---

Cutting Crime (Justice Reinvestment)

Absolutely. I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for putting the matter in context. I have been talking about the end result—clearing up the spilled milk—but a lot of the targeting work is all about intervention to manage out the problem. That is a very important point here. A lot of the work that the Committee did was about not just looking at the end result of sentencing but intervening at an earlier stage to get it right and to avoid having to rely on a criminal justice system that does not always deal with problems appropriately, particularly when it comes to young offenders. The restorative justice concept is a prime example of the alternative approach. I will end by reminding the Minister of the meeting that we had some weeks ago in Birmingham with key players in mental health. It was a very productive round-table discussion, hosted by the National Centre for Mental Health. We were lucky to be joined by senior consultant forensic psychiatrists and the mother of a young man who, as a result of serious drug problems, ended up with a mental health problem and was treated inappropriately by the criminal justice system. I make this plea—I hope that the Minister will forgive me for making it because he has heard it from me before, but I make no apology for that—that we must get the diversionary therapies and methods absolutely right when it comes to mental health, not only in the Crown court and the magistrates court, in terms of making it easier for sentencers to pass mental health treatment conditions as part of a community order, but at the police station too. That means ensuring that if a desk sergeant or even a duty solicitor or any person who comes into contact with an arrested person, an accused person or a suspect is able to have recourse to community psychiatric nursing help—[Interruption.] I do not know if the person who is in charge of the amplification system wanted me to make that point more clearly. [Laughter.] However, I am happy that it has been amplified and made more clearly. The intervention of community psychiatric nursing at that level and the professional input of mental health services will go a long way to ensuring that people who have genuine mental health problems end up being treated appropriately rather than in a criminal justice system that far too often fails them, resulting in inappropriate prison sentences being imposed and in the alarming statistics that we are all depressingly familiar with regarding the number of people in our prisons who have mental health conditions. At the top end of the scale, I would argue that the Mental Health Act provides very important and valuable services for those people with acute mental health problems. However, it is more towards the middle and the bottom end of the scale that the system is, I am afraid, quite simply deficient. It is very much a question of commissioning. The Minister will agree with me that collaborative work with the Department of Health is essential if we are to get the mental health services that we need. So I urge him to do all he can as a member of the new Government to ensure that, by the time we get to the new commissioning regime next year, mental health services are at the top of the list when it comes to new provision. On that note, I conclude my remarks, Mrs Main, and I am very grateful to you.