Debate contribution: PSNI: Pressure due to Health System Failings

Debate contribution by Mr Doug Beattie MC on 1 December 2025.

MLA

Mr Doug Beattie MC

Party at the time

Ulster Unionist Party

Date

1 December 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

PSNI: Pressure due to Health System Failings

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5269470

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I thank the Member for that intervention. I have been touched by suicide on at least five occasions, so I know exactly where she is coming from. I am talking about a societal issue. This is a societal issue, not a structural issue. We need to tackle its cause at the root. I think that it was Desmond Tutu who said:

"There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they're falling in."

It is a societal issue, and we need to deal with it. The PSNI's Right Care, Right Person approach is, without a doubt, the right one to take. It will take time and will, clearly, need Justice and the police to work in partnership not only with the Health Department but with the Department of Education and the Department for Communities. It goes right across our Departments. The result will be a huge reduction in calls to the police, because they will not attend them. That will save them time and resources. The police will triage calls and decide whether they or their partners will attend a call. Let me give an example. A neighbour has not been seen recently; a call is made to the police; and the police triage that call and decide that they will not attend but that it will be for the adult safeguarding team, maybe local council services or a registered family member to attend instead. That makes perfect sense to me. I will give another example. A child could miss school; a call is made to the police; the Right Care, Right Person approach is taken; the call is triaged; and the Department of Education decides that it will look at it with education welfare services. You get the idea behind the system; it is pretty straightforward. The statistics are really stark. The police receive around 38,000 calls a year on concerns for safety. They attend about 28,000 of those calls, which is about 78%. However, under Right Care, Right Person, the police would attend about 13,000 calls, which is about 36%. That is a huge change in resources. The remaining calls would, obviously, go to other agencies. Some really good work is happening between the Department of Health and the Department of Justice. They need to work at this. However, it will take time. The motion rightly states that, on average, the police receive around:

"100 concern for safety calls per day on average, with only 3% of those incidents linked to crime".

However, the police also receive 400,000 phone calls to their 101 service, the majority of which are not crime-related. Without a shadow of a doubt, the reduced headcount in the police is having an effect. The call about the Budget is an absolute red herring, to be perfectly honest. I genuinely think that. The Department of Health is the largest Department. It has the most real estate, the most vehicles and the most people — 95,000 employees in the Department of Health. The Department of Education has about 45,000 people, and the Department of Justice has 14,000 people. We should remember that the Department of Health also looks after the Fire and Rescue Service. Many people forget that. We need a joined-up approach. We should also remember that the judiciary is putting people with mental health issues into prisons. There is an issue across the board, which is why I said that it is societal. We need to make sure that, when we implement Right Care, Right Person we do so at the right time, that it is staged right and that we do not just throw it in without making sure that it has been properly sequenced. If we need to see why we should not do that, we just need to look to what happened to the Cawdery family —

— when something was rushed that should not have been.

662 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not flagged

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 14:03 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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