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Drugs

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr Bayley. It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I apologise, but I have a very sore throat, so my voice is not quite as it should be. It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Cambridge (Dr Huppert). I will certainly look to his pronouncements in future for an indication of Liberal Democrat policy.

I start by recognising that the report is an important piece of work. I pay tribute to the leadership of the Select Committee’s Chair, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz). I also pay tribute to all the members of the Committee who contributed to the report, which draws upon the huge experience of different people and organisations. As we have heard, many different countries have been considered.

I had an opportunity to listen to some of the witness sessions. I heard Sir Richard Branson and Russell Brand give evidence, and I attended the Committee’s one-day conference in Parliament. I think it was very useful to invite the general public in to hear the deliberations of that Committee.

I visited Colombia after the Select Committee’s visit, and I know from my conversations with the Serious Organised Crime Agency officers based in Colombia that they were delighted to be able to explain the international role they play in addressing the drugs problem. They do some very important work, which I am pleased has been recognised in the report.

The report is wide-ranging and contains many recommendations. Because of the time, I will go through some of the recommendations that I believe are key. I look to the Minister to answer some of my questions on the approach the Government will take to addressing the Committee’s recommendations.

I start with the recommendation that the lead for drugs policy should be shared between the Home Office and the Department of Health, with a designated point person co-ordinating policy. That might seem an unlikely place to start, but I think it is absolutely essential that drugs policy is co-ordinated across Departments. I will address that theme in the points I raise this afternoon. The Opposition recognise the importance of a co-ordinated approach, and it is certainly important to recognise that there has been a high level of cross-departmental work on drugs over the past 10 years.

The Minister, although based in the Home Office, is responding on behalf of the Government, and I know he takes seriously his responsibilities on drugs. I question whether it should be necessary for two Departments to be involved with drugs, because the Minister is able today to discuss aspects of the drugs strategy that sit not only within the Home Office but within the Department of Education and other bodies, such as Public Health England and the NHS.

That leads me to the report’s recommendation on the need to strengthen and open up the inter-ministerial group on drugs, which the Minister chairs. One of the recommendations is that the group’s minutes, agendas and attendance lists should be published. I have spent much of the past 18 months trying to get details of those minutes, agendas and attendance lists through parliamentary questions, and I have resorted to freedom of information requests. I have been continually thwarted by the Home Office, so I think that recommendation would help us to understand and appreciate what is happening across Government.

We can see the importance of cross-Government working when we look at the record of achievement over the past 10 years on reducing the health harms of drug use, particularly heroin and crack cocaine use. All the key indicators are improving, and some of them have already been mentioned.

The number of drug users is falling, particularly among the 16 to 24 age group, although, as the hon. Member for Cambridge highlighted, that may not give us a true picture if we take legal highs into account. The number of drug deaths has fallen even more sharply—more than halving between 2001 and 2011—partly because we have had much better access to treatment and because treatment is more successful. The average waiting time to access treatment was nine weeks in 2001; it was five days in 2011, and it is getting more effective. Only 27% of treatment programmes were successful in 2005, but the figure rose to 41% in 2011.

Finally, and probably most importantly, more people are completing treatment. In 2005, 37,000 people dropped out of treatment before completion, whereas only 11,000 completed it. By 2011, those figures had almost reversed: 17,000 people dropped out of treatment, whereas nearly 30,000 completed it. I am sure we could see further improvement, and I am not complacent at all, but we ought to recognise that there has been huge improvement in treatment outcomes over the past 10 years. I say that in particular because much of what has been achieved was within the framework of collaboration.

The National Treatment Agency for Substance Misuse was set up as a joint Home Office and Department of Health project to ensure that drugs treatment had the required priority in the NHS. Although the NTA was funded by the NHS, the Home Office had representation on its board because there was clear acceptance that the Home Office had a key part to play. We knew that drug treatment was important in reducing crime. We wanted to ensure that those two parts, treatment and crime prevention, sat together. I think the NTA was an unprecedented success, and I pay tribute to the recently retired chief executive, Paul Hayes, who did an excellent job over many years.

I saw at first hand how collaboration can work effectively when I visited a drugs treatment facility in Wakefield run by Turning Point. In one building there were police

officers, probation officers, social workers and a range of medics and support officers, which works very well, but I share the Committee’s concerns about how such a set-up will fare in the new frameworks. Such facilities will depend on the co-operation of the new police and crime commissioners, who will have some responsibility for funding, and the new health and wellbeing boards. In the case of the facility that I visited, the PCC will have to liaise with nine different health and wellbeing boards, each of which has a huge number of priorities. We need to keep an eye on how well such facilities continue to be funded under those new PCCs and health and wellbeing boards.

I am also concerned about the level of co-ordination between health and wellbeing boards and the criminal justice system. I am pleased that in my home city of Hull the police have been co-opted onto the health and wellbeing board, but I do not think that is the norm. I support the Committee’s recommendation that more information be collected from health and wellbeing boards on where their money is being spent and who is involved in that decision making. The Home Office should ensure that that includes information on co-ordination with criminal justice partners. Drug treatment is not sexy, but for it to keep working a huge number of local politicians will have to continue to prioritise drug treatment and the spending that it needs. I question whether, in the financing regime they have set up, the Government have put enough in place to incentivise local politicians to recognise that.

Quite rightly, much of the Committee’s report addresses how we can improve treatment and increase recovery rates, and I particularly want to mention prisons. The Committee makes a number of recommendations about improving provision in prisons, and that seems sensible. Will the Minister tell us how far the Government have started to implement some of the recommendations? In particular, I echo the Committee’s concerns about the importance of treatment and the availability of support at the prison gate to prevent recovering addicts from relapsing, especially because of the recent changes in the NHS. I understand that in-prison drug treatment is being commissioned not in the locality but by a national agency, but that what happens when the person leaves prison and returns to the community depends on the commissioning arrangements of the clinical commissioning group and the health and wellbeing board.