STANDING COMMITTEE OF

TYNWALD COURT OFFICIAL REPORT RECORTYS OIKOIL BING VEAYN TINVAAL

PROCEEDINGS DAALTYN

SOCIAL AFFAIRS POLICY REVIEW COMMITTEE MENTAL HEALTH HANSARD Douglas, Wednesday, 6th December 2017 PP2017/0182

SAPRC-MH, No. 2

All published Official Reports can be found on the Tynwald website: www.tynwald.org.im/business/hansard

Published by the Office of the Clerk of Tynwald, Legislative Buildings, Finch Road, Douglas, Isle of Man, IM1 3PW. © High Court of Tynwald, 2017

STANDING COMMITTEE, WEDNESDAY, 6th DECEMBER 2017

Members Present: Chairman: Mr D C Cretney MLC Mr D J Ashford MHK Clerk: Mr J D C King Assistant Clerk: Miss S Kenny

Contents Procedural ...................................................................................................................................... 49 EVIDENCE OF Mr D Flint, former Inspector of Isle of Man Constabulary ...................................... 49 The Committee sat in private at 4.53 p.m. .................................................................................... 58

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STANDING COMMITTEE, WEDNESDAY, 6th DECEMBER 2017

Standing Committee of Tynwald on Social Affairs Policy Review Mental Health The Committee sat in public at 4.15 p.m. in the Legislative Council Chamber, Legislative Buildings, Douglas [MR CRETNEY in the Chair]

Procedural

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The Chairman (Mr Cretney): Welcome to this public meeting of the Social Affairs Policy Review Committee, which is a Standing Committee of Tynwald. I am David Cretney MLC and I chair this Committee. With me is David Ashford MHK. If we could ensure our mobile phones are off, or on silent, so that we do not have any interruptions. And, for the purposes of Hansard, I will be ensuring that we do not have two people speaking at once. The Social Affairs Policy Review Committee is one of three Standing Committees of Tynwald Court established in October 2011 with a wide scrutiny remit. We have three Departments to cover: the Department of Home Affairs, Education and Children, and the Department of Health and Social Care. Today we are discussing the subject of Mental Health provision and we welcome Derek Flint, former Inspector of the Isle of Man Constabulary.

EVIDENCE OF Mr D Flint, former Inspector of Isle of Man Constabulary

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Q106. The Chairman: So, you are very welcome. When we first had the conversation you asked to come along on the basis of your former role, and I now understand you are working for the Department of Health and Social Care. Would you just clarify what role you are doing within that organisation? Mr Flint: Yes, I am one of the business and performance managers at the Hospital. It is a tripartite role which looks after the business cases, business plans and hopefully the transformational plans for the Hospital. Q107. The Chairman: Okay, thank you. So back to your previous life. Can you specify what your role as an inspector entailed?

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Mr Flint: I was one of the 12 Inspectors in the Force. My last command was operational support, which covered items like roads policing, armed policing, search dogs – all the specialist areas. Prior to that, my portfolio was custody and call handling. Within the custody side of that, I

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had quite immersive experience with mental health both in terms of the management and safety of detainees, and also working with our partner agencies to make sure that there were better outcomes for them. Q108. The Chairman: Okay, so any statement you would like to make on the topic of mental health and perhaps expand?

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Mr Flint: I think to start off with, there are a lot of people working very hard to do their very best for our people who have mental health issues. What we perhaps lack is a middle ground between the criminal side of things and the management of what is determined as mental health by psychiatrists. The people that fall between the grids are those that are perhaps most at risk in some respects, because they do not fall into the criminal justice system so they cannot benefit – which is a bit of an absurd word – from the processes and sanctions that a court can give to get them help; and also because they are not under treatment, or direct treatment, there is a risk where their mental health potential is much diminished. They are not the very best version of themselves that they could be. So my fear is that we have a system where there is a middle ground, where people are perhaps at their most vulnerable and then end up in one of the two systems which I mentioned, which could perhaps be avoided. Q109. The Chairman: In your role, how regularly did you come into contact with mental health issues and in what circumstances? Mr Flint: On a daily basis. We did some what we would call ‘fag packet research’, if you will, in terms of how much impact mental health was having on policing and it is generally recognised both on the Island and across the British Isles that probably in the region of 20% of calls for service or contact with individuals involves some sort of mental health element. Now, as a custody inspector, that was virtually every second case, I would say, there was some mental health element involved with it. Vulnerable people, by their very nature, tend to have mental health issues, tend to be subject to the criminal justice system at some stage, and on top of that, as my role of duty inspector which is a role which for 12 hours at a time you are handed command of the Force, until you need somebody with a bigger hat on to come and bail you out, shall we say, you are in the process of managing high-risk missing-from-homes, who again may be suicidal, may be in crisis and also in one of my other roles as a tactical firearms commander, one of the big aspects of that is actually how you deal with mentally vulnerable people, because obviously the wrong approach to interactions with those sorts of people could lead to very serious consequences. Q110. The Chairman: Okay, how do you view the involvement of the Police with the mentally ill?

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Mr Flint: We are in some respects the service of both first and last resort. It is inevitable that we are likely to be – I use the term ‘we’; it has been a while now, but you know what I mean! It is always likely that the Police will be the first point of contact for mental health incidents, whether it is somebody who has been arrested, whether it is somebody who is presenting in a public place who appears unable to take care of themselves, but it is my own belief, and I think it is shared by a lot of professionals that in many respects the Police are the last people on earth that should be dealing with mental health issues, other than at that first point of contact. At that stage there should be clear and definite and supported pathways which get them into the care system and under the care of mental health professionals – or just health care professionals – as early as possible.

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Q111. The Chairman: In recent discussion, the Chief Constable has been in to the Social Affairs Policy Review Committee, together with mental health professionals, saying that they are hoping to make real progress and that a mental health professional would be there if one of those issues came up.

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Mr Flint: And that is fair comment, but we have been saying this for an awful long time, and I have seen very little progress. One of the things that is perhaps disappointing about the way that works across Government is that it is very personality driven. I had exceptional relationships with mental health professionals, ambulance, emergency department doctors and nurses, and quite often we achieved the best outcomes for people just through us being able to sit down round a pot of tea and sort things out. The aspiration that has existed for a good number of years now, to have the access immediately to a mental health professional to be able to go out with cops and go to addresses and deal with the crisis there, has not been achieved. We have been talking about it an awful long time and I can see both sides of the coin very clearly. We were strapped for cash and resources in the Police. I know that Mental Health were; I know the Health Service are. But when you are dealing with the most vulnerable people in our society, is it right, in terms of the aspirations we have as a great nation, for that to be a ‘nice to do’? It is a ‘need to do’ and if we do not get those early interventions in with the right people at the right place at the right time, it ends up costing us a lot more money.

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Q112. The Chairman: Absolutely. Okay. The Chief Constable's Annual Report stated that one in five police incidents involve mental health in some way. When do you think police involvement with mental health is appropriate? 105

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Mr Flint: Section 136 of the Mental Health Act provides the power for a police officer who finds somebody who is in crisis , for want of a better word, in a public place to be able to detain them and bring them into care and a place of safety for assessment by the necessary professionals. That for me is, if you like, it in some respects, because of what I just described: being able to pass them on to people who are actually trained and more, I think, astutely aware as well of what is and what is not mental health, because what may seem to a police officer or even a man in the street as to ‘this person is obviously mentally ill’ is not the case; it might be a personality disorder, which is not described as a mental illness, for example. What you end up with is a conflict between the services in terms of ‘Well, what are we going to do with them? If they are not mentally ill, well you will have to take them away.’ That is not our job. We are not trained – we fight with people on a Friday and Saturday night, that is our job; your job is to look after people. There is this chasm in between, where people are not given the support and care and because they do not get the support and care they deteriorate and they go one way or the other, either criminally or psychologically. I think the other thing as well is that within that legislative provision we have not really kept pace with the adjacent isle. There has been an awful lot of work there: the Crisis Care Concordat and other work. I was just reading this morning that a gentleman I have a great deal of respect for and I would commend some further reading to you – a chap called Michael Brown – he was an inspector of the West Midlands Police and he is now part of the College of Policing. He writes an excellent blog and he was talking about the implications for the Policing and Crime Act 2017 amendments to their Mental Health Act, and you can see the refinements that are going in, in terms of that whole thing, ‘You said; we did’. Well, they have listened to what the issues are within policing and where the IPCC has had to be involved because of another death in custody or death after police contact, which could have been avoided had the pathways been in place.

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Q113. Mr Ashford: Just following on from that, obviously one of the things you mention there was about the detention under the Mental Health Act and getting them to a place of safety. From your experience, how often does that fall down, where the Police are left carrying the can, so to speak? Because there is nowhere for them to go, particularly for instance you mentioned there about Friday and Saturday nights, which bring their own sorts of problems, but a lot of these incidents do happen at night time and certainly one of the things I have been hearing quite a bit about from current serving officers and from other people in the public domain, is that there is not necessarily that support there. The Police pick them up and have secured them, but then they have got nowhere necessarily to take them. Mr Flint: We are a lot better than we were. I think that is the first thing to point out. When I took over custody in 2012, there was still a propensity to bring people in for detention under the Act into police custody. It is the last place on earth that they should be and we did a lot of work and got that down into single figures. It was really when somebody was so violent that they would not be able to be contained in either Grianagh Court or at Noble’s in the emergency department, because those were the favoured places to go. The order of battle was Grianagh Court, the emergency department and if all else is lost then they go to custody. So we made a lot of inroads into that and certainly the legislative changes that are about to take place in the UK very much reflect that in terms of it is absolutely the last option, and if you do take somebody, well they need to be checked by a healthcare professional every 30 minutes. Well, unless you have got a doctor or a nurse on the premises, as you do in some of the big Bridewells in the UK, that is never going to be achievable, but it sent the message out that that is not the right thing to do. Where we then ended up with issues was that we cured that, but then you have the issues of taking them to Grianagh Court and what that handover looked like. Even up to the time of me leaving the service, we were still refining that in terms of threat and risk and harm and so on, and vulnerabilities. If there was a security issue in terms of that person was perhaps still volatile, then it was the right thing to do to keep the Police there. But there was, shall we say, some overcautiousness on perhaps the mental health side, in terms of how long the cops stayed there. It was refining that freeing up of resources. Because the other option that we did not have that is available in the UK is that once you are at a place of safety, you are at a place safety, whereas in the UK if it had been up here and escalated and the person had to go to custody, and then everything calmed down a little bit, they could be shifted to ED or they could be shifted to a mental health facility; we do not have that option here. So it is that lack of agility in terms of tracking the best practice and legislative changes in the UK that perhaps let us down a little bit and made our solutions a little bit clunky. They very much were sorted out by negotiation and personalities and understanding, rather than actually, ‘Well, the law says this, so there is a clear way of doing it’, which builds a clearer pathway. Q114. The Chairman: Do the Police have any formal training to deal with mental health issues?

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Mr Flint: Yes. We used to do an awful lot and it went right back to my time in training. I was a trainer from 2000 to 2003 and we worked a lot with the Mental Health Service, to make sure that officers were aware of what mental health presentation was like, and we had an immense level of support and I would put on record my thanks to Gloria Balakrishna, who was instrumental in providing that training. We used to do scenarios and all sorts of stuff. My understanding is that still continues to this day, in some shape or form, so that officers understand what the signs and indicators are, and also in terms of how to deal with them. Certainly within the firearms arena, we spent a lot of time training that, in terms of how you would deal with an emotionally mentally distressed person, giving them space and time, early

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negotiation and that was, again, enhanced training which some of the officers had for that particular specialism as well. Q115. The Chairman: Can you comment on any impact that dealing with mental health issues has upon police officers? Do they end up having stress issues themselves?

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Mr Flint: The stress issues would develop from not being able to do the best they possibly could for somebody. There is a feeling of despair that comes in any situation where you have not been able to look after somebody as well as you could do. The mission statement of the Isle of Man Police is ‘keeping people safe’, and that manifests itself in a number of different ways. But if you have had an awfully difficult time, trying to obtain the best outcomes for somebody that you know is in crisis, that can take a lump out of you and that is, as you described before, where the difficulties between services arise, and it is not as smooth as it should be and you know you should be doing something else somewhere, backing your colleagues up rather than doing an extended or convoluted handover. Those are all little bits of chips out of the block and can lead to further problems. But I would not say that it is necessarily symptomatic of them dealing with mental health, but there is a very, very … emerging picture with regard to mental health and the police service across the board, and that is evidenced here and in the British Isles. We do see people through the stresses of the job with mental health issues themselves. Q116. The Chairman: Do you feel there has been any development over the last couple years in matters of mental health in general and the involvement of the Constabulary in particular? Mr Flint: The Mental Health Liaison Committee that we had was great. We took a lot of steps forward. We managed to quell the reception of detainees into custody which was fantastic. We developed better understanding of everybody’s service needs on either side, and once you understand what pressures Mental Health are under, you are bound to be more sympathetic than you would be just making assumptions. We also took big steps with regard to both the safety of mental health detainees, and that dignity and respect side of things as well. The example I would give you is the historic methodology that we had of transporting mental health detainees in vans. Well, the sensible thing to do is transfer them in an ambulance because if it is something that is drugs related, or whatever, you have got … if there has been a restraint, there is a risk of heart attack and so on. Having a team that can deal with that there and then is the right thing to do. The other thing is, as well, if a police van pulls up outside Billy's house, the curtains go and it is ‘Billy’s in trouble again.’ If an ambulance turns up, ‘Billy’s not well.’ So there is an entirely different context that the onlooker will take if an ambulance is involved. We have got great support from the ambulance service. They are hard-pressed anyway, but you know what, they recognise it was absolutely the right thing to do. There are times when it is the right thing to do, to transfer them in a police van, in terms of you are going to be waiting 40 minutes – let's get down the road with them. But you do that on a threat and risk basis. So the talking was there and the understanding was there, and the bit I said before, that we have waited an awful long time to get that mental health professional embedded in A&E, where they can act as, if you like, a flying squad with a cop and go out and do the assessment, almost, right in the front room of the individual, and rather than being carted in and going through the whole 132 process, ‘Listen, you know this, you know that, we are going to see you in the morning and so on; this is what you need to do’, give them coping strategies and you have had somebody who is a professional actually doing it there and then. Those are the aspirations and it disappoints me to know that those are still aspirations and they have not been achieved because they are absolutely the right thing to do.

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STANDING COMMITTEE, WEDNESDAY, 6th DECEMBER 2017 Q117. The Clerk: Can I just come in Mr Cretney? We talked about having a mental health professional embedded in A&E; you said we have waited a long time for that. Just to be clear, is that now in place? 240

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Mr Flint: My understanding is that it is still not in place. It was an aspiration from Mental Health to be able to make them available at the right time, because obviously, out of hours, the service provision is on call and the aspiration was to have somebody there that could deal with people coming through the system, but was also available to us, in terms of ‘Get your coat on, we need to go and see somebody’, and do the assessments there. It had been trialled in the West Midlands to a fair degree of success and it had reduced the number of … section 136, in their Act, admissions because they were able to do that crisis intervention on the doorstep, rather than carting people through and putting them into a system which was already creaking and under stress. As I say, I am not absolutely certain, but that is my understanding that it has still not been achieved. The Clerk: Thank you.

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Q118. The Chairman: We have met a number of people in private, one of whom stated, just as you have described, that a police van turning up outside this person's house caused more concern. What would be the circumstances whereby it was decided that a police van was the right thing to do? Is it that they are being violent or drunk or … ?

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Mr Flint: Everything that comes through the control room is graded on threat and risk, and where that stands. It is a case of is it a priority, do we go now, do we go soon, do we go later, do we not go at all? We have always got to go and have a look. The issue is the methodology that we use to go and have a look, and unfortunately the mode of transport is a transit van for the cops. That is what we run around in. Would it be more appropriate to grab the keys for a plain car and run up in that? Yes, it would, but in terms of a busy service, which is as strapped for staff as everybody else is, it is not always that easy and it might be a two-minute job or it might turn out to be something more convoluted. It is just the logistics, more than anything else, and I think we have to be realistic that cops run around in police vans. There is no other way we can get round that.

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Q119. The Chairman: This person, I think, the one I am referring to in particular, felt that by a police van turning up, the neighbours would think that he was doing something wrong when actually he is not well. 275

Mr Flint: I absolutely agree with your sentiments, you are absolutely right, and in an ideal world the cops would not be going at all. We would be going to back up, if there was an issue which involved violence or a threat of violence. We are the wrong service to be going in the first instance. 280

Q120. The Chairman: This question predated your latest appointment, but is there anything you can say now that you could not say when you were working for the Police?

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Mr Flint: I think I have always been recognised for being fairly forthright in my opinions. No, I don’t. There is stuff that … Obviously I have not discussed anything here that had not actually been discussed in some forum or another, so the issues are there.

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The problem is the inertia and we need to find a way to break that and start to gain some traction and make these changes happen. Yes, some of them will cost money, but in the long run I believe there are savings there, because if you can reduce the likelihood of somebody becoming profoundly mentally ill and the hundreds of thousands of pounds a year that they will drain from the service because of their acute needs, then you can solve an awful lot. But it is those fixes that need to be put in place. So it is the old case, isn’t it? Let’s stop doing reports and talking; let’s do something. Q121. Mr Ashford: Just following directly on from that, if you had a magic wand – and wouldn’t it be nice if we all did? – what would be the one change that you think would have the most impact? Mr Flint: A 24-hour, readily available on-duty, on-shift mental health professional that could either go out themselves, or with an ambulance, or with a cop and do things on the ground. That would be, if you like, first on my wish list. The second thing would be those people that we find that are dropping through the gaps, there is some sort of social care provision which does more for them. People are working hard, people are trying hard to get these people the right outcomes, but it is a growth industry, mental health. There is so much more awareness about it. People are living stressful lives, there is more and more impact on them. So we have got to accept that if we do not put this in place, it is something else that is going to overwhelm the Health Service, certainly, which is already under the spotlight for an awful lot of challenges, and it is one more thing that they perhaps do not need.

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Q122. The Chairman: Again, this next question kind of goes back on that, because I think what you have said this afternoon does reflect what the Chief Constable said to us when he was in twice speaking to us, but are there any differences between your view of the issue and what we have heard from the Chief Constable, do you think? 315

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Mr Flint: I don't think but the difficulty … The Chief is a strategist and it is in his gift to make things happen. Now, what I do not have access to, which he does have access to, is all the political ramifications, the politics between CEOs and so on. That I do not understand because it was above my pay grade. I have a lot of sympathy for the position he finds himself in, but I think collectively there is a huge responsibility at CEO level and at Chief Officer level to get these things done, because discussions you have had, like you say, anecdotal evidence from police officers and this, that and the other, they get fed up with it. When you get fed up with things, you do not take things as seriously. That diminishes the care to the only person that matters in all this, which is the person who is in crisis. So if they do not see that the bosses are taking it seriously, then they will not take it seriously as well and we just end up further back down the line than where we should have been. Q123. The Chairman: You may not want to answer this – I know you are never shy to answer – but in terms of the Department of Health and Social Care and the new positions, the business development … are they fixed-term appointments? Mr Flint: No, they are permanent appointments. Basically, behind it, there is a recognition that the quite senior people in Health and Social Care have been down there with their hoses, firefighting and trying to deal with the general stuff. Now, there is nothing going to move forward until their capacity is freed up to deal with the strategic issues and the big hit and the big questions of the day. So at my level, I have been brought in as one of three others to try and absorb that and start to punch through some of the

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quick wins, if you will, and look at processes and streamline things and make the working day easier for the people that are there with the stethoscope and the syringe. So if we can achieve that, then we have won on both bases: we have improved morale at the coalface and also we have let the executive … released some capacity to them to be able to get on with the big stuff. Q124. The Chairman: Again, I think that coincides, the other day we had a Public Accounts Committee, and Mr Quinn and Mr Catlow were in. Mr Quinn in particular was talking about the strategic stuff and things which were able to save money and stuff. So you are going to be assisting in terms of allowing him to make decisions which will save money – Mr Flint: Yes, and as I say, for somebody like Mr Quinn to be down with the fire hose, it is not appropriate. He should be driving the engine, as it were. So it is freeing up that capacity for him to be able to say, ‘Right, I have got some space and time now. I can deal with those big issues, and those big savings and big transformational changes that need to go ahead.’ I am certainly very positive about it, but it is going to be a hell of a lot of hard work. I am under no illusion with regard to that.

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Q125. The Chairman: Well, thank you for answering that, because it is not directly what you are here to speak to us today about, but I think it is helpful because it coincides with other work which we are involved with at the moment. Anything else? 360

Mr Ashford: Nothing else from me. The Clerk: Can I ask a couple of questions? 365

The Chairman: Please do. Q126. The Clerk: Just a couple of factual ones – things that have been referred to. When did you leave the Police?

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Mr Flint: I left the Police in May. It was the Friday before TT – whatever date that was. You will know, Mr Cretney! I think it was 26th May. The Clerk: Just gone?

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Mr Flint: Yes, 26th May 2017. Q127. The Clerk: Right, thank you. You talked about getting the numbers in police custody down to single figures. Do you mean single figures as in incidents per week or …?

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Mr Flint: Per year. Mental health detentions virtually were wiped out. It is a very, very exceptional event when somebody is now brought into custody under section 132 of the Mental Health Act. 385

Q128. The Clerk: It came down to single figures; what was it before? Mr Flint: We were probably doing at least one or two a month. I think, just to frame the importance of that, somebody with a mental health crisis who is in a non-health setting is a massive, massive risk. There are dozens of recorded incidents where

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people with mental health have died in police custody and the avoidability of it is now very much recognised. It has been a big, big focus for the UK services as well, to get people away from custody when they are there for mental health reasons. It is just not the right place to be. The resources are not there, the training is not there and it really is by good luck that they walk out the door in one piece.

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Q129. The Clerk: Can I just come back to another thing that Mr Flint said earlier. You talked about things being personality driven when you were talking about relationships between different services, and I could not quite work out whether you thought things being personality driven was a good thing or a bad thing. 400

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Mr Flint: It is a good thing in the short term, because it gets things done. In the long term it does not help, because new people come in and will either try and reinvent the wheel or they will not understand the importance of things, and you have got to have a personal vested interest in it. I was genuinely interested in keeping people safe and doing the best I could for them, and mental health, which came under my portfolio, was something which I became really, really intensely involved in. I was lucky that I had colleagues in the partner services who had the same view and wanted to do more and wanted to do better. Some of us had little wins, and some of us had little losses, but on the whole, between those who were involved, we got it sorted. What we lack is the framework of legislation and regulations which are now being put in place in mental health in the United Kingdom, which actually nail it on because it is law; it has got to be done that way. It is very prescriptive and descriptive. It is a bit like the Police Powers and Procedures Act – it is codes, it is very prescriptive in terms of how things should be done and that is what keeps people alive, keeps people safe and provides better outcomes.

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Q130. The Clerk: Right, thank you. Just talking about frameworks, you talked about sitting around a cup of tea and sorting things out. When you say that, are you talking about sorting out procedures or are you talking about sorting out individual cases? 420

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Mr Flint: Both. We did sort out individual cases, but also managed to thrash out new frameworks, new standard operating procedures, new policy where it was necessary, and then that was presented to our various service heads and signed off, if appropriate. So things like, for example, the ambulance service memorandum of understanding (MOU) which we had for transportation of mental health detainees from the scene to hospital or to Grianagh Court: that was a classic example. That was a cup of tea job, formalised, signed off at the right level and became reality. Q131. The Clerk: If you were talking about individual cases, did you get tangled up with data protection law, and was that … ? Mr Flint: We were all dealing with the same person so it was a case of if you were dealing with something that was actually in process at that particular time, then everybody is, if you like, duty involved to actually sort it. They are all part of the solution, whether it is on the medical side of things or on the policing side of things, because there is law in place which is part of that. But no, I have had some long tea breaks, shall we say, trying to sort things out. I use the term anecdotally: it is actually looking at what the problem is and then sorting it out – whether or not there is tea involved or not is almost immaterial. Q132. The Clerk: Well, yes, not to go on about the tea too much, but I think it is quite a practical thing which this Committee has looked at over the years, which is when you are talking

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STANDING COMMITTEE, WEDNESDAY, 6th DECEMBER 2017 about individual cases, whether it is children or vulnerable adults or anybody else, for that matter, do the agencies have the ability to talk to each other, or are there constraints, of which data protection is the famous one, which make it harder for them to do that? 445

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Mr Flint: I see exactly where you are coming from. I think it is made harder than it needs to be. We have spoken in the past about joint data units. It is not just necessarily about mental health; it is about other areas of business as well, where … I always used to use the phrase, we all have a professional filter. We hear the bits that we need to do our job and even in a healthcare setting, you are not particularly interested in whether Mrs Miggins has got a hernia if you are actually dealing with Mrs Miggins for a cataract or something like that. It is a case of actually using that professional filter and using the information that you need to. But having the access to it as well, and having the confidence between agencies that that data is secure and safe and is only being used for the purposes that it needs to be proportionally to sort out that particular issue. The Clerk: Thank you.

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Q133. The Chairman: Was there anything else you think that we have not asked you that we should have asked you?

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Mr Flint: No, not really. I think, really for me, it is filling that middle gap in and also making sure that we step forward to enable people in crisis to get access to the right professional as early as we possibly can, and then they have got the ongoing resources to continue to support them right the way through to hopefully full recovery and a better future.

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The Chairman: Thank you. I don’t know what it is about myself and Mr Ashford but we seem to be on Committees that either talk about biscuits or today it has been tea! (Laughter) We will finish now. We can all go and have our tea and biscuits. I would like to thank you very much for coming along and for giving us the benefit of your expertise and good luck in your new role. Mr Flint: Thank you very much.

475

The Chairman: Thank you very much. We will now sit in private. The Committee sat in private at 4.53 p.m.

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