We’ve had a change of Government, but any change on suicide prevention or commitment to suicide reduction?
The period of Conservative Government, 2010–2024, was the worst for suicide prevention since records began in terms of rising suicide numbers; and the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England 2023–2028 lacked ambition, vision, funding, commitment, positive dynamics for change, and hope.
With Labour’s landslide win, we might have expected change but will we get it from this new Government, ie our new political leaders, and can we get it from a ‘governance establishment’ which, it could be argued, is at least as responsible for the low ambition and systemic failure over the past 14 years as the elected politicians.
There are many different angles I could take on this question, but I’ve covered many already in my detailed critique of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England 2023–2028, and I want to focus on one specific lens through which we can view change — both the lack of positive change in the suicide numbers during the past 14 years, and the potential for us to considerably reduce the suicide numbers over the next 14 years.
Let’s try to be hopeful.
After all, I am “in the hope business”!
A petition for change
The lens through which I’m going to view the transformational change challenge of suicide reduction in England (and the wider UK, although Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales now have their own suicide prevention strategies & plans, so I’ll stick to England), is the petition to parliament that I drafted, published & promoted last year with Steve Phillip of The Jordan Legacy, which got to the 10,000 signatures threshold requiring a written response from government/Government, and which was arrogantly dismissed by those with theoretical ‘responsibility’ for creating hope through action and bringing the suicide numbers down!
The package of proposals put forward emerged from action research among ‘experts by profession and qualifications’ and ‘experts by lived or living experiences of suicide’ summarising the key practical actions needed to get the suicide numbers on a downward trend #TowardsZeroSuicide.
Some of these measures would cost little to implement, and the whole package would ‘pay for itself’ many times over, so anyone truly committed to Suicide Prevention and Suicide Reduction would surely leap at the chance to support and implement these proposals?
Who wants change?
A few big questions need to be asked and, ideally, answered.
Who were these arrogant, out-of-touch people, who rejected these compassionate, constructive proposals so dismissively?
To what extent was it our elected politicians?
To what extent was it our civil servants?
To what extent was it advisers to government?
Or was it a combination of all three?
To what extent was it ‘the system’ to blame rather than any particular individuals, although isn’t any ‘system’ created and sustained by people, so we shouldn’t hide behind ‘the system’ being in the dock?
And another key question now is:
What or who would stop these positive proposals being implemented now?
Let’s test to see if there’s a new Government “willing and able to do all it can to prevent all preventable suicides” — our definition of a Zero Suicide Society which underpinned the action research project, the wider engagement with the Suicide Prevention & Suicide Reduction communities, and the resulting Zero Suicide Society (JoinTheDots) Transformation Programme.
Let’s test if the civil servants supporting Government; advisers to Government (with a large G from the world of Politics with a large P); advisers to government (with a small g and a small p); and the ‘Suicide Prevention Establishment’ are now willing and able to implement these life-saving and cost-saving measures, without the barrier of the Conservatives, or flush out if they’re not pushing forward these proposals; perhaps even preventing change?!
For those who supported the woefully low ambition National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England, 2023–2028 — who didn’t publicly lambast it as myself and others did — who said they wanted higher ambition but thought ‘it’s the best Strategy we’re going to get from this Government’, now is the time to speak publicly and loudly about the need to raise our aspirations on getting the suicide numbers down.
In response to a recent question in the new parliament about action, following yet another preventable suicide death, the Labour Minister taking the question referred the MP to “the government’s National Suicide Prevention Strategy”, thereby adopting “the government’s” Strategy and distancing himself from the responsibility to do better than the previous Government; so accepting low ambition, inaction, and the absence of funding to take impactful action…and all of this supposedly trying to comfort the family of another young person lost too soon!
Whenever I ask those in positions of power and influence, those who shape these national strategies and plans, if they believe that ‘most suicides are preventable’, they invariably say yes, so that means — let’s do the maths! — we should, collectively, be aiming for a 50% reduction at least, as part of getting the suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero.
You agree?!
If not, why not?
Which ‘business’ are you in — Suicide Prevention or Suicide Reduction (or neither)?
Please note that, in this piece, I’m using the two terms ‘Suicide Prevention’ and ‘Suicide Reduction’ quite deliberately, as some people and organisations have a primary focus on Suicide Prevention (or, in some cases, the primary focus might be on, for example, Suicide Bereavement support — valuable work! — which includes suicide prevention via supporting those impacted by a suicide loss) and some, like myself and Towards Zero Suicide CIC, have a primary focus on Suicide Reduction.
Suicide Prevention covers all efforts to prevent suicides at a micro or macro level which could potentially reduce the overall suicide numbers or at least stop them from rising or stop them rising further or faster.
Suicide Reduction covers all co-ordinated efforts via visions, strategies, plans, policy proposals & policy change, advocacy, campaigning, collaborative movements for reduction, breakthrough thinking, transformational change programmes, facilitating systems change, etc to get the overall suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero.
Suicide Prevention activity can take place without Suicide Reduction. Suicide Reduction necessarily includes Suicide Prevention.
Btw many people are not engaged in either Prevention or Reduction, so we need to try and get more people and organisations engaged and involved!
Some people and organisations will (consciously or subconsciously) tolerate 6,000+ suicide deaths each year in the UK, by looking at the graph and saying (or at least thinking) things like “it could be worse” or “we’re probably doing the best we can” or “it’s out of our control” or, when presented with a woefully low ambition National Suicide Prevention Strategy, “it’s probably the best we could get and I think we should support it, not criticise it” — and, crucially, you don’t hear them regularly saying things like “these suicide numbers are totally unacceptable in a so-called civilised society”!
Some people and organisations are actively not tolerating those 6,000+ preventable deaths by suicide each year.
They look at the graph and say — and they believe this deeply and passionately — we must get the suicide numbers down and, crucially, we can get the suicide numbers down, towards zero.
These people and organisations are not just ‘in the Suicide Prevention business’, they’re ‘in the Suicide Reduction business’!
Background and context for the petition proposals to get the (UK) suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero?
I want to first sum up where these petition proposals came from.
Myself and Steve Phillip carried out action research and analysis, and co-authored the report ‘Moving Towards a Zero Suicide Society’, which several Suicide Prevention Leads called “ground-breaking”, publishing the 1st edition on 11 July 2023, followed by an intensive and extensive period of public engagement to get further input and more practical suggestions for getting the suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero.
We then published the 2nd Edition on 29 September 2023, along with other documents effectively putting forward an alternative National Strategy, and I started rolling out the Zero Suicide Society Transformation Programme, now being driven through Towards Zero Suicide CIC which is 100% dedicated to delivering this (JoinTheDots) Transformation Programme, and getting the UK suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero.
After the 1st edition of ‘Moving Towards a Zero Suicide Society’ was published, there were meetings, presentations, workshops, and two open-invitation webinars to fully explain the action research process and analysis; the resulting Zero Suicide Society vision, model, framework, Transformation Programme; and the petition proposals:
In the original report, fine-tuned later, we set out all of the practical actions for getting the suicide numbers down that we can take ourselves, eg ‘take the training, have a conversation’, which I’ve subsequently fleshed out in this report published after the #ZeroSuicideSociety Humber-to-Mersey #JoinTheDotsTour in June 2024…
…practical actions that communities can take, schools, hospitals, workplaces, sectors, professions, etc, and the practical actions we need from government/Government/parliament, especially where there’s a need for changes in the law or regulation or governance systems or parliamentary process or major policy shifts.
These practical actions needed from govt/Govt/parliament were then synthesised — there were more than 20 measures initially, reduced down to 12, to fit into the word limit in the Parliamentary Petitions Committee process — and packaged up under the banner of a ‘Suicide Prevention Act’ to have consolidated change, and relevant enabling legislation where necessary, and to make a clear statement that these measures were aimed at Suicide Prevention.
In fact the package of measures within the petition proposals were aimed at Suicide Reduction but this term is not used among the public at large, and not used enough within the field — maybe we can start using it more?!
As I explained at the webinar on 15 August 2023, the process of publishing the petition proposals highlighted that the civil servant administering the petitions process had a very low level of knowledge about suicide, suicide prevention, current legislation & regulation impacting on suicide & suicide prevention, and — most disturbingly perhaps — what we mean by ‘Lived Experience of Suicide’.
The petition proposal which referred to the foundation stone of the Zero Suicide Society (Building Blocks) model, Lived Experience Involvement with continuous listening to and learning from diverse lived experiences, was actually removed from our initial draft, and — as far as we could tell —this was because the civil servant we were liaising with simply didn’t understand what this was, never mind understanding how vitally important it is for Suicide Prevention and Suicide Reduction.
Our (otherwise polite and friendly) civil servant (just going about their job, which no doubt spans across many different subjects so we wouldn’t expect them to have an in-depth knowledge of suicide, suicide prevention, or related legislation and regulation necessarily, although we might expect them to check a few facts!) also responded by questioning why we wanted to change the Health and Safety at Work legislation as they thought “it already covers suicide”!
It doesn’t, the Act specifically excludes suicide!
They also changed the title of our petition from what we’d submitted — “Introduce a Suicide Prevention Act to seek to minimise suicides” — to “Introduce a Suicide Prevention Act to seek to reduce suicides”, so we had to emphasise one of our most crucial points about high ambition not low ambition and wanting to ‘minimise’ the number of suicides not just ‘reduce’ the number!
Here’s a recording from the section of our webinar on 15 August 2023 where I explain about these changes, the exchanges with our allocated civil servant, and the implications.
Let me make it clear, there’s no suggestion of malevolence or malicious intent here, but it emphasises that a combination of ignorance (not knowing), lack of competence (not checking), and institutionalised low ambition can hold us back in Suicide Prevention and Suicide Reduction.
The petition process progresses and the National Strategy appears
Another story was emerging as our petition was being promoted and the signatures were coming in.
When our petition was launched on 20 July 2023, we were still waiting for a new National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England, which should have been in place from September 2022, 10 years after the first published National Strategy for England, with two 5-year plans having emerged during that time, including the most recent plan which had the low aspiration target of reducing the number of suicides by 10% within 5 years (btw — the numbers didn’t come down by 10%, they actually went up!), but still no sign of the new National Strategy at that point, so we couldn’t account for it or comment on it in our report.
This overdue new or updated National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England, for 2023–2028, finally emerged, to great fanfare from the Minister, Maria Caulfield, on 11 September 2023, the day after World Suicide Prevention Day.
Many people working in the fields of Suicide Prevention and Suicide Reduction, especially those with lived experience of suicide, immediately pointed out the low ambition, the absence of a reduction target, and the absence of any new funding — in fact, with projections of reduced resources, as funding for existing programmes ceased — so little chance of getting the suicide numbers coming down.
In the Strategy document, there was a vague aspiration to reduce the numbers…
…but with no specific numbers or clear route to achieving any reduction, with a scattergun of potential actions listed in a document that otherwise reeked of systemic low ambition from a Government that was likely to be out of office within the next 5 years or, to use the inexact language contained within the National Strategy, within “half this time or sooner”!
Steve Phillip & I met with DHSC to express our dissatisfaction with the new National Strategy for England, and we published a response to the Strategy from The Jordan Legacy with our criticism of its low ambition but also with recommendations for practical actions that would constitute high ambition, taking measures mentioned in the Strategy and raising the bar for these specific measures, so we were effectively putting forward an alternative, more positive, more hopeful, more ambitious National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England:
Combined with our report ‘Moving Towards a Zero Suicide Society’, and our petition package of proposals, this higher ambition, practical alternative gave a lot more hope to those working in Suicide Reduction, we had widespread support for our proposals, and the numbers of signatures on our petition were gradually building towards the first key threshold of 10,000 which requires the govt/Govt to provide a formal, written response.
So there was superb support, especially from people in our network with lived experience of suicide, but there was some resistance from within the fields of Suicide Prevention and Suicide Reduction, mainly from the bigger national charities, with a few smaller charities also resistant or disengaged, and from some of those who were directly involved in shaping the National Strategy for England who, as we might expect, were defensive in the face of criticism of ‘their Strategy’ and ‘their low ambition’ baked into the new National Strategy.
Some told us “it was the best Strategy we could get in the circumstances” which is not much of a defence, especially when low ambition costs lives.
It’s certainly a huge risk to publicly back such a low aspiration Strategy, and be seen to be ‘conspiring with low ambition’.
As I remarked at the time, “if you get into bed with low ambition, you tend to get infected with low ambition”!
At an NSPA webinar dedicated to this topic, one supporter of the Strategy and a highly vocal supporter of the National Strategy Advisory Group repeated a line which has been used several times publicly by lead adviser Professor Appleby “in the circumstances, we’re very lucky to even have a Strategy”, which also smacks of institutionalised low ambition.
The most horrific response we received to our challenges around the flatlining of the suicide numbers over the previous 15 years was “at least the numbers aren’t going up”!
We also heard members of the National Suicide Prevention Advisory Group, trying to defend what to most people working in Suicide Reduction looks like failing national strategies and plans, “without the National Strategy, the numbers could be higher”.
Aside from this being speculative, it also misses the key point that the numbers should be on a long-term downward trend, towards zero, so even a flat line is a dreadful result.
Then, when we got the 2022–2023 ONS statistics for England, the numbers had actually gone up, by 6% (followed by confirmation of a 7.6% rise for England & Wales), so no-one could again use that awful line “at least they’re not going up”!
In my conversations with Suicide Prevention Leads around-the-country, and the many people with lived experience in our network, I was urged to write a more detailed critique of the underlying, systemic, institutionalised failures in the current National Strategy for England and the process that keeps creating low ambition strategies & plans, and to apply my ‘dynamics of change’ analysis to the barriers and potential for positive change and higher impact, so I published this 36,000-word critique and analysis of how we can break down the barriers to change and get the numbers down:
Nice to get support, sad to have opposition or ‘non-support’
Our experience with promoting the petition proposals and trying to ‘get signatures’ was an education in itself.
On the positive side of the equation, we had lots of people giving us tips for how to boost the number of petition signatures including from those who’d achieved large numbers of signatures on their petitions such as the 3 Dads Walking and the #ForThe100 campaign.
We had lots of people & organisations supporting us publicly with great enthusiasm.
We had pro bono support from Rashpal Singh Sagoo and his business BOXmedia producing superb promotional videos.
And we had many of our collaborative partners sending us videos they’d made themselves, inc Bob & Maggie Abrahart, Charlie Hart, Ellie Hatto, Jeremy O’Dwyer, Richard McCann, Sam Southern, and Jayne Walsham.
On the negative side of the equation, we had charities & CICs working in Suicide Prevention who didn’t support our petition for a range of revealing and, in some respects, disturbing reasons.
All good insight though!
Some of them said they needed more detail on our proposals before they could support our petition, eg before supporting the proposal for suicide prevention education in schools, wanting to know exactly what would be covered, how it would be covered, and who would cover it.
This particular policy proposal was, of course, building on the petition the 3 Dads Walking had already initiated and taken all the way to parliament.
At the point where our proposal was launched, there still appeared to be no movement from the Department for Education, so we included it among the 12 specific asks in our petition to help keep the pressure on for a reform that virtually everyone we’d interviewed had said was a ‘no brainer’ for getting the suicide numbers down.
It’s actually quite common, when petitions are put up, for people and organisations to argue for more details on ‘the what, how and who’ even though there’s a compelling ‘why’ and the overwhelming majority in favour.
This can be in good faith, due to genuine strong concerns about potential adverse impacts.
And it can be a ‘campaign tactic’ from opponents because it’s easy to try and block what is intended as a positive change that most people and organisations support by demanding further detail that cannot actually be provided at this stage where the debate is still focused on the principle, and the detail takes time to work through with all the stakeholders.
We highlighted at the time that supporting our petition would enable a process where there would be much discussion, deliberation and debate on ‘the what, how and who’ before any detailed policy went forward, and there would be research, engagement and consultation with parents, pupils, teachers, school staff & other stakeholders before anything was finalised…
…and we urged people to sign our petition to try and help kick start this process.
But some still chose not to, even though they claimed to want to help reduce the numbers of suicides, and the overwhelming majority of suicide prevention advocates had said this change would help reduce the numbers.
In the time that has elapsed since our petition, there has been some movement at DfE, although not as far or as fast as we would like, and we’ve heard from more experts about ‘the what, how and who’ of this particular policy proposal, including the really valuable Churchill Fellowship report from Nina Smith which includes detail on the successful implementation of suicide prevention education in schools in other countries, like Australia and the US.
But, at the time of our petition, we did face some opposition from some people and organisations we thought would be supportive, and that was challenging.
More recent calls for ‘collaboration’ and ‘bringing everyone together’ to facilitate the changes needed to get the suicide numbers on a downward trend #TowardsZeroSuicide has to of course take into account the fact that not all those people and organisations you think are ‘with you’ will in fact be active collaborative partners when it really matters.
Some will openly not support you and publicly give their reasons why, which at least ticks the transparency and accountability boxes even if unhelpful and frustrating; some will privately tell you why they’re not supporting your petition, which at least shows some level of courtesy and respect; some will just not reply to your messages and say nothing; and, probably worst of all, some will say they’re going to support you but won’t!
One prominent charity told us they would support our petition, that their Board of Trustees had agreed in principle to support our petition, that they would put something in their next newsletter urging support for our petition…but then didn’t follow through on their promises and they became conspicuous for their lack of support for our petition.
I have no explanation for this because this charity couldn’t explain its inaction, despite claiming to share the vision of a Zero Suicide Society and to want the practical actions that would get the suicide numbers down, towards zero; and claiming to want to work ‘collaboratively’ and even berating other people for not being ‘collaborative’!
It’s a strange world sometimes!
The bigger charities often have their own agenda or a different focus
As is often the case for advocacy and campaigns ‘from the ground up’, most of the big national charities didn’t support our petition, despite some of them being more than happy to take part in the action research project that identified and synthesised the practical actions needed to get the suicide numbers down, ie participated in the research and engagement exercise which shaped the petition proposals.
We knew they wouldn’t necessarily support all 12 of the policy proposals contained within the petition package, but we did think they might support the package in principle perhaps with some qualifications or conditions, but none of them supported our petition.
To be fair, Samaritans did have a conversation about it with us, and explained that they didn’t want to support a proposal for a Suicide Prevention Act because they weren’t sure if legislation was ‘the way to go’, they weren’t sure if legislation was actually necessary for the changes we were asking for in our petition package, and they’d been ‘burned’ by their experience with the Online Safety Bill which had taken up so much time and effort over a period of years, demonstrating how hard it is to effect change this way.
This gave us the opportunity to explain that several of the petition proposals didn’t need new legislation or changes to existing legislation but some did, and the petition was also a tactical tool to try and get MPs thinking about all the measures that can get the numbers of suicides down — and this was a constructive conversation which highlighted all the possible routes to desired changes.
In contrast, PAPYRUS didn’t want to engage with our petition at all and told us they had a blanket policy of not supporting petitions — other than those initiated by themselves or PAPYRUS ambassadors like the 3 Dads Walking — because “we get lots of requests to support petitions and campaigns and we have to say no to them all”.
Having a blanket policy like this of course means no scope for collaboration around shared goals, and no scope to be discerning and support those petitions that have particular worth…and it effectively creates an additional barrier to suicide prevention.
We did try to argue a case for PAPYRUS supporting this particular petition, including highlighting the fact that the PAPYRUS CEO was interviewed as part of the action research project which generated the co-created proposals contained within the petition and he seemed to be in favour (although he may not have supported each of the 12 specific measures).
We also highlighted the fact that we had been very active in helping promote the 3 Dads Walking petition for suicide prevention education in schools, and had interviewed the 3 Dads Walking as part of the action research project, and thought that PAPYRUS supporting this petition, which included a further call for suicide prevention education in schools, might help ‘keep the pressure on the Department for Education’…
…but PAPYRUS thought being seen to support our petition could “water down” the 3 Dads Walking campaign.
So we had to agree to disagree on this!
I would certainly urge all charities, CICs, advocates & campaigners in the fields of Suicide Prevention and Suicide Reduction to not have a blanket policy of not supporting the petitions or campaigns of others trying to get the suicide numbers down, and to seek ways to collaborate around our common goals.
Otherwise, it’s making it so much harder to effect change in getting the suicide numbers down, and it’s disheartening for the smaller charities and CICs when the bigger national charities like PAPYRUS have a blanket non-collaboration policy.
But, thankfully, we had lots of support from individuals and from many small, local, grassroots charities, CICs, and community organisations, and we managed to reach the 10,000 signatures needed to require a formal written response to our petition proposals.
The sad story of the DHSC VCSE Suicide Prevention Grant Fund
Just before summarising that response, the political backdrop here was a Government falling apart after 14 years in office, with consistently poor poll ratings for both the party and the PM; the Government regularly being described in focus groups as out-of-touch and arrogant; and it being almost certain there would be a change of party ‘in power’, so the Conservatives had no drive in terms of taking forward any policies or measures that it didn’t think would be immediate vote winners.
And suicide prevention has never been seen as a vote winner, by any party.
One way in which the Government and its Ministers had demonstrated they were out-of-touch and making poor decisions was the DHSC VCSE Suicide Prevention Grant Fund.
[DHSC is Department of Health & Social Care]
[VCSE = Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise organisations]
When the belated National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England, 2023–2028, was finally released on 11 September 2023, the Mental Health Minister, Maria Caulfield, had announced this Grant Fund with great fanfare as an example of new funding for suicide prevention.
This was disingenuous for 4 reasons.
1) it was the only piece of ‘new funding’ as part of the new Strategy.
2) it had already been announced so it was the political game of having more than one ‘announcement’ for the same pot of money.
3) buried deeper in the Strategy was the bad news that some of the existing funding streams were running down and would not be renewed so, by the end of 2028, it was projected that significantly fewer resources would be devoted to suicide prevention.
4) the total amount allocated to the Grant Fund was a one-off pot of just £10 million when preventable suicide deaths were known to cost the country £10 billion per year
And along with a National Suicide Prevention Strategy that was effectively a big competition with winners (a small number of ‘priority groups’) and losers (a large number of groups and issues not given ‘priority’ status), the Government was creating yet another competition, in the form of the Grant Fund, which would potentially have a very small number of winners and a very large number of losers.
And this is what happened, with DHSC announcing there would be just 70 organisations receiving funding and 1700 organisations receiving no funding, so only 5% successful in this competition and 95% unsuccessful.
To make things worse, 25% of the total funding was allocated to just 4 charities, which was an extraordinary decision.
When the Fund was first announced, the Minister said that it was for “small, local, grassroots organisations” so it was an opportunity to give out small grants to hundreds of VCSEs which met these criteria, organisations for which even just £1,000 could be a a significant injection of cash.
And, btw, it had been announced that the Fund was to cover operational costs for existing services not capital costs for new investment, which in itself is unusual for a grant fund, but this provided an opportunity to assist hundreds of small, local VCSEs with their cashflow.
But by allocating 25% of the total Fund to just 4 charities, with these 4 charities each getting more than £500,000, it scuppered any possibility of a large number of small, local, grassroots organisations benefiting.
And who were these “small, local, grassroots organisations” getting huge grants?
Well two of them were PAPYRUS and Samaritans, neither of which would be generally regarded as “small, local, grassroots organisations”!
I was very critical of this decision at the time and publicly criticised the Government/DHSC for its poor decisions, organisations like PAPYRUS and Samaritans for taking the (lion’s share of the) money from the Fund, and all those responsible for being part of this fiasco as I saw it.
My arguments were robust and founded on sound ethical and moral principles, having had many experiences of helping to create grant funds, sitting on boards awarding funds, and evaluating grant funds:
> no person or organisation involved in the creation or management of any Grant Fund should be eligible to receive money from the Fund
> if the Fund is intended to be for “small, local, grassroots organisations”, then only ‘small, local, grassroots organisations’ should be eligible to apply and receive funds.
On this basis, I argued that organisations like PAPYRUS and Samaritans should not have even been able to apply for money from this Fund and certainly should not have been awarded funding.
The amount they received just made it look even worse but the underlying principles should have ruled them out anyway.
And then we had the Minister, Maria Caulfield, attending the NSPA (National Suicide Prevention Alliance) Conference on 31 January at The Oval with what I called her ‘David Brent moment’:
She breezily announced to the room “I’m delighted to confirm that NSPA has been successful in its application to the DHSC VCSE Grant Fund” (NSPA had been awarded £150,000, in addition to its ‘parent organisation’ Samaritans being given £530,000).
This was a room filled with people and organisations that had been unsuccessful in their applications, with around 95% of the applicants in the room having been unsuccessful, and yet the Minister — completely misjudging this moment — seemed to think there would be huge applause for her announcement!
The #ZeroSuicideSociety Transformation Programme & #JoinTheDotsTour
For the record, I wrote a submission on behalf of The Jordan Legacy to roll out the Zero Suicide Society Transformation Programme, designed to get the suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero, but this was one of the 1,700 applications that received no funding at all.
I ended up rolling out the Programme, including organising the #ZeroSuicide Society #JoinTheDotsTour from the Humber to the Mersey in June 2024 with no grant funding from DHSC or any other source, once again emphasising how hard it is for small, local, grassroots organisations working in collaborative partnership to get the suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero suicide.
For those not already aware, we had a ground-breaking Launch Conference at the Baths Hall which was largely independently-funded but with very generous support from North Lincolnshire Council Public Health:
And we had a totally independently-funded, pioneering Tour across the M62 Corridor, and grand finale in Liverpool, with free venues supplied by several of our collaborative partners:
This piece on the National Suicide Prevention Alliance (NSPA) website summarises the whole Tour, with lessons learned and tips for anyone thinking of planning and organising anything similar in their area:
https://nspa.org.uk/news/insights-and-learnings-from-the-zero-suicide-society-humber-to-mersey-tour/
We’re quick to blame the politicians but is this fair criticism?
Finally, before focusing in detail on those petition proposals, I want to highlight the fact that this ‘political backdrop’ is not just Political with a large P because it wasn’t just the Government with a large G that created the woefully low ambition National Suicide Prevention Strategy.
It wasn’t just the Government that created and administered the shambolic DHSC VCSE Grant Fund, it was government with a small g; civil servants at DHSC; advisers to (large G) Government; advisers to (small g) government; the National Suicide Prevention Advisory Group; and some of those organisations which ended up benefiting from the Fund.
When I raise these types of concerns, I know it can upset people who believe, in good faith, they are not doing anything ‘wrong’ and are simply trying to help — and, indeed, some contacted me to tell me “all we’re trying to do is prevent suicides and save lives” — but we’re all trying to do that, all the ‘small, local, grassroots organisations’ are trying to do that, along with all the individual advocates and campaigners, but not all have the same level of power & influence, or access to decision makers, or access to funding, despite all believing we have the passionate desire and practical ability to prevent suicides and save lives.
These small, local, grassroots organisations, and these individual advocates and campaigners, are often working in collaborative partnership because they believe it’s the way to have most impact, and because they know they have very limited power and influence on their own…but they regularly come up against barriers to collaboration and collective impact.
The ‘response’ to the petition from DHSC
Given that we had not only submitted proposed actions to get the suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero, but criticised the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England for being woeful in its low ambition — and I’d gone further in my critique in saying it was also “shameful in its spin; potentially harmful in places; and, at worst, the suicide prevention strategy that prevents us from preventing suicides” — and given that we’d put forward more ambitious proposals for a considerably better National Strategy, it was immediately disappointing and frustrating to see this as the first line of the DHSC’s response:
In subsequent interactions with DHSC, they continued to refer us to the National Strategy — just as Ministers in the previous Government did and the new Government has done — completely ignoring our criticism of, and proposed alternative to, the woefully low ambition National Strategy.
Large chunks of the DHSC response to our petition proposals were simply copied and pasted from the National Strategy, emphasising how little thought and effort had gone into the response, and how disrespectful it was.
It would be hard to blame the politicians for this lack of commitment to suicide prevention because it probably never got as far as being seen by a politician; probably not even a senior civil servant, just low level administrative processing.
The 2nd paragraph (below) is more of the same, patronising us by telling us what we already knew, ie that there was a new National Strategy for England; failing to acknowledge our criticisms of, and alternatives to, this woefully low ambition National Strategy; and with the additional, poorly punctuated, line at the end of this 2nd paragraph saying “It is our view, that many of the actions suggested within this petition, will be delivered through the Strategy”:
We had already highlighted how, in our view, many of these actions would NOT be delivered through the National Strategy, and how we didn’t believe it was truly a cross-government strategy.
Indeed, one of the petition proposals was for a National Suicide Prevention Office to help make sure it was truly a whole-of-government approach, not coming through the Health Department with largely a health lens.
The 3rd paragraph (below) states that “The Strategy set an ambition to reduce suicides within five years” but we’d already criticised it for being both vague and low ambition with no specific reduction target!
It says “The strategy is informed by data, evidence, and engagement with stakeholders, including people with lived experience…” but my critique had already highlighted the problems with ‘The Data & Evidence Bias Trap’ which bakes systemic bias and discrimination in to the National Strategy — ie where quantitative data on higher-than-average risk exists, ‘priority group’ status is assigned whilst other groups are de-prioritised and penalised for not having the right type of data or evidence — and it had highlighted how thin the engagement among people with lived experience of suicide had been:
The text above also repeats a common claim from DHSC and the National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group that the National Strategy had been informed by public engagement via “the mental health call for evidence” in 2022. I’d also highlighted the flaws here in my published critique.
When DHSC put out a call for evidence in 2022, it was around the ‘Ten Year Mental Health Plan’ and it asked for input into the Mental Health Plan, it was not a public engagement or consultation or call for evidence specific to suicide prevention or specifically to shape the Suicide Prevention Strategy.
And this is an important distinction, as well as being in stark contrast to Scotland where there was a specific two-part process to develop the National Suicide Prevention Strategy.
In Scotland, as well as having a joint national government and local government approach, via the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities (COSLA), there was an initial open engagement exercise with a call for evidence and proposals, and then the draft Suicide Prevention Strategy was put out for detailed public consultation.
In England, there was no public engagement at all specific to the National Suicide Prevention Strategy, and the draft National Strategy was not put out for public consultation.
Within the call for evidence around the 10-Year Mental Health Plan, there was a structure based around half a dozen questions, none of which referred to suicide or suicide prevention, and only one of which — around crisis intervention — could readily be related to suicide prevention.
Obviously, in the absence of an engagement process specifically for the National Suicide Prevention Strategy, people and organisations used the Mental Health Plan to try and put across their experiences and views around suicide prevention; and the National Suicide Prevention Strategy Advisory Group tried to shoe-horn a consultation around suicide prevention into this mental health consultation process.
Sadly, ironically, among the key points we’d been making for the past 12 months were that ‘suicide is not just a mental health issue’ and it’s problematic when suicide prevention is subsumed within mental health — and we were arguing that DHSC should not be in charge of developing and agreeing the National Suicide Prevention Strategy because of the health bias — and here was DHSC saying that suicide prevention had been covered within the Mental Health Plan process!
To make matters worse, the Government then announced that it was not going ahead with the 10-Year Mental Health Plan and, instead, was going to merge it into a Major Conditions Strategy that would include conditions like Cancer and Dementia, further watering down its commitment to mental health and doubly watering down any remaining semblance of commitment to suicide prevention.
The 4th paragraph in ‘the government’s response’, which turned out to be a DHSC response, all makes sense and is obviously designed to be reassuring but it also comes across as dismissive and arrogant because it also ignores the points we made about the flaws in the National Strategy and the National Strategy process and our specific proposal in the petition for a National Suicide Prevention Office for a genuine whole-of-government approach, not the limited and systemically biased approach that results from having ‘the Health Department’ responsible for the National Suicide Prevention Strategy.
Next the DHSC response says:
DHSC may well, in good faith, believe that the actions identified in the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England, 2023–2028, “go some way to deliver what this petition seeks to bring forward” but, even then, it’s acknowledging that some only go “some way” and we’d already highlighted the shortfalls and how much further the measures identified in the Strategy need to go:
And, as I’ll highlight below, some of the petition proposals are not covered at all by the National Suicide Prevention Strategy, and some of them are not even given the courtesy of a specific response from DHSC which I think is totally unacceptable, making a mockery of this democratic process encouraging people to put forward petitions, get 10,000+ signatures, and have a requirement for a formal written response from ‘the government’.
So let’s look at the items DHSC does choose to comment on, along with its comments, before highlighting the petition proposals DHSC chose to completely ignore.
First, there’s a response to the proposal, reiterating the call from the 3 Dads Walking, for suicide prevention education in schools.
At the time of this response from DHSC, we’d had the 3 Dads Walking petition with 170,000 signatures, and almost universal support for this proposal from those working in suicide prevention, and many MPs had given it their backing in the Westminster Hall Debate that was prompted by the 3 Dads Walking petition; and many ‘experts’ had supported it.
We should have been well past the ‘whether to’ stage and moving forward with ‘the what, how and who’ but the Department for Education was still stuck in the ‘whether to’ stage.
Since this response to our petition, there has been some revised guidance for RHSE published which goes part-way to what the advocates, campaigners and experts have been asking for.
We’ve also now got the report from Nina Smith’s Churchill Fellowship on this very subject, which highlights what is in place in other countries where they are several years down-the-track in having suicide prevention education, and other relevant support, in schools.
I know DfE has expressed interest in seeing this latest research but with a form of words that sounded typically conservative and defensive, certainly not positive about the opportunity to save lives. That’s obviously their default setting. But hopefully Nina’s report will enlighten and reassure, and help move this forward.
It’s already had a huge impact with Edge Hill University committing to building suicide prevention education in schools into its teacher training courses, and rolling it out to schools:
Heartwarming!
Next, DHSC responds to our call for Suicide Prevention Impact Assessments by saying there are plans to launch “a mental health impact assessment tool” as a guidance tool for policymakers.
This is a fail on several counts.
We’d actually had a meeting with DHSC 4 months previously where I’d emphasised that what we were proposing was a specific Suicide Prevention Impact Assessment, not a broad ‘mental health impact assessment’.
I’d also emphasised that it’s much harder to implement a broad tool around mental health than to implement a process focused specifically on suicide risk or benefit so better to start with suicide prevention first.
And, of course, there is the usual problem of a ‘mental health tool’ treating suicide prevention as ‘a mental health issue’.
The proposal in the petition was for a Suicide Prevention Impact Assessment before the introduction of any new laws, new policy proposals, and before finalising the recommendations of any major policy review or Inquiry, so not just for ‘policy making’.
And to be a statutory requirement, not just a guidance tool for policymakers.
Now it’s possible a defensive DHSC might argue that this level of detail wasn’t apparent from the petition itself, and that would be true, but we had briefed DHSC previously on this detail, we had sent them copies of our response to the National Strategy with our wider proposals, we had sent them links to recordings of webinars where we discussed the proposals in more detail, we had sent them video summaries…
…and they could have asked!
But that’s a fundamental flaw in the petition process perhaps, that the ‘formal, written response from government’ can be made with no discussion and no attempt to understand the actual proposals they are dismissing!
This next paragraph (below) reads like a typical piece of government waffle and it’s not clear exactly which of our petition proposals it’s responding to.
It would have been helpful to have had headings covering each of our proposals.
I think it’s probably meant to be a response to our proposal for “Establish dedicated crisis support and community support hubs” but our proposal was focused much more on community-based solutions not services within the NHS or ‘health-based places of safety’ although we certainly need all NHS services to be ‘places of safety’ and capable of appropriate and effective triage for anyone experiencing crisis.
I’ve since learned about funding from NHS England for 6 pilot projects across the country that will effectively be 24/7 ‘Mental Health Hubs’, and this does sound interesting but, once again, the emphasis is on mental health not suicide prevention specifically, and it looks like these hubs could be in NHS premises rather than in independent community venues, which would be disappointing.
Next, we have another section of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England (below) which has been pasted into the DHSC response to the petition without it being clear which particular proposal it’s meant to be responding to:
As it happens, this has subsequently arisen in conversations and exchanges because the National Suicide Prevention Strategy included…
…but it hasn’t fulfilled this commitment.
It’s been a source of particular consternation and frustration for the Construction sector, where many people and organisations are desperate to reduce the suicide rates, because there have been no figures for the sector published by ONS since 2021 — when there were 507 suicides among Construction workers in England & Wales, almost 10% of all suicides in England & Wales.
This has fuelled (unhealthy) speculation that there’s been a considerable rise in the suicide rate among Construction workers in the past 2 years with the government frightened to publish the figures in the absence of any plan to tackle this problem.
And there’s one other problem with this text of course…
…which is, as highlighted in my critique of the National Strategy for England, it potentially falls into ‘The Priority Trap’ of trying to prioritise which sectors to focus suicide prevention on rather than trying to reduce the number of suicides in each and every sector by working collaboratively with each and every sector, not turning suicide prevention into a competition!
Next (below), we have these comments…
…which I think is a response to these particular petition proposals (although, again, it’s not clear because there are no headings and no synchronised order to the DHSC’s responses):
The text on the nRTSSS system and data-sharing is fine as far as it goes, but the DHSC response misses the point again because the petition proposal was for statutory local suicide prevention partnerships which would have the necessary authority and funding to be able to effectively and sustainably gather, study, and analyse all the relevant data; plug gaps in the data; work in collaborative partnership with all other relevant local and national bodies; implement a system of Continuous Systemic Action Learning; take appropriate and effective action to reduce suicides in their area; and have continuous review and evaluation of impact.
This is not what we have.
Some local partnerships have been able to continue without national funding but many have fallen away as funding has ceased.
And, as data sets grow, there’s a tendency to start giving greater priority to analysis from national nRTSSS data when, in fact, the greatest value is in local data, local analysis, local collaboration, and local action; which is why we were advocating for well-funded, statutory local partnerships.
In response to the very specific proposal in the petition…
…DHSC’s response was:
At least it accepts that the National Suicide Prevention Strategy doesn’t cover amending the Building Regulations.
But, once again, it’s a disappointing and frustrating low ambition brush-off.
The petition was deliberately being very specific with a high ambition proposal designed to have high impact in reducing the suicide numbers.
We know there are other initiatives being planned or implemented around the country to try and better design the built environment or public spaces to try and reduce the numbers of suicides, but we were suggesting that we raise the bar and go for a whole systems change solution.
The Building Regulations have had past reviews which have taken into account the physical safety considerations of how to try and prevent accidents and accidental deaths, but not from the perspective of how to try and prevent and minimise suicide deaths and people intentionally trying to harm themselves.
This point seems to have been lost on DHSC, or deliberately ignored.
In response to the petition proposal…
…DHSC responded:
This is another case of not taking any time to understand the actual proposal being put forward here, and it’s indicative of a wider problem within the field of suicide prevention.
Because anyone experiencing any form of loss or trauma experience is at a heightened risk of suicide, with anyone experiencing any form of traumatic loss being at a considerably higher suicide risk, this proposal was for anyone experiencing any form of loss or trauma to have access to relevant counselling to help them through their loss or trauma experience and thereby reduce their suicide risk.
The DHSC in its response, as so many people and organisations do, has immediately narrowed the scope down to only those facing bereavement by suicide.
This is an important sub-group, and we welcome efforts to support those who’ve experienced suicide bereavement, but to get the suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero, we must support everyone who experiences any form of loss or trauma — and any form of traumatic loss — who we know can then have a potentially heightened risk of suicide.
Disturbingly and disrespectfully, there were some of the specific petition proposals that DHSC did not comment on at all in its response.
One was predictable because we were advocating for a whole-of-government approach via the establishment of a National Suicide Prevention Office (NSPO) which of course would be seen as a threat to DHSC or would be considered by DHSC as not needed…
…but evidence around the world suggests that you don’t get a genuine whole-of-government response when the National Suicide Prevention Strategy is managed out of ‘the Health Department’; the health bias tends to be locked in.
This proposal wasn’t commented on at all either:
Was it lack of understanding or lack of commitment, or both?
This proposal was for all government departments, all statutory organisations, all regulated industries, sectors & professions, and ideally all significant sized workplaces to have co-created Suicide Prevention Plans or Zero Suicide Plans, the implementation of Zero Suicide/Zero Suicide Society frameworks, and mandatory suicide prevention training.
This had been fleshed out in several presentations, webinars, video explainers, and correspondence which had all been forwarded to DHSC (because the word limit constraints of the petitions process can’t do it justice)…
…but I suspect no-one at DHSC had taken notice because they weren’t interested and/or the person or people who, probably very quickly, wrote the response to the petition (which came out surprisingly quickly!) just tried to brush it off asap and get it off their task list for the week!
And another important and complex proposal…
…did not even get the courtesy of a response.
Two more specific proposals didn’t get a response, as far as we were concerned.
For one of these…
…DHSC might have thought it had responded because it made some comments about lived experience input…
…but we’d already emphasised that the level of lived experience input into the Strategy was poor and inadequate in our view, and that the bar needed to be raised much higher for future Lived Experience Involvement.
Revealingly, when we first submitted the petition, the civil servant we were dealing with had taken out the specific proposal for ‘lived experience input’ and it appeared they didn’t really understand what this was, which I mentioned in the video explainer for the petition proposals:
We explained that it was crucial, the foundation stone for the Zero Suicide Society approach, and we were talking about a diverse mix of people with lived experience of suicide being involved in the development of the co-created Suicide Prevention Plans and Zero Suicide Strategies we’d proposed.
The other omission is also revealing.
We wanted proposals for reducing suicides among workers and we specifically wanted the RIDDOR requirements to be changed:
The civil servant we were dealing with said they thought suicide was covered by existing legislation so we had to explain that the reporting requirements explicitly excluded investigating suspected suicides, which was precisely why we were asking for this change.
Here’s a post I did about this on LinkedIn:
And here on Twitter:
And, after all that, DHSC did not even bother to respond to this specific proposal!
Which is another reason why we were advocating for a National Suicide Prevention Office not managing the National Suicide Prevention Strategy out of the Health Department where they often don’t understand these issues or don’t have the appetite for driving such changes, or both.
You cannot be serious DHSC!
And then, last not least, we have the ultimate piss-take from DHSC.
After making a submission to the DHSC VCSE Suicide Prevention Grant Fund for funding to support the roll out of the #ZeroSuicideSociety #JoinTheDots Transformation Programme, with a much more ambitious suicide prevention strategy than the National Strategy for England, and after publicly exposing the sham of the the Fund, with only 5% of applicants getting any funding, and 25% of the total funds going to just 4 charities, including 2 big national charities that, as I’ve explained, I didn’t think were eligible for this money, and shouldn’t have even applied for it, DHSC included this as the sign-off for its response to our petition!
But we press on!
With the petition proposals having been rudely ignored; govt/Govt having demonstrated their lack of commitment to suicide prevention; no serious consideration having been given to more ambitious proposals to get the suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero; no funding being made available to support an alternative high ambition strategy; and many people & organisations in what is increasingly, disturbingly, called “the suicide prevention sector” — or I’ve even heard “our industry”! — appearing to support the woefully low ambition National Strategy and make comments like “the National Strategy is what it is, we just need to support it now” and “our job is to implement the National Strategy”…
…I had to just press on with rolling out the #ZeroSuicideSociety #JoinTheDots Transformation Programme without any public funding or grants or government backing.
And that’s what I did, with some initial support from The Jordan Legacy, then setting up a new, dedicated, for-purpose business Towards Zero Suicide CIC, rolling out the Programme via the Humber-to-Mersey JoinTheDotsTour…
…and then embedding the Programme with our initial collaborative partners, with a view to then gradually and organically expanding the Programme.
The Tour made its way across the M62 Corridor, arriving in Liverpool, as planned, to dovetail with the 5th Global Zero Suicide Summit — strictly speaking, the International Zero Suicide in Healthcare Summit — which I attended on 24/25 June:
Follow-up and follow-through — the hard yards of suicide reduction
Learning from previous Tours and major campaigns and awareness-raising initiatives, where I’d heard lots of complaints about the organisers “completely disappearing at the end of the Tour”, probably exhausted, as it’s tough to organise these types of major events and initiatives, I allocated the whole of July to follow-ups and follow-throughs, as we’d connected with more than 3,000 people from 550 organisations, and developed or deepened relationships in the 15 towns & cities the Tour had visited.
The General Election — did it make any difference?!
And on 4 July, of course, it was the General Election with the expected win for the Labour Party, and a much bigger win than many had expected, including the polls, so we had a new Labour Government.
The outgoing Conservative Government had been ‘in power’ for 14 years, from 2010 to 2024, with its first National Suicide Prevention Strategy published in 2012, and the Mental Health Minister, Maria Caulfield, had told the nation on BBC Breakfast, and elsewhere, that there had been “considerable progress since 2012”, which was repeating the first line in the Executive Summary of the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England that so many people and organisations had signed up to:
We now know that the Conservative Hall of Shame — led by Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak — had presided over the highest increase in the suicide numbers of any Government since records began.
It had been extremely hard to justify a claim of ‘considerable progress since 2012’ when this claim was initially made in September 2023.
It’s impossible to defend now we have the latest data for 2023.
So having waved goodbye to the worst Government in history for suicide prevention, we all thought the new Government must be better right?
But, so far, so little.
Nothing in the action plans for the first 100 days; nothing in the King’s Speech; nothing in their first Budget; no new funding; no new ideas; no interest in the more ambitious strategies we put forward; no dedicated Minister for Suicide Prevention (not even a Mental Health Minister); and appearing to embrace the previous Government’s woefully low ambition National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England, 2023–2028, without raising the bar.
Whole system change needed, not just another bunch of politicians!
But, as the analysis above shows, especially the appalling response from DHSC which probably had no involvement from the politicians, and the way so many people & organisations working in suicide prevention have seemingly happily got into bed with low ambition and are not actively agitating for a much more ambitious Suicide Prevention Strategy — just asking for more money, which is part of the answer but only part — we can’t just blame the Labour Party for the inertia since July, just as we probably shouldn’t just blame the Conservative Party for the lack of ambition in the National Suicide Prevention Strategy for England, 2023–2028.
One of the most depressing things I saw after the General Election was this post on LinkedIn by the CEO of one of the UK’s biggest suicide prevention charities, PAPYRUS:
Now, first let me say that I spend a fair amount of time promoting the services that PAPYRUS provides, and did so during the #JoinTheDotsTour Launch Conference and throughout the Tour; I have worked happily with many PAPYRUS staff; I’ve supported the PAPYRUS ambassadors, 3 Dads Walking, from the very beginning of their walks; I walked with the 3 Dads Walking for a day in April this year, and I invited Mike Palmer to be on our stage at our Launch Conference for our panel on suicide prevention education in schools — I try to do all I can to be collaborative, and I will continue to promote PAPYRUS and HOPELINE.
But I couldn’t let these comments on LinkedIn from the PAPYRUS CEO go because it just sounded defeatist and lacking in ambition to say “I have no particular ‘ask’ of the new Government other than that it see suicide as a preventable death”.
I thought “surely PAPYRUS should be well prepared and have very specific ‘asks’ from the Government?’’ and I was also frustrated by the comments from the PAPYRUS CEO (and others on his thread) being negative about ‘Zero Suicide’ and, by association, being negative about the Zero Suicide Society Programme, which is clearly designed to break through the inertia and get the suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero suicide.
So I replied…
…which led to some rather nasty personal abuse in other reply comments but more understanding from others after I’d had the chance to explain the serious points I was making, and explain more about the Zero Suicide and Zero Suicide Society philosophies, visions & frameworks.
The lasting impact was thinking ‘myself and all my collaborative partners, of which 80% are people with lived experience of suicide, are trying to make change happen from the ground-up and, occasionally, from the top down, eg via the petition proposals, and we’ve invested huge effort in collating all the practical actions we can take ourselves and all the actions we need others to take, including Govt/govt/parliament, and published all of this, and toured the country with it with enthusiastic support from hundreds of local charities and CICs (and wonderful practical support in each location from Samaritans incidentally), and tried unsuccessfully to get funding from DHSC (whilst others have got £500K+), and tried to get our alternative, high ambition suicide prevention strategies, plans and ‘specific asks’ in front of the new Labour Government…
…and here’s one of the most powerful and influential people in ‘the suicide prevention sector’, heading up one of the biggest national charities, and he doesn’t have any particular ‘ask’ of the new Government and no expectations of the new Government “other than that it see suicide as a preventable death”.
I find that very sad and quite depressing!
Final Reflections
Once again, at least it makes it clear that those of us who are out there trying to make a difference from the ground-up; who are ambitious; who want to get the suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero; and who believe we can get the suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero suicide…
…probably aren’t going to get much support, if any, from the top down, whether that be the Government, government, DHSC, or the big national charities like PAPYRUS — although thank you once again Samaritans for all your practical support for our Summer Tour.
I believe that we can and we should continue to support the services that the big charities like PAPYRUS provide to support children and young people, but we know we can’t rely on them to support our advocacy and campaigning efforts to get the suicide numbers down for people of all ages; the 6,000+ preventable suicide deaths we have each year in the UK.
We know that the big national charities like PAPYRUS (and probably Samaritans, and I was told Mind as well) are very unlikely to support our petitions and national campaigns, so where does that leave us?
I’m not actually sure.
I have some ideas, but I’m not sure at this stage about the best way forward, and I’m open to ideas.
Meanwhile, I’ll just continue to focus on the further roll out of the #ZeroSuicideSociety #JoinTheDots Transformation Programme, and all the national projects and transformational change initiatives I’m involved in, most of which don’t involve Government or government, though some necessarily must do at some point…
…and which generally don’t usually involve the bigger national charities, or those charities and CICs that are growing and becoming bigger and tending to become more distant as they grow.
I’m a grassroots, from-the-ground-up, advocate and campaigner at heart, but I know we need to find a way to get some big changes from the top down.
Hopefully, some of those reading this analysis of the petition proposals — which, remember, were co-created from a research and engagement project (including interviewing people from PAPYRUS and Samaritans, and the 3 Dads Walking, and people working in the NHS, and employers, and people with lived experience of suicide, etc) — and they will want to see some of these specific ‘asks’ advancing in the course of this parliament.
And the sooner the better, because every month we don’t have these measures, it’s another 500+ preventable suicide deaths in the UK.
The baton is sitting there ready to be picked up by anyone or any organisation or group or coalition wanting to advocate or campaign for these specific measures and practical actions that most of those we interviewed said would get the suicide numbers down, towards zero.
We may have a new Government, but nothing has changed in terms of these actions still being the actions that will get the suicide numbers down.
Are we perhaps pointing the finger too much at the politicians because to have a more ambitious suicide prevention strategy, and to raise the bar in terms of actions, urgent actions, we don’t just need the Government to change, we need the government to change; we need a change of attitudes and behaviour from the kinds of civil servants that wrote the appalling response to the petition proposals; and we need a step change from those directly responsible for the National Suicide Prevention Strategy because the current Strategy is simply not good enough.
As I said in my critique of the National Strategy, we probably also need some fresh people involved, including a new lead adviser to govt/Govt, given his unhelpful low ambition language in his Foreword to the National Strategy document.
Anyone who is willing and able to move any of the specific petition proposals forward is free to do so.
They are not my proposals, or Steve Phillip’s proposals. or Towards Zero Suicide CIC’s proposals or The Jordan Legacy’s proposals, or even the proposals of all those who took part in the action research and engagement project in 2023, they are just a list of proposals that most of those working in suicide prevention told us would get the suicide numbers down, and down considerably. They are a shared resource.
A key factor in successful collaboration and collective impact is not trying to ‘own’ ideas and get obsessive about your personal or organisational ‘brand’ but to share visions, strategies, plans, actions, petition proposals as truly collective entities…and welcome efforts to take these forward to achieve shared goals in line with shared values.
Also, although the petition proposals were aimed firmly at national Govt/govt/parliament, more could be done at a local level to take these petition proposals forward, perhaps even as a demonstration for national government of commitment and of ‘what works’.
For example, a local council or ICB or combined authority or elected mayor could adopt many of the petition proposals, eg Suicide Prevention Impact Assessments for all new policies, Zero Suicide Plans, mandatory training.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you want to know more detail or if I can assist in any way.
I am always happy to help if it potentially can prevent or reduce suicides.
Finally, writing this piece, and the deep thinking which goes into writing a piece like this, to get the transformational change we need — the systems change, policy change, structural change, and cultural change that will get the suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero suicide, not just superficial ‘awareness-raising campaigns’— we need more people and organisations to not just be ‘in the Suicide Prevention business’ but to firmly, clearly, and passionately be ‘in the Suicide Reduction business’!
Paul Vittles is Chief Facilitator for the ZeroSuicideSociety JoinTheDots Transformation Programme, and Founder of Towards Zero Suicide CIC, and he designed & delivered the Humber-to-Mersey JoinTheDotsTour, comprising 19 major events in 15 towns & cities in 2 weeks in June 2024.
Paul is a Research Fellow, consultant, coach, counsellor, and ‘transformational change expert’ who has worked in the field of transformational change via community engagement for 40 years and is now focused on the transformational change challenge of getting the (UK) suicide numbers on a downward trend, towards zero suicide, via systems change, policy change, structural change, and cultural change.
Paul works in collaborative partnership with many people and organisations who share the same goals, the same values, the belief that we must get the suicide numbers down, the belief that we can get the suicide numbers down, towards zero, a desire to be part of a Zero Suicide Society community that is #InThisTogether…
…and, as Paul says at business conferences as he tries to ‘get outside the suicide prevention bubble’ and draw more people into the transformational change challenge, when asked what business he is in, he says and he encourages everyone else in the room or at the venue to say…
…we’re in the hope business!
