Recommendation 161

While we heard about best practices in the local delivery of probation services, we were also told that communication may be difficult among the various local agencies involved in the delivery of community sentences. Justin Russell, for instance, told us that “there has been a lot of investment in identifying people with a mental health problem when they first come into the system”. He told us that “liaison diversion mental health workers”, who work in “almost every police custody suite”, identify “over 100,000” cases a year. Yet, he explained, “the issue then is whether that information is passed on to the CPS, the courts and the Probation Service” as HMIP “found that often it is not”. 298 They identified causes of these communication issues: as is the case for communication between the Probation Service and its commissioned partners (see section starting at paragraph 173 on “the operation of current contracts”), “quite often, people did not realise that they could share the information and felt that there were data protection restrictions, which was unfortunate, or they forgot to share it or did not have the systems that would enable them to do it”. 299