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265WH
6 JUNE 2013 Drugs
266WH
Westminster Hall
Thursday 6 June 2013
[HUGH BAYLEY in the Chair]
Drugs
[Relevant documents: Drugs: Breaking the Cycle, Ninth
Report of the Home Affairs Committee, Session 2012-13,
HC 184, and the Government response, Cm 8567.]
Motion made, and Question proposed, That the sitting
be now adjourned.—(Mr Jeremy Browne.)
1.30 pm
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab): It is a pleasure to
serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bayley, in this
important debate. I am pleased to see the Minister here,
as well as the colleagues from the Select Committee on
Home Affairs who said that they would come. I pay
tribute to those Committee members who participated
in drafting and agreeing the report: the hon. Members
for Northampton North (Michael Ellis), for Oxford
West and Abingdon (Nicola Blackwood), for Hertsmere
(Mr Clappison) and for South Ribble (Lorraine Fullbrook),
my hon. Friends the Members for Birmingham, Selly
Oak (Steve McCabe) and for Walsall North (Mr Winnick)
and the hon. Member for Rochester and Strood (Mark
Reckless). In particular, I commend the hon. Member
for Cambridge (Dr Huppert) and our colleague the
hon. Member for Oxford West and Abingdon, who first
pressed for the inquiry. The hon. Member for Cambridge
is in his place. Like me, he is torn between two debates
in the House on Home Affairs. We are occupying the
time of Home Office Ministers in both Westminster
Hall and the main Chamber: gladly, not the same
Minister. I am also grateful to Committee staff, particularly
the specialist Ellie Scarnell, for all their hard work.
The Committee’s report, published on 3 December
2012, is entitled “Breaking the Cycle”. It is our first
report on drugs for more than a decade; the last time we
considered the issue, in 2002, a young Member of the
House, the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr Cameron),
was on the Committee, which should give other Committee
members heart that they have a great political future
ahead of them. We spent a year looking in depth at
drug education, prevention and treatment for drug
addiction, at reducing the supply of drugs in both the
United Kingdom and abroad and at the evidence on
which drugs policy was based. We visited two countries:
Colombia, where we travelled into the jungle to see
where cocaine is produced, and Portugal, to examine
the drug laws there. We had nearly 200 evidence submissions
and 48 conclusions and recommendations. We heard
views from people as diverse as Sir Richard Branson,
Russell Brand and Peter Oborne. The ex-president of
Switzerland, Ruth Dreifuss, also gave evidence to the
Committee.
This debate, for which we canvassed so many people’s
support, is current. Just today, there was a letter in The
Times calling for an independent review of the Misuse
of Drugs Act 1971, signed by the hon. Member for
Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) as the former leader
of the Green party, Professor David Nutt, Sting and
many others, including the hon. Member for Cambridge
and myself. Public response to the report has been
overwhelming. Society cares deeply about the issue,
because it affects us all and the costs are borne by each
and every one of us. In the United Kingdom alone,
drug addicts commit between one third and one half of
all acquisitive crime, and drugs cost our health and
justice system £15.3 billion a year.
The debate following the report’s publication caused
great excitement in the press. The Mail on Sunday front
page read:
“MPs pave way to legalise drugs”.
The front page of the more sober Guardian said that
MPs were calling for
“a royal commission on failing drugs laws”.
It has become a feature of reports by the Home
Affairs Committee and other Committees that we do
not just make recommendations; we also monitor them
to see whether they have been implemented. I call it our
traffic light report. Each recommendation is awarded a
colour: red when the Government have done nothing
about it, yellow when they are moving in the right
direction and green if the recommendation has been
accepted. After all—you will know this, Mr Bayley,
from your distinguished service on Select Committees
—there is no point in having a Select Committee
inquiry, going into a subject in depth and providing
recommendations if nobody wants to implement them.
I am pleased to say that the Government have accepted
or partially accepted just under 50% of the conclusions
and recommendations in our drugs report. That is not
as much as in other reports, but they are moving in the
right direction. It was, however, disappointing that they
rejected our main recommendation calling for a royal
commission, although I warmly welcome the Deputy
Prime Minister’s support for it.
I am delighted that the Minister of State, Home
Department, the hon. Member for Taunton Deane
(Mr Browne), who is here today, is following our
recommendations and considering drugs policies abroad,
visiting countries such as Denmark and Sweden. In
particular, I am glad that he is considering visiting
Portugal, or may have done so already; we will hear his
travel plans and where he has been in his speech. We
visited Portugal, as I have said, and saw at first hand
what the Portuguese are doing. I hope that when he
went to Portugal he met, or that if he goes to Portugal
he will meet, Dr Fernando Leal da Costa, the Portuguese
Health Minister, who was kind enough to attend our
drugs conference in September and give the 200-plus
attendees a fascinating insight into the impact of their
policies.
We decided to call our report “Breaking the Cycle”
because we identified a number of critical intervention
points where, if the right action is taken, the devastating
cycle of drug addiction can be broken. The first critical
intervention point is during childhood. Prevention is
better than cure, and the education system has a vital
role to play in ensuring that children and young people
resist peer pressure and understand the risks involved in
taking drugs. We found that drugs education provision
was patchy. The Department for Education noted that
most primary and secondary schools provide it once a
year at most. A number of our witnesses were highly
critical of the quality of awareness provided in the