Question reference: S6W-01743
- Asked by: Jamie Greene, MSP for West Scotland, Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party
- Date lodged: 22 July 2021
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Current status: Answered by Keith Brown on 10 August 2021
Question
To ask the Scottish Government whether it will consider increasing investment in mental health facilities to address the reported issues of burnout among Police Scotland staff.
Answer
The Welfare and Wellbeing of Police Officers, and the allocation of resources, is a matter for the Chief Constable of Police Scotland and the Scottish Police Authority.
Officers and staff can access a range of services to care for their physical and mental health through Police Scotland's “Your Wellbeing Matters” programme. This includes the introduction of Wellbeing Champions, and has resulted in raised awareness of the services available such as occupational health and employee assistance, which offer counselling, and specific interactions through the Trauma Risk Management programme (TRiM). We continue to support policing in Scotland and despite constraints on Scotland’s public services, through a decade of UK austerity, policing services have been maintained and improved and we will protect the police resource budget in real terms for the entirety of this Parliamentary term, as we did for the last. We have invested over £10 billion in policing since the creation of Police Scotland in 2013 and have increased the policing budget by £75.5 million in 2021-22.
We have made a commitment to increase the direct investment into mental health services by at least 25% and ensure that, by the end of the parliament, 10% of our frontline NHS budget will be invested in mental health services.
We have also set our plan to prevent, mitigate and respond to the mental health impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic through our ‘Mental Health Transition and Recovery Plan’, published in October 2020, which sets out our response to the mental health effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, containing over 100 actions. The Plan is supported by a £120 million Recovery and Renewal fund, announced in February 2021. The Fund will transform services, with a renewed focus on prevention and early intervention. We expect total spend, including by NHS Scotland, on mental health in 2021-22, to be in excess of £1.2 billion.