FOI Mental Health Related 999 calls (0383-2024/25)

Request
Please provide, from Jan 2018 up until the most current month available at the point of production, the following:

Q1. The number of mental health related 999 calls your force received.
Q2. The number of mental health related 999 calls to which your force responded.
Q3. Detainments under Section 136 of the Mental Health Act 1983.
Q4. Additionally, if available, please provide for the same period the above split by the county in which the incident occurred (As per your clarification email dated 13 August 2024 the number of mental health related 999 calls received, the number attended, and the number of Section 136 detainments).
Q5. Additionally, if available, please provide for the same period the above split by whether or not the person involved was under the age of 18 (As per your clarification email dated 13 August 2024 the number of mental health related 999 calls received, the number attended, and the number of Section 136 detainments).

If monthly totals are not available, please provide annual totals instead. If the whole period requested is not available, please instead provide figures from the earliest point available up until the most recent at the point of production.

Q6. Additionally, has your force introduced Right Care, Right Person as a policy?
Q7. If so, when was it introduced? If not, are any plans for it to be introduced?

Extent of Searches to Locate Information
Following receipt of your request searches were conducted within North Yorkshire Police to locate relevant information. 

Decision
I am not obliged to provide you with a response to your request pursuant to Section 12(1) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (the Act). Please note that when one part of your request falls under Section 12, we are not obliged to review the rest of the questions and the whole request is therefore exempt.

Section 12(1) applies to your request as the cost of complying with your request is above the amount to which we are legally required to respond i.e. the cost of identifying and retrieving any relevant information exceeds the ‘appropriate level’ as stated in the Freedom of Information (Appropriate Limit and Fees) Regulations 2004.

Due to the nature of our recording systems the information requested in response to Question 5 is not in an easily retrievable format. Our information retrieval process generally relies on a computer ran report which captures any information recorded upon the surface of a record or within specified fields. Where relevant information is held deeper in the record, or outside of a specified field, a manual assessment is required to retrieve that information. To retrieve the requested information, it would be necessary to read hundreds of incidents since 2018 to determine which of those involved persons under the age of 18, which would exceed the time limit allowed under the Act. 

Pursuant to Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act this letter acts as a Refusal Notice.

Pursuant to Section 16 of the Act I am required to offer you advice and assistance with regarding to refining your request to within the ‘appropriate limit’ (time/cost limit). If you would like to revise your request, omitting Question 5, we may be able to provide the information in response to Questions 1-4 and 6-7.  Additionally, please note that in relation to Question 2, due to records retention, we no longer hold information pre-dating November 2020.  Therefore, you may wish to revise Questions 1 and 2 to include incidents from November 2020 to date.

Please note that systems used for recording information are not generic, nor are the procedures used locally in capturing the data.  It should be noted therefore that this force’s response to your questions should not be used for comparison purposes with any other responses you may receive.