Centre for Mental Health

Bradley report offers new beginning for mental health and criminal justice, says Sainsbury Centre

30 April 2009

Today offers a new beginning for the way the criminal justice system deals with people with mental health problems, Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health chief executive Angela Greatley said today.

Commenting on publication of the government-commissioned Bradley Report, Angela Greatley said: "Too many people with a wide range of mental health problems are being imprisoned in this country. Lord Bradley has set out a comprehensive and ambitious way of putting that right.

"We strongly support Lord Bradley's plan for a Criminal Justice Mental Health team in every locality in England. Setting these up would be a vast improvement on the patchy provision of diversion schemes we have today. We call upon the Department of Health to follow Lord Bradley's recommendation and mandate these teams in the next NHS Operating Framework.

"We endorse Lord Bradley's call for all prison hospital transfers to be completed within 14 days. It is unacceptable that many prisoners wait for months to go to hospital when they are acutely unwell. But to achieve this change we are going to have to explore better ways of using secure hospital and step-down facilities."

The Bradley Report makes numerous recommendations for improvements in the way people with mental health problems and people with learning disabilities are managed in the criminal justice system. They include a call for Criminal Justice Mental Health teams to divert people in police stations as well as the courts.

Sainsbury Centre associate director Graham Durcan commented: "Both prisons and secure hospitals are holding record numbers of people*. We have to do more to divert people safely from custody to their communities. Short prison sentences are especially damaging to people's mental health and they do nothing to reduce further offending.

"If Lord Bradley's report was implemented in full, it could make a substantial difference to many thousands of people's lives. It would help offenders with mental health problems to turn their lives around. It would benefit communities by making them safer. And it would reduce the costs of crime to the nation as a whole."

* The prison population is currently over 82,000. The secure hospital population reached a record 3,900 in 2007.