I am concerned about the notion rather than the specific aspect. Let me work backwards: the Police Service and police officers have enormous day-to-day involvement with individuals who suffer from mental health problems. Indeed, a large proportion of police time is taken up with dealing with individuals who have such problems. Arguably—in fact, undoubtedly—that is not the best approach. I can think of fewer things that are more corrosive to individuals who suffer from ill health than for them to find themselves stuck in a solid concrete room with a steel door and a small wicket to look at. However, although the Police Service is engaged in such crisis intervention and management in the first instance, there has been no corresponding transfer of funding from health to the police to deal with that. I take the view that, if the police are expected to police regardless, the health service should be expected to deliver health regardless. Irrespective of whether an individual is or is not in police custody, the health service should have a responsibility for looking after them.
Of course, there are areas where the police should pay for additional health elements, and those areas clearly include exposure to forensic examinations and the requirement to gather blood. However, what happens in a large proportion of cases is that individuals who suffer from mental illness, which is a health consideration, are locked up in cells. Why are the police paying for the failure—perhaps that is an emotive word—of a health system that allows individuals to be in those cells in the first place by giving money back to it? It seems to me that health possibly gets a double dividend out of this.
Other elements of the cost of providing medical forensic services are unnecessarily complex; let us, for example, consider our road traffic legislation. A blood sample from an accused person must be taken by a doctor. As far as I am aware—and I have two sisters who work as nurses—most blood is now drawn by nurses. The cost of securing doctors to draw blood is considerably higher than the cost of nurses—if nurses were allowed to draw blood under the legislation, of course.
Again, we are not helped by the fact that across Scotland, as I understand it, we do not have a single point of negotiation with the health service for the provision of doctor services, not least because the health service exists as an umbrella body, even though there are individual health boards and authorities underneath it. We need to undertake that process many times over, which in itself is highly inefficient and wasteful.