Touchstone have many staff members working across the West Yorkshire Liaison and Diversion service, including coordinators and support workers across each of the five localities, a social worker, ETE and Peer Support specialists and a Court Practitioner. Touchstone have been working with Liaison and Diversion since 2017 when the Leeds Liaison and Diversion service was launched from Elland Road police station, a stone’s throw away from Touchstone House. Touchstone has been a key partner in the subsequent roll out of Liaison and Diversion across West Yorkshire, with moves into Bradford in 2018 and Kirklees and Calderdale in 2019. Touchstone’s Operations Manager works closely with the Liaison and Diversion Senior Leadership Team to ensure the skills, knowledge and experience of Touchstone are used as effectively as possible within the partnership with Wakefield Council. Touchstone’s vision is to inspire communities and transform lives, we do this by providing a range of innovative services to improve health and wellbeing. The main aim of Liaison and Diversion is to improve health and criminal justice outcomes. Our focus on innovation makes us an ideal partner with Wakefield Council in delivering Liaison and Diversion, which continues to adapt and evolve to ensure it meets the needs of the people it supports. Touchstone’s key values of Leadership and Learning, Inclusion and Diversity, Value for Money, Quality and Continuous Improvement, Integrity and Respect, Recovery and Coproduction are fundamentally aligned with the vitally important work of Liaison and Diversion.

WomenCentre have worked with Liaison and Diversion since 2019, employing 2 members of staff in our service, one in Kirklees and one in Calderdale.

WomenCentre is a local Charity working Kirklees and Calderdale supporting over 3000 local women a year. Women Centre offers insight, based on expertise in working with women and girls facing severe and multiple disadvantage across a range of sectors that can be shared in order to develop local and national agendas, and make the case for women-centred solutions.The main areas of service delivery are Domestic Abuse and Women’s Health and Wellbeing. Women also receive support with practical issues such as parenting, managing debt, and housing and immigration issues. The services reach many women who are at points of crisis: women experiencing acute and chronic mental health difficulties; in contact with the criminal justice system; women refugees and asylum seekers; women in poverty; those with drug and alcohol problems; and victims of domestic violence and their children.

Together Women provides holistic services to women and girls with multiple and complex needs across Yorkshire, Humberside and the North of England, providing gender specific support for women and girls that is flexible, responsive and dynamic. Their women centres located in Leeds; Bradford; Hull; Sheffield; and HMP New Hall offer safe, women-only spaces from which key workers and sessional staff provide needs assessment, action-planning, support and case management for women referred by a number of different agencies.

Together Women have worked in partnership with Liaison and Diversion since 2019, with 2 members of staff seconded into Liaison and Diversion, one in Leeds one in Bradford.

Leeds and York Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust have been working with the Liaison and Diversion service since 2020. We currently have 2 staff with a max of 3 working into the magistrates and crown courts in Leeds. The team are registered mental health nurses with experience of assessing and working with individuals in mental health acute and crisis situations. Bringing this experience, along with the knowledge of statutory and non-statutory services enables the team to work with partners to assess and support service users through the judicial processes advising on support for individual’s mental health.

Well Women and the Liaison and Diversion Service have a really strong partnership and have worked together for several years, but the services have worked closely together since 2016, when the Restore Project was first funded. Women coming from conditional cautions experience a seamless transition from the Liaison and Diversion to Well Women Centre. In 2018 Well Women Centre won the Howard League for Penal Reform Women’s Category, this was specifically due to the partnership we have.

Well Women are a service based in Wakefield and support women of 16 and above providing a holistic, non-medical approach to help improve women’s health and well-being. The Well Women centre offer counselling at a weekly time and space to help women explore their difficulties in a safe, private and confidential environment. In addition, they also offer courses as an opportunity for women to meet and support one another in a safe, confidential space. Courses include Managing Low Mood, Managing Anxiety, Understanding Anger, Managing Stress, Post Natal Wellbeing, Living Naturally with the Menopause and The Freedom Programme. Well Women also offer drop in sessions for Women to come along for support.

The Bridge Project partnership with The Liaison and Diversion Service began in 2018. The partnership became West Yorkshire wide in 2019 when a substance misuse lead was placed in all 5 sites, along with one Young Person substance misuse lead.

The Bridge Project work with vulnerable people who experience substance misuse, risk taking behaviours, mental health difficulties and many more. Their mission is to empower people experiencing multiple barriers to achieve positive change. The Bridge Project work directly with substance misuse providers to establish effective pathways from The Liaison and Diversion Service into treatment and work through any challenges or barriers, whilst also monitoring changes and adapting the support to fit the client effectively.

The Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust (BDCFT) Police Liaison Service (PLS) is an important part of our First Response Service (FRS) It aspires to offer a fair access to Mental Health services for those individuals in police custody. It consists of 3 Registered Mental Health Nurses (RMN), they are also referred to as Criminal Justice Nurses (CJN) and are based at Trafalgar house Custody suite covering office hours.

The service offers 3 broad functions

1. Urgent Mental Health assessments within the custody suite, which sign post to appropriate follow up where needed, This includes communicating with and linking detainees into existing support packages such as the Community Mental Health Teams
2. One of the staff members provide a Crown Court Liaison service, whom provides assessment, reports and link for Crown court with Magistrates court
3. The screening of detainees for serious or enduring Mental health conditions, that are potentially suitable for the Liaison and Diversion (L&D) service

The RMNs provide the L&D service with information where it relates to risk and a means to safely screen potential service users into appropriate statutory services. There is a supportive and advice element to their function, which is fostered by good communication and working relations between the teams.

Outside of office hours the central FRS based at Lynfield Mount Hospital provide function 1 ) above via a call out service from the police to FRS.

South West Yorkshire Partnership Foundation Trust (or SWYPFT) are a specialist NHS foundation trust that provides many different services such as: Community, Mental Health, and Learning disability, to individuals who live in the Barnsley, Calderdale, Kirklees, and Wakefield areas. The foundation trust also provide some medium forensic services to the whole of Yorkshire and the Humber. Being a foundation trust means that the service is accountable for its own members – this means all members get a say in how the service is run, and how they’d like the service to be developed.

South West Yorkshire Partnership Foundation Trust have two members of staff working within the Liaison and Diversion Service, they are both Mental Health Practitioners.

The Himmat Project is a programme put in place to support young people with developing their knowledge, skills, values, attitudes and confidence. This is set to allow young people to build confidence and empower them to decide their own future. There are many different types of support, these include; Alternative education, Study Support, Youth provision, Sports coaching, Triple R and Stronger Families. All support is specifically tailored to each young individual and is culturally specific and religiously sensitive for all clients and users.

The Himmat Project began in 1991 and is based in Bradford and Calderdale. Funded by many different local and national sources – within 5 years of opening the service had become a charity and a company limited by guarantee. The project has formed many different successful partnerships with multiple agencies, including the Liaison and Diversion Service.

The service has one Youth Support Time Recovery Worker working within the Liaison and Diversion service.

Bradford’s Youth Justice Service have two members of staff who are seconded full time into the Liaison and Diversion team. Both practitioners are experienced workers, bringing a wealth of local knowledge and understanding to the team. One of these roles is funded via the Violence Reduction Unit to work specifically with young people who are ‘no further actioned’ or ‘released under investigation’ for offences. This allows support to be offered to young people at the earliest point possible when they come to the attention of the police. The close working relationship between the Youth Justice Service and the Liaison and Diversion Service in Bradford allows information about vulnerable young people to be shared in a timely manner, allowing the right service to support young people and their families.

The Youth Offending Teams work with young people who have come into contact with the Youth Justice System, their mission is to improve their quality of life, and provide the correct support to ensure each young person has the opportunity to make a change in their, possibly dangerous, behaviours and views. The Teams have the ethos “Child first, Offender second” and work hard to ensure that each and every child that comes through the system receives tailored, safeguarding need, Criminogenic need, mental health and many more types of support.

Their work is underpinned by restorative justice principles and trauma informed approaches, interventions are bespoke to the individual and are based on assessed risk and need, challenging criminal activity and anti-social behaviour and supporting young people to take personal responsibility. The Youth Offending Teams also work with the victims of their offences to repair the harm caused to them and the wider community as a whole.

The Youth Offending Teams consist of a range of professionals including intervention workers, police and probation officers, social workers and specialist roles. They work together to support young people and families with a range of issues including emotional wellbeing support, accessing appropriate education and training, accessing health services, supporting speech language and communications needs and parenting and whole family support.

West Yorkshire Police have worked in partnership with Liaison and Diversion in Wakefield since 2013 and across the whole of West Yorkshire since April 2019.

The Liaison and Diversion team have a presence in police custody suites where adults are able to opt into the service and receive support whether they are charged or not. Liaison and Diversion carry out assessments to identify people that may have a wide range of vulnerabilities including mental health, learning disabilities, substance misuse and social vulnerabilities with a view to reducing and preventing further contact within the Criminal Justice System.

The Liaison and Diversion Service’s aim is to ensure people have access to appropriate interventions and services to reduce the risk of re-offending. The work that our service does contributes to West Yorkshire Police’s commitment to reduce crime and protect vulnerable people.

The West Yorkshire Violence Reduction Unit (VRU) brings together specialists from health, police, local government, education, youth justice, prisons, probation, third sector and community organisations to tackle violent crime and the underlying causes of violent crime. Using a public health approach, the VRU does not just focus on high-risk individuals but is looking at how to tackle the causes of violence.

VRU work with Liaison and Diversion to deliver the Custody Diversion Project, focusing on criminal exploitation and knife crime. The project approach uses trained professionals with lived experience of the criminal justice system to equip children and young people to think critically, assess risk and make better life choices, making them more resilient to the risks of becoming involved in gangs, exploitation and violence.