the projections that we have looked at. This will become an increasing problem. It is not only all of those issues I have mentioned, but also a range of healthcare issues that they have got in terms of multiple morbidity that are not being met as well. The issues, and I think that it has been said by my colleague Amy from Alzheimer Scotland, is a lot of the issues that are to do with improving the range of other services alongside the police work. As Cameron says, it is the problem of being able to do that. I urge that that. For example, you have particular models there, such as housing first, to pick up on your point about homelessness, which is looked to provide housing to people ahead of resolving their drug or alcohol problems. Otherwise, it is a catch-22 that people cannot stabilise their drug and alcohol use because they are homeless, but they cannot get a house until they do that. That is useful. Following on from that, I think that this is a good time to bring in Bob Leslie. Given that we know that one in four people have mental health problems, can I just ask how you feel that people are being supported in the current system, and if you think that it is adequate? I think that I would echo my colleague's plea. As Dr Benny refers to, the money tree is not the magic solution. We know that we are working in constrained times and we would all love to have more resources, but we have to be realistic and work with what we have and try to tailor our services as best we can to address the needs. One of the things that I work in the same area as Dr Benny and Paisley. The vast majority of our demand coming through the social work services—this is where the demand through the police service comes in—is that we get the adult protection or adult welfare concern reports coming in every day. To date, in Renfrewshire, we have had over 2,000 since April concern reports coming into social work. That is a vast number that has to be screened, looked at and followed up. Some of them may be criminal matters that have been reported, sexual offences, domestic violence and there will be a parallel investigation going on. Others will be individuals who are in various crises, whether that is mental health, addiction or other issues. One of the strategies that locally our adult protection committee has been trying to adopt is that we have a community safety hub that meets daily, which is with all council departments led by our public protection team. Police Scotland are represented by Scottish Fire and Rescue and the local authority wardens service and the housing department. There are various concerns coming in through there and can get screened and individuals signposted and cases picked up and directed. We also have a repeat referral group within the social work team. That is picking up the multiple referrals that Dr Benny will see through our mental health system and the police will see coming through our call centres. We have a number of individuals in the area who, shall we say, have got the season ticket for contacting either Police Scotland, NHS 24, rolling up at A and E, phoning social work standby. Whatever agency it happens to be, it will be well known and pop up every so often with a crisis—in fact, very regularly sometimes, multiple times in a day—and the purpose of that group is to try to look at how we can tailor support. Often, as Mr Lidl has indicated, some of those individuals are incredibly difficult to engage with because of their personality or because of the state of their addiction and the point in their journey that they are on. That makes delivering services very difficult. The demand that has been evidenced around the table is just rising all the time and the resources on the ground to actually be able to deal with the demand just is not there. We have reconfigured our mental health hospitals. We have taken inpatient beds away, supposedly to put resources into the community, but the community resources do not match the demand, and that is the reality that we face. Stuart Stevenson is a tiny bit of clarity—maybe I just missed what was being said by Bob there—at the 2000 referrals. Was that the whole of Scotland or just your area? Just your area. Could I be clear what area that is? That is Renfrewshire Council. The timescale is that. Over what time is that 2000? First of April 2017 to present. 2018—16, sorry. I will just equally say MSPs at the surgery sample. We term frequent flyers, so it is everybody. Thank you. Can we have Liam McArthur, followed by Oliver Mundell? Just picking up on Mr Leslie's point about the presentation of individuals who, whether it is a drug addiction or an alcohol addiction, are very difficult to engage with to diagnose. We have heard anecdotal evidence of police officers presenting initially to deal with a call, finding an individual in distress, clearly under the influence of drugs or alcohol, or potentially both. Taking that individual to A&E, for example, nobody being able to deal with the individual until the effect of the drugs or alcohol is worn off sufficiently for a diagnosis to be made. To then be left with a choice of either taking them back to their home or putting in a cell. Very often, it is the latter, which I think that police officers have made abundantly clear. It does not appear to them to be an appropriate place to hold that individual, but in the absence of any other options, that is really the option that they opt for. I know that there is not a magic wand that can be waved on all of that, but in relation to that issue, we can look to press health boards, mental health teams or whatever, to try to ensure that we are not seeing those individuals with mental health issues but addiction issues, finding themselves and the cells in a way that only exacerbates the problem that was initially presenting itself. Dr Benny? I want me to have a go at that. Speaking in general terms, one of the issues that we have is that, going back 20 or 30 years ago, many of those individuals would be admitted to hospital for a short period of time. I worked at the Western Infirmary 30 years ago in the so-called short stay admission unit, and it was almost exclusively for exactly that situation. The reason for it is that it is effectively impossible to do a proper assessment of somebody's mental health when they are intoxicated. You can sometimes run into real difficulties of failing to diagnose, underlying either medical or psychiatric conditions because someone is intoxicated, and the classic scenario is a head injury, a subdural hematoma, which develops gradually and can mimic intoxication. Having somewhere safe to observe a person who is sobering up from drugs or alcohol is very useful, and we do not really have that resource any more. As you say, that situation is dealt with in different ways in different parts of the country but rarely dealt with all that well. There is also the far more recent phenomenon of the so-called novel psychoactive substances, which is sometimes known as legal highs. At its most simple, the real difficulty that we face with them is that we cannot be sure whether someone has taken such a thing. Testing their urine is not feasible, not possible, and you cannot actually detect whether someone has taken one of those substances or not. The period of time that it takes a person to recover from that initial period of delirium is often much, much longer than the few hours that you would usually see with alcohol or drugs, sometimes several weeks or even longer. Of course, those people end up in hospital, usually in general hospitals, and are very difficult to manage there, often requiring police assistance because they can be extremely violent. Is there—as you have described, there is a situation where in the past there would be bed space available set aside for those sorts of incidents, which simply has been removed from the system generally, but where the demand, if anything, appears to have increased or has just become more pronounced because there isn't that bed space available? I do not think that we can say with any safety that the demand has increased in terms of numbers, but the nature of that demand is changing as well, particularly with the different and more longer term presentation with the novel Psychiatry Substances. In part of the partnership work that Mr Graham was talking about earlier, has there been discussion in particular localities or nationwide that reviewing the disappearance of that bed space is something that needs to be looked at again? I would refer that one to two places to my right. I am happy to answer that first. I am not aware that there have been specific discussions about sort of police role in influencing bed spaces in the NHS and whether that is appropriate or not. There have been a number of instances in which local authorities have provided facilities for people to detoxify—I am not sure if that is the right phrase—so we are up. Indeed, there is a legislative enablement for local authorities to do that. There are few and far between. I agree with your general point that police cells are not necessarily the best or the right place for people to be in those circumstances, but they are a safe place as a last resort. That is why, on the occasions that you describe it, it is again an anecdote that I would hear frequently when the data would back it up that, often after the police attempting to find a variety of different ways of dealing with what might be the best care and support for an individual who has not committed a crime, was forced to bring them into custody for their own safety, which is not ideal for that individual, first and foremost, but is also resource intensive in the organisation because those people need to be monitored in police custody at times, the whole time that they are in custody. The wider point goes back to the question about where the committee could focus some attention on moving that on. I think that there are two points that I would want to make. The one is that what we must not do, whether it is a challenge or an opportunity in the estear times that we live, is a matter of perspective. I see it as an opportunity that what we must not do is shrink into the silos of the organisations that our services have generally been designed around. The best examples of where we design services that best meet people's needs are where people are able to step out of that, where leaders are able to look at the system and are able to look at it from the perspective of the needs of the individuals that are coming into it, identify where those needs are not being met and design new ways of delivering services. People who would normally be employed by health boards might be employed by the police service, working in a control room to make that early assessment, or there might be people who are employed by a health service and by the police service in a car together going and responding and then able to provide a service to people that they need at the time. What we cannot have is that the service that people get is dependent on who somebody chooses to phone because people might phone an ambulance, they might phone a doctor surgery, they might phone the police or they might phone another organisation during or out with ours and the service that they get should not necessarily be dependent on that choice. I think that the broadest issue for me at that system level is that we must not conceive of the systems as being in silos. It is not about the health system, it is not about the justice system and one of the areas that I would really like to see strengthen relationships and prioritisation of work is the interface between public health, which is the origin of most of the underlying factors that cause people to come into the justice system and the justice system and policing being at the heart and normally the gateway into that. A strengthening of the relationships and the joint working between public health and justice I think would start to see a shift towards trying to identify ways in which we can prevent that demand coming to the police door and do it in a way that is going to be consistent with actually the aspirations of public health across the country as well, which is about keeping people well as opposed to curing them from being ill, I guess. There is an analogy in the justice system that we could draw. Thank you, convener. I think that just in some part to build on the evidence just given by the BMA and that is about what we used to have compared to what we do have. I draw on my own experience as having a police in the Highlands and Islands and there was a fantastic facility located on the elbow, if you like, in between the hospital and the police headquarters in Rennes called Beechwood House. That was a third sector organisation that was run by the Church of Scotland and provided facilities to help people with drug and alcohol abuse for both short-stay and long-term assistance. It relied heavily on funding from a whole variety of different organisations, including the police, and us, luck, bad in this case, would have it. When all those agencies started to withdraw their funding, the facilities closed and put the responsibilities back, ultimately, largely on the police tender being the service that was caring for them. What that did was that, removed from people in crisis the opportunity to have access to people that A. understood their addiction, B. understood their psychological needs and C. understood the harm or risk of harm that was open to them whilst they were in that vulnerable position and moved them almost exclusively into the criminal justice system where, as a consequence of progressive change in policy, they would invariably end up not being prosecuted, but, ultimately, if a procurator fiscal gets 30 or 40 reports of a drunk and incapable person at some point in time, they will take action and then move the problem into prison. Any notion or suggestion that finance has got nothing to do with this is deeply, deeply unhelpful. Yes, of course, it is always going to be important that we collaborate and work and that we must not retreat into silos, but we cannot pretend that money is not an issue in all of this, because it absolutely is. It is the big giant elephant standing in the middle of this room just now that no one seems to be prepared to be having a real conversation about it. That is always going to be frustrating. It is particularly important to make that point in reference to the question, the very specific question that Mary Fee asked, and I think that it was a fair question. That was, how can the police always guarantee to have the capacity to deal with the people in crisis? We cannot, no service around the table can always guarantee to have the capacity. We get it wrong mercifully and frequently, but we do get it wrong and, on occasions, people fall through the gaps. What we have to get to, though, is we have to get to a stage where we do not have political hand-ringing when those mistakes occur. Us is often the case, and we have the benefit of hindsight saying, you should have done this, you should have done that, you should have done the next thing. We are at a genuine recognition of the phenomenal workloads that people on health, people on education, people on social work, people on prisons, people on criminal justice social work, and, indeed, police officers themselves are carrying. We are carrying the risks of many, many vulnerable people in our society on a day-to-day basis, and we are doing the very best that we can. Us was very helpfully pointed out by many people under very, very difficult circumstances. The lack of finance invariably leads to a pressure on the people and invariably impacts on the support services that we have in our own infrastructure. The police service, if we had nothing other to do than deal with the people and ignore our buildings, ignore our equipment, ignore our communications, we could probably get on with all that, but there is a reality about what we have to do to maintain and deliver our service in the background. The need to continue doing the things that hold your service up from a technological and facilities perspective invariably comes at the cost of those that end up delivering the service in the first place. When you have fewer people dealing with more crisis or more instances of crisis, that is going to lead to a breaking point, and it will lead to many vulnerable people being failed by the mythical system that people talk about that has been put in place to serve them. Supplementary from Stuart Stevenson, and then we will move on to Ben Macpherson and Fulton MacGregor. I just say that I have a couple of family members who are nurses at Craigden Inn, so I know a little bit about the area that Callum Steele has been referring to. I just wonder—and he may not be able to answer this, but my question implies an answer—whether beachwood was probably a more cost-effective way of dealing with a particular category of client than it is being dealt with by the police, which is a comparatively expensive intervention, and indeed that might be true elsewhere. In fact, the beachwoods of this world might be a way of not only delivering better outcomes but making better use of the money. Is that a fair comment or is that far too simple-minded to be sustainable? Sometimes simple things are the right things for that very purpose because they do not need much more analysis than the fact that everyone understands conceptually that they are the right thing to do. But beachwood house did more than take pressure off the police service. It took pressure, principally off the accident and emergency department, and largely short-stay admission units in Regmore hospital. I have to say also from Dr Gray's, because it extended often into Murrishart, which will be known, I suspect, by Mr Ross. Although beachwood was off its time, I believe that facilities similar to beachwood would have the capability to deal with individuals' health needs. While having the self-evident security and authority that is brought by police presence is very important, I think that it needs to go much more beyond that, and indeed highlighting—weren't we very clever? Scottish Police Federation in our own right suggested that we need to come up with bespoke arrangements of facilities to deal with people that may be disposed to violence as a consequence of either mental health or addiction or some other kind of vulnerability, which does not necessarily mean that they would be best dealt with by being preceded through the criminal justice system. Again, I think that the written BMA submission helped to identify that. The law has not changed in terms of criminal behaviour, policy decisions and the perspective of prosecutions. Whilst we still have crimes in the absolute sense of their definition, the police largely—not always but largely—try to avoid putting people through the criminal justice system, if we can at all avoid it, because we know that there is a very strong leaning now towards avoiding prosecution on any of putting people into courts. If we are able to come up with facilities across our great country that involved police, involved social workers, involved those with addiction specialisms, involved those with health specialisms, I believe that we could make some significant steps to at least dealing with one small part of the area of demand that comes upon our service. A new beachwood would be more effective and might, and I only say might be cheaper. Just touching on Beechwood and other services like, for example, the Glasgow Crisis Centre, I think that those short-term respite facilities are needed across the country for this vulnerable population that we have talked about. If I can just go back to Cullen Steal's point about austerity, and I think obviously we would echo that, particularly the funding cut that has taken place for alcohol and drug partnerships last year and likely to be sustained this year, that I think the challenge with that and other cuts is the always being on the back foot of what we want to achieve in terms of being proactive, and I think an example of that talking of the vulnerable population, particularly in Glasgow, is the outbreak of HIV among drug injectors, which you could trace back to the challenge of resources and services not engaging well with that population. Interestingly, that now is a driver for looking at safer injecting facilities and heroin assisted treatment. That is a response to a crisis, and we do not want to be in that position where we are on the back foot responding to crisis and creating new services, if you like, after the event. Going back to my original point about this vulnerable population, I think we do need to specifically look about how we provide long-term care, whether that is a care worker, but somebody who takes an interest in those individuals over the long-term, because that is the refrain continually from users that we speak to. Right the way through the system is that nobody takes an interest in them over the long-term. There is a short-term interest in their needs and then they drop out of the services and nobody follows them up, so that group could make a significant impact. It would save resources elsewhere in the system, not just police resources, but long-term costs to the health service and more widely. There have been a lot of supplementaries on that, so I will move on, but we can come back to the end to anything that still needs to be asked. Ben Macpherson, followed by Fulton. Thank you, convener. It relates to what Mr Liddell just said and what Mr Steele said about austerity. My question is focused on the vulnerable population that you described, but I would like to start off with an anecdotal example. Late last year, a constituent came to me at my surgery, having been reassessed for employment support and allowance and spoke about suicidal tendencies that they were having. I reported it to the police immediately and the officers locally dealt with the situation superbly and provided lots of support. I think that that is a good example of where police are responsive in areas that we have been discussing today around the vulnerable population. However, what it also makes me query—I would be really interested to hear a comment around the room, not just from Police Scotland—how much, if I accept that some of the statements may also be anecdotal around the table. However, I would be interested to hear comment and thought on what impact you believe UK Government welfare reform has had on creating extra pressure on the vulnerable population group. Who would like to comment on that? David Little? No, it absolutely has in terms of the population that we deal with, particularly in terms of people's ability to move towards more stable drug use and long-term recovery, particularly relation to sanctions and the problem that people have of even volunteering and just being the way that they are treated in terms of potentially being pushed towards employment, which, in many cases, those opportunities do not exist for people with a 20-year history of a drug problem. I think that, undoubtedly, sanctions have impacted adversely on the population that we deal with directly. Any other witnesses have a view? Yes, Dr Benny. It is very clear that austerity has had a double hit on the health services and the health of the population, in addition to the much tighter finances. Since 2010, you have also got the hit on individuals who are placed into poverty by the changes in the benefits entitlements. I certainly see, working as a psychiatrist, some of the really quite bizarre decisions about who is supposedly fit for work when, patently, they are not. It is a more general point than the one that Ben Macpherson asked about welfare reform, just about the degrees with everybody else. I was not going to really, but it is just that you see other services around social care, around social work, around health being stripped back and them not being able to work together to provide what people need. This is the bump in the blanket, if you like, of the carpet or whatever your mental images. That is where it is coming out, is that you end up with further demand on police. That is not necessarily saving anyone much money. A perception that it has impacted on demand. Is there any... Police Scotland can add to that as well, or I appreciate that it may not be the data? I do not... Neither through sort of anecdotes or data that we have, I would be able to say with any degree of certainty. What we do know is that the demands on policing are changing. We do not know to what extent and why. We do not really understand underlying reasons behind why some of those demands change. As I said right at the start, we do not have a great baseline of data going back over many years, perhaps because of the nature of how we have reorganised various functions. I am not perhaps best placed to answer that question. I think that a lot of the discussion that we have had over the past 10 or 15 minutes in the committee has focused very heavily on symptoms. I do not necessarily know exactly what they are symptoms of, but I would go back to the point that our proposal, our key proposition coming out of our longer-term strategic approach that we discussed earlier, will be that we make an emphatic shift in partnership with others into preventative services. That is ultimately the best way of reducing demand in a way that is genuinely removing that demand from services. I would go back to a point that I made earlier about children and young people. I know that they are not specifically represented by a group that works exclusively with children and young people around this table, but I think that it is a very important point in terms of demand, that there is a disproportionate amount of demand that comes to the police about children and young people who are in crisis, often because of their parents, many of the symptoms of which we have heard talked about, but the children can sometimes be lost in that. I gave one anecdote earlier, and I think that it is incumbent on us as leaders in those systems to make sure that that is highlighted and prioritised, not because, in any sense, children and young people are the future of the country or because they are going to build where we go tomorrow, but they are the here and now, they are the people who demand that attention, who are vulnerable by the end of their very age alone. If we are going to develop services in any area, that should be a priority and a focus for the future. In response to Ben Macpherson's question, I think that from what we would term a traditional crime police demand, I think that there is a very pronounced danger in assuming that those who are poor are more likely to commit crime, because I do not think that there is any evidence that would support that. In fact, I think that, quite the contrary, there is a very strong sense of self-worth, but there is, I believe, a particular vulnerability that is associated with those who are in poverty and extreme poverty, and that is the opportunity for them to be exploited and the opportunity for them to try and seek some kind of solace in activities that would not necessarily be legal. Their vulnerability to payday loans, their vulnerability to those that peddle drugs and alcohol, and the self-evident cycle of despair that that can create could result in demand coming through the police service in that way, rather than just as a consequence of the welfare reforms having a direct impact on the criminal behaviour of individuals. I was more alluding to the range of services around the room and the added pressure on that and was not making any directed statement around an increased capacity for crime amongst any section of society. I would be interested to hear what Cameron Black may have had to say. I think that we are seeing the effects of the welfare cuts and the austerity programme that has brought that about. We are seeing, certainly in social work services across Scotland, an increased demand, an increased presentation of people destitute, and we have seen the growth of food banks across the whole of the country and in our towns and cities. There is not a day that goes by in our office that a number of people present destitute looking for food bank referrals vouchers to go to the food bank, where, even in our office, we have an emergency stock of very basic essentials that does not mimic what food banks give, but we give people at least a starter and also give them vouchers, people with no utility credit for either gas or electric, because they have been sanctioned by the DWP or have not got their claim processed. It is in the system and we cannot get the log jam and an increase in referrals in work by our benefits advice team that helps people through that maze of what is now the welfare system and through the appeals process that can take quite a long time, as I am sure many of the elected members around the table will know. We are seeing the knock-on effects, not just through social work but through housing and the homeless services as well. We, as I said earlier, are cat-chall, so we see people coming to us for all sorts of reasons when they are down on their luck and have come to them themselves. Anecdotally, certainly, people were sick about sanctions on their benefits and welfare reforms being a direct result of why they ended up on the street. However, it is difficult to say that there is actually not an increase from every single area of reason, really, locally and nationally. Budgets have been tightened in all places, as Amy was saying. Someone used the phrase where they said that people are no longer falling through the gaps or being hammered through the gaps. We are seeing an increase as a result of that, but from lots of reasons as well. The police are catching that as well. Conscious of time, we have a couple of supplementaries that I propose to take after Fulton MacGregor. I would follow up from Ben MacPherson's point there and say that I had the pleasure—or it was not a pleasure—of viewing the film of my Daniel Blake recently. Ben, you were at that screening as well. I would encourage Emdy, who has not seen it, to view that and what was really striking about that particular film. There were three or four incidents where two low-abiding citizens, if you like, at the start of the film, were propelled into contact directly with the justice system, and that seemed to be, through the film itself, because of the impact of the benefit in welfare sanctions that they were facing. That was a supplementary convener. One of my main points was to bring Bob, Lesley and David Liddle on something that we have discussed already about the first point of contact. We heard what Malcolm Graham thought could be done, particularly around weekend contact. I think that, in my experience working in social work for 12 years, that a lot of times during the week days, the police aren't actually the first point of contact when a person is known, they've got maybe a social worker, they've got maybe a drug and alcohol worker, they've got various people involved, but then things can radically change at the weekend and it's not uncommon for social work staff or whatever to be coming in a Monday morning and things have maybe transpired over the weekend. I suppose what I'm asking is what do Bob and David think could be done, tying things up over the weekend, so that the police have got the support that they need when they're making an assessment of an individual who may be particularly vulnerable, because they could be involved in quite a serious incident. If the police are going to deal with that, they have to deal with that as they see fit at that time, but it might not be dealt with that on a Monday or Tuesday, if that makes sense. It's a very broad brush question, but just because the police had already given a sort of answer to that, I wanted to give you guys an opportunity a bit more. I think that that's a really important question in terms of the challenge for services obviously, is that they're mostly open. Certainly, drug and alcohol services are mostly open nine to five during the week, so I think a wider range of opening times and support workers. We've had some of that in terms of arrest referral programmes and other schemes, which actually have worked outside of that, but I think definitely that there's a need to explore that. The challenge obviously is how we're actually services contracting, how we're going to actually expand and actually deliver that, but I think it would make a huge difference. And certainly in terms of work we've done around the older population of people with drug problems, we did a recent survey of 129 individuals of which 79%, average age 41, 79% were living alone, isolated with significant mental health problems among a range of other problems. And what you see also with the drug-related deaths, that obviously in those periods, particularly on Christmas and New Year, you've got added problems where the services aren't around for individuals. So I think it's definitely an area that should be explored alongside, as I said, that wider issue of trying to... I mean, it's probably the same issue, I guess, in terms of making long-term regular contact with the most vulnerable populations. Anyone else like to come in on Fulton's point? Just to say, we have a similar experience actually with our dementia helpline. That's open 24x7, 366 this year, last year, days a year. And we find that it's at night and over the weekends, but particularly at night time, that we see an increase in calls because people just don't know who else to phone, otherwise they'll phone the social work department. This is often carers, a family carer, a spouse, sometimes a son or daughter. And at night time, it's just, well, who else am I going to phone about an incident like this? What would it be able to ask Bob Leslie? Can I just clarify for the purposes of asking Bob to speak as a social worker? I'm not criticising social work anyway. I'm exploring an issue that I think's always been around in people, for certainly in all my years working social work. It's always been an issue about the weekend and how maybe services can be tied up over the weekend, so I just wanted to clarify that point. It's a difficult one, as you rightly say, Fulton. Out of our social work services kick in normally at the end of the working day, back at five o'clock. Most local authorities have an arrangement where they've got an out-of-hours service and it varies across all the 32 different local authorities. In the west of Scotland, there will certainly be greater Glasgow area. Most of the local authorities around Glasgow buy into the Glasgow and partners out-of-hours social work service based in Glasgow, but another number of authorities around the central belt, the Lanarkshire, the Ayrshire, the Infeasyn Gallow and the Borders have their own arrangements. It is difficult to provide, and the BMA briefing paper does indicate that, helpfully, the out-of-hours responses are more limited, because the number of staff on is much lower. The staff don't know the local individuals in our area unless they are alerted to it. Part of that comes down to good, robust communication and interface with our IT systems. I get frustrated coming in and I'm sure Fulton has experienced this in his career. You come in on a Monday morning to a range of alerts from the out-of-hours service, and at the bottom it will say that they are unable to access the local authorities' record system. Therefore, the standby staff have been working blind that they have not been able to see the notes that have been put on as an alert to our out-of-hours colleagues. NHS 24 has a similar issue. The information that they have to look at, as I understand, is that GPs can put special notes on the health system that pop-up from the call handler, or the nurse dealing with the call, and refer to it only as good as that information is there. Therefore, although we might fire information in, if that system breaks down or the connection breaks down to standby, it might not be having that full impact of, you know, here's what to do if so and so phones you, because we were alert to the fact that there might be a crisis over the weekend. However, the ability of standby to respond and access to other services out-of-hours is limited, because a majority of services go into shutdown mode out-of-hours over holiday periods. That is a difficulty and that is a challenge for all services, whether it is social services, health services or even the voluntary sector. Everybody goes on to lower manning. The cost of running a 24-7 service is just unsustainable. Thank you. Yes. One more point. I have a question for Amal Cymgrain. Is that okay? Of course. Yes, thanks. It was actually talking about the missing person protocol, and I've seen that the sort of areas that the individuals feel like who the focus is on. I would completely agree with that, but I wanted to ask about people who don't fall into any of those three categories. I know that there's a sort of 72-hour way—that's maybe not the right phrase—but how are people who don't fall into those categories treated when they become missing persons? The purpose of the categorisation was recognising a huge proportion of the calls that we get for people who've gone missing fit into those three categories. We wanted to develop specific work that was going to try and address some of the reasons why those people go missing. One of the categories is looked after children. To follow on from the point that has just been made about out of our social work, whether children are looked after in residential or whether they're looked after in some other way, there's a whole variety of reasons why looked after children repeatedly go missing. The police are not necessarily at the heart of reducing the reasons why that would be, but we're normally on the receiving end of the call when that person goes missing. It's often hugely time-consuming and intensive to ensure that that young person is safe. It wasn't really intended to try and triage the response in each individual instance. It was more about making sure that we were putting in place the best response, recognising that there are broadly different needs. For people who don't fit into those categories, they don't get any lesser response. It's not triaged at a level below those categories. It just means that there isn't something bespoke that we've developed that's recognised the specific needs of, for instance, a child or a young person or perhaps an older person suffering from dementia. Does that answer the question? It does, thank you very much. Recently, there was quite a high profile case in my constituency for missing person. Unfortunately, the family had a tragic end when the young man was found. The family, that young person, have been in contact with myself. One of the things that they are now raising is that the first 72 hours that they felt were quite crucial, and that they didn't feel that maybe enough was done at that point, because obviously the police were waiting to see if the person was missing. I have to say that the family have been extremely complementary about the police incorporage that has been well publicised in the press and what not. I wonder if you would be open to meeting with my constituent and myself to discuss that? I am not aware of the specific circumstances of the case. I am very sorry to hear that I had a tragic outcome for the family. I have not been involved in that personally, but I would be very happy to take off the table any details and make sure that an appropriate senior person that has got knowledge of the case is able to meet with the family and discuss it personally with them. That absolutely will not be an issue. Douglas Ross, followed by Stuart Stevenson. Can I go back a little bit to Liam McArthur's questions? It is to look at it from a different angle. We are speaking about demand-led policing and obviously the amount of resources available for the police to go out and do their bread and butter work. If the police get tied up with other functions, my question is about the NHS involvement in custody centres. I understand that, if not all parts of Scotland, the police pay the NHS to come into custody centres to deal with some issues that arise within the custody suites. However, in some parts of Moray, I have been told that, although that money is paid to the NHS, the NHS does not come into the custody centre and, therefore, you have two officers taking someone who has been detained and setting up for a large part of their shift in A&E with a patient who could possibly be seen within the custody centre. I was wondering if Calum Steele or Mr Graham or anyone else had experience of that and how it goes back to what you are saying about acting in silos. That is something that I think is very positive, but, if it is not working well on the ground, it is actually a waste of money and we are taking resources, again, off the street to sit in A&E when they could be better used out in our communities. That is a really good point. The first thing that I would say is that there is a high proportion of people who come into custody who are accused or suspected of committing a crime that falls into the vulnerability criteria that we have broadly been discussing. They have mental health issues, they may have a diagnosed mental health illness, they have substance abuse and, like so many of the people that we deal with, all of those things overlap in some days' life at the point that has sometimes led to them coming into custody in the first place. In relation to medical care for people in custody, the police do not pay the NHS to provide that. The police used to pay under legacy force arrangements on a number of different arrangements for either private healthcare to come into custody or for NHS boards, sometimes single or sometimes in groups, to provide healthcare in custody. At the start of Police Scotland, we worked with the Government and with NHS Scotland and there was a sum of money transferred from the block policing grants to the NHS and they were then obliged to provide the service for not just healthcare and custody and something similar had happened previously in Scottish prisons that you might be aware of, but also to provide the service for forensic medical examinations of victims and of accused people. As we went through that, we developed standards of service that could be expected and it would be safe to say that, at times, it has taken longer than the police would like for those standards of service to be met in some areas. It is relatively straightforward to do that in large custody centres. I take Edinburgh as an example where I was previously the commander. You have a large custody centre at St Leonard's. You have nurses who, out of hours, are employed there full-time, who work there, who have access to medical information for who are essentially patients. They can link that up with other healthcare needs, either what has happened before or what might need to happen afterwards when somebody goes back into the community for whether it is their substance abuse, mental illness or some other healthcare need whilst they are in custody. That is a good model. It is self-evident from the journey that we have been on. It is much harder to provide that level of service in smaller custody centres and generally they are in more remote areas. It is something that we are actively working with the NHS on and we are working with the Government to ensure that those standards improve. It is not just about healthcare for people who are in custody, it is also about the forensic examination, which has been an issue over time as well. Stuart Stevenson Thank you, convener. I just wanted to pick up on, again, something Calum Steele said, or repeat. I thought I heard him say that statistics of criminality and poverty are not correlated. Was that a statement related to the national position? I think that there is some substantial evidence that the areas of multiple deprivation are much higher proportion in particular of victims in those areas, although probably—and I am not so certain about that—a higher proportion of offenders in those areas was the reference to national figures in which it is less clear, as we have seen declining crime rates, while poverty in certain respects has been going the other way, that there is a correlation. There appears to be a difference between those two things. Is that fair? It is fair. Indeed, work undertaken by the violence reduction unit in Scotland identifies that those exposed to poverty are much more likely to be victims of crime than perpetrators of crime. It is probably quite important to expand on this point slightly when it comes to young, vulnerable people, because those who find themselves in poverty still tend to have the same wants and desires as their peers who may have the better clothes—or certainly the designer clothes and the fancier gadgets. There is a greater likelihood that they can be targeted from those seeking to exploit them and taking advantage of those desires, particularly in the area of sexual exploitation, where the victims of crime may not have seen themselves as victims because they are getting by their way of it rewarded in some way by being able to either have a new phone or some new clothes, which makes it very difficult for the police to get involved in it, because they do not see themselves as victims of crime. That is a fair observation. That is a helpful expansion of the previous remark. We are just about out of time, but before we close the session—I hope that I am not putting you in the spot here—I would like each of the witnesses to give a very brief, possibly one-sentence key message from today's session that you would like to leave with the committee. If you can do that, anybody who has one can put you in first. That is fine. What would you like to get across to us from today's session? What your message would be? We are not going to make any substantial difference to the lives of the majority if we do not stop looking at them as a financial consideration and start treating them like a human consideration. Joint working on this is essential and I very much echo that we are dealing with individual people, and we have to be thinking in terms of every time of what is best for that individual person. Let us also remember that our backs are against the wall financially because of the austerity agenda. Thank you, David Little. Malcolm talked about the silo working. I think that picking up the point about the vulnerable population and the crossover, that is something that we need to look at. I very briefly give an example of the people with dual diagnosis that are often pushed from mental health services to addiction services and back again. There is a need for those services and a range of other homelessness and offending services all to work more effectively together to help that particular population. On the cause of those issues, rather than exclusively the symptoms, we need to turn round the emphasis of where our resource is focused. Let us make sure that we are directing it where it is likely to have the greatest effect. As I am sure members of the committee know, we are most likely to improve and have substantial impact on people's life chances before they reach the age of five. I think that it is probably just to echo that that solutions for this are upstream often in lots of different areas. If you put in place the appropriate supports to enable people to live their lives, to maintain independence, you will reduce the demand. We take a human rights-based approach to working with people who have dementia. I am delighted to see the nods around the room. I think that thinking of it in those terms really helps to direct us towards the kind of solutions that are going to work and that are going to respect people. Much of what has been said, we need to have very effective joint working and an examination of how we better co-ordinate all our services as agencies. In the wider context, I warn to the idea that your colleagues in the Health and Sport Committee might need to partner in some of the work, because it is cross-legislative and cross-issue, and perhaps a wider debate across society in general about what they want our services to look like, both police, NHS and social services. I think that that is beginning to get lost and a lot of focus is on here is a problem, how do we fix it? In those times where we are put back against the wall with money, we need to go back to basics and say, what do we want and how do we want it delivered and how much we have got to do it with. It remains for me to say thank you very much to all of you, all our witnesses today. It has been an incredibly useful session. We have got so much out of it and we will be discussing ways in which we can take forward everything that you have said today. It has been quite an invaluable discussion that we have had, so thank you very much. I will briefly suspend to let the witnesses leave and we will have a bit of a comfort break to reconvene the meeting. Item 3 on the agenda is consideration of four public petitions. If I could refer members to paper 3, which sets out the options available to the committee when considering petitions. Just to remind you, if you want to keep a petition open, you should indicate how they would like the committee to take it forward or if anyone wishes to close, set out your reasons for wanting to do that. I propose that we consider the petitions in the order that they are set out in paper 3. That is petition 1501 and petition 1567, which is investigating on ascertain deaths, suicides and fatal accidents. I seek members' views on those petitions. One of the things in relation to the tornado collision that we have got correspondence as a committee on, where the story that is brought to us would suggest that the opportunity for the system to look at what happened there may have, because of cross jurisdictional responsibility as a military, the home base of the person who died in Scotland, in England. It appears reasonably laid out that opportunities may have dropped through the system. I think that I would be interested to hear from the Scottish Government in particular how they deal with issues around military-related deaths, because, of course, the military is ultra-virus for us as a Parliament, but I understand that it is a virus for us to make inquiries. I would be interested to know what protocols exist there, because that might lead us to an understanding on behalf of the petitioner as to whether what has happened is what is the best available outcome. Clearly, it does not bring the loss to a different position of the individual who died in that accident, but I would want to know that before considering that we should close the petition. I will point out that it is a third party that you are referring to who brought the attention to the military. It is not the petitioner, it is the third party relating to the petition. I do stand corrected, convener, but my point is none the less challenging. I take that point. I agree with that. Any other views from members? Douglas Ross? I fully support what Stuart Stevens has said. Mr Jones is a constituent who has been in contact with me about this. I have written to Annabelle Ewing about it, because some of his wider concerns come within her remit, but I think that it would be useful for the committee while keeping open the petition to go down that route. I also have another constituent who has raised issues in Parliament about mortuary services in Murray, but her husband tragically died in a sudden death. It was a boating accident, and she had concerns over guidance given by the Crown Office to police about destroying personal items. Because the petition looks at the wider sudden death issues in Scotland, I wonder if we could write to the Crown Office for clarification on those issues. I would be happy to do that. I do not know what others think. That is sound reasonable. It is connected. That is a good suggestion. Another suggestion. I wondered whether we should write to the Lord Advocate to get his view in relation to the military question that Stuart Stevenson raised on how he would deal with the incident that was referred to with a previous Lord Advocate. It would be quite good to know the current Lord Advocate's views. If members think that that is a sensible idea. I agree with that point that Douglas and Stuart have made. As the papers indicate, Mr Jones has expressed specific concerns about the communications from COVs. That can be wrapped up in whatever we are going to say to the Lord Advocate in that letter. Ben and Fulton, do you have any views? I am quite happy with what has been said to everything that I have suggested. Happy to proceed on that basis. I move on to the next two petitions, which are petition 1510 and petition 1511. It is with respect to police and fire control rooms. The petitions are discussed on pages 3 and 4 of the paper. There is also a letter from Tavish Scott MSP, which is included in the submission. I wonder if we could seek views on that. Again, those are matters where we are not yet in a position to close those petitions. The reorganisation of service centres in general, I think that there are concerns that have been raised. We are now in a position where we are able to see whether those concerns are justified. I am sure that those who are running the services concern are very alert to those concerns. I would not want to close those petitions until we can actually see that the reorganisation of service centres has delivered the improvements in service, which are possible through that, and the other benefits that have been claimed from them. So until we can see that, and I think that it really is up to the police and fire services to report on their experience and then be challenged on what they say. At that point, it is for us to consider whether it is the time to close those petitions. I totally heartedly agree with what Stewart said. In relation to some specific incidents that have arisen and that were highlighted by a former member of the fire service in relation to incidents in and around, I think that, in Burness, it would be useful to get Alasdair Hayes' view on that. As I understand it, I think that Tavish Scott has actually met Alasdair Hayes since writing to the committee, but I think that for the purposes of the committee, in the context of the petitions that sit before us, it would be helpful to get in writing from Mr Hayes' perspective on those incidents. Thank you. Any other views? I'm happy with what's been proposed so far with both Stewart and Liam's. I think that that's the best way to proceed. Any other opinions? No, I would agree with the points that have been raised. No, I'll all agree to go forward in that way. Thank you. So we move on to agenda item 4, which is the Justice Sub-Committee on Policing, and we invite feedback from the convener of the Justice Sub-Committee on Policing to give us some feedback. Mary Fee. Thank you, convener. The Justice Sub-Committee on Policing met on 12 January 2017 to discuss its forward work programme. I refer members to an XA of paper 6, which gives details of the issues that the sub-committee is to consider over the next few months. You'll see that the sub-committee is to take evidence on the Stop and Search Code of Practice on 26 January, and members of the committee are more than welcome to attend that meeting or any future meetings of the sub-committee. The Public Audit and Post-Legislative Scrutiny Committee is taking evidence from the Auditor General on the morning of Thursday, 26 January, on our 2015-16 audit of the SPA, and again members are more than welcome to attend that meeting. Can you please let the clerks to this committee know if you intend to attend it? I believe that the sub-committee now has quite a busy schedule of work until well into the spring, and if members have any suggestions of areas of work for the sub-committee to include in a future work programme, please let me know, and I'm happy to answer any questions committee members may have on the work programme. Any questions for the convener of the Justice Sub-Committee in general or on the work programme? Liam? I think that just reinforcing the convener's point about Thursday's evidence session, it's not often that we get an opportunity to hear oral evidence on something that's going to come before the committee in the way that the stop and search provisions will, so I think that if colleagues have time available, it may be worth coming along to that. Thank you very much. We now move into private session. The next committee meeting will be on 31 January, when our main item of business will be private consideration of a draft report on the criminal finances LCM. Can I suspend briefly to allow the gallery to clear?