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287WH Drugs 6 JUNE 2013 Drugs 288WH [Mr Jeremy Browne] was some thought about whether that law was perhaps too liberal and could be slightly tighter to restrict the potential for abuse. [MR CLIVE BETTS in the Chair] My point is that there were many interesting features of the experience in Portugal, as there were in Denmark and Sweden. I am genuinely open-minded on this matter. I approach open-mindedly what changes we could consider and potentially even adopt in this country to make our laws more effective. I heard the point that was made by the hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull North, who speaks for the Opposition, and others about where responsibility lies for drugs policy in the United Kingdom. It is worth noting that in all the countries that I have been to so far, the lead responsibility lies with the Health Department. In this country, of course, the lead responsibility lies with the Home Office. I am not sure that in practice that is as significant as it is regarded as being by both those who believe vehemently that it should remain with the Home Office and those who believe vehemently that it should not, because we have a cross-Government approach. There needs to be a lead Department, and of course much of drugs policy is about law enforcement, so there is a persuasive case to be made for that being with the Home Office, but we also of course involve the Department of Health, the Department for Education, the Department for Communities and Local Government, the Department for Work and Pensions, the Cabinet Office and others in a cross-Government strategy on drugs, so I would not want anyone attending this debate to think that the Home Office ploughed on without listening to other parts of the Government. The three parts of the strategy are demand, supply and recovery. We have a range of initiatives on demand reduction. The FRANK website and programme was mentioned during our debate. That has been updated and relaunched and is widely used as a source of information—particularly, but not exclusively, by young people. Another example is the Choices programme that we have developed. That focuses on preventing substance misuse and related offending among vulnerable groups of young people aged 10 to 19. The programme received funding of £4 million in 2011-12 and engaged more than 10,000 vulnerable young people. This issue is not just about schools. In fact, many people take drugs for the first time when they have left school—when they are adults. Schools have a part to play, but so do other methods of education. It is worth noting that the number of young people taking up drugs and particularly school pupils experimenting with drugs has fallen markedly, so there does not seem to be a shortage of information among young people about the harmful consequences of taking drugs. Indeed, increasing numbers of young people seem to be mindful of those harmful consequences and, as a result, have not taken drugs. Diana Johnson: In the light of the fact that for many years, as I understand it, it has been Liberal Democrat policy to have PSHE as part of the statutory national curriculum, I wonder whether the Minister, as a Liberal Democrat Minister in the coalition Government, is satisfied that enough is currently being done through the Department for Education to ensure that there is good drugs education in all our schools. Mr Browne: This is a wider issue. I will engage seriously with the question, because I think that it is fair. It is about the degree to which we, as a Government and a country, use schools to inculcate desirable behaviour in children of school age. There is a powerful lobby in the House—I have received its representations—that says that it is crucial for part of the curriculum in schools to be about tackling drugs and the harmful effects of drugs. I have also had representations from people saying that children should be taught in school about sexually appropriate relationships and that that should be part of the curriculum. I have also been told that children should be taught in school about responsible financial management, because children leave school without necessarily being able to make mature decisions about their personal finances. I have also been told that children should be taught in school how to cook properly, because large numbers of children are not as adept as hon. Members at this debate are at making delicious meals for themselves and that that should be part of the curriculum. I have been told that healthy eating more generally should be part of the curriculum in schools because otherwise children would eat unhealthy food through ignorance rather than because they preferred the taste of unhealthy food. I have also been told that there should be more awareness of alcohol and the dangers of cigarettes and that there should be more public health information generally. The point that I am making is that there is a reasonable nervousness in the Department for Education that, unless we try to rationalise the activities that children are taught about in school, all of which are individually worthy—I think that everyone would accept that—teachers might get to the end of the school day and find that there is not much time left to teach children some of the core academic subjects that parents rightly expect them to be taught. There is a genuine debate about whether schools are there primarily to create good citizens or to educate children in core areas of academic knowledge. There is scope for a bit of a trade-off. Most people would want their children to be adept at maths, English literature and other typical academic subjects and to be rounded citizens at the same time, but there are only so many hours in the day and the Department for Education has to make some judgments about how to fill those hours intelligently. On supply, we work closely with partner countries in Europe particularly. While I was in Portugal, I also took the opportunity to visit MAOC—the maritime analysis and operations centre—which is an initiative primarily involving Atlantic-facing European countries, although I think that the Dutch are also involved. They do not really face the Atlantic; it depends how far one thinks the Atlantic goes down the English channel. But the United Kingdom, the French, the Portuguese, the Spanish and others are working to try to intercept drug shipments. Before becoming a Home Office Minister, I was a Foreign Office Minister who covered, among other places, Latin America. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has met the Presidents of Colombia and
289WH Drugs 6 JUNE 2013 Drugs 290WH Panama. Home Office Ministers have met the Interior Ministers of Colombia and Brazil and the Foreign Ministers of Bolivia and the Dominican Republic. But I hope that I do not sound immodest when I say that I suspect that, probably more than anyone else in government, I have an insight into the countries that we have talked about. Since this Government formed, I have been to Colombia on three occasions and Peru on two occasions. I have been to Bolivia; I have been to Ecuador; I have been to Panama on two occasions and so on. In the countries that I am talking about, the issue is cocaine, and there is indeed a severe impact on those countries. We recognise our responsibilities to them as a consuming country. We work closely with the Governments of all those countries to varying degrees and certainly with the President and Government of Colombia, to whom many in this debate have already paid tribute. Recovery is an area where there is quite a lot of innovative public policy making. We have the world’s first payment-by-results programme to try to incentivise recovery outcomes. It is being piloted in eight areas, and I have attended an extensive meeting with people from the eight areas in the Department of Health to talk to them about the progress that they are making in Bracknell Forest, Enfield, Kent, Lincolnshire, Oxfordshire, Stockport, Wakefield and Wigan. We are optimistic that they will make good progress, but they will not all make identical progress. Part of what will be interesting about the pilot studies is how local providers, tailoring their services to their local problem, will produce outcomes that we hope will reduce harm and drug taking and enable people to recover in their areas. There is an interesting debate, which I think my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge touched on, about how one measures recovery. We have had that debate in Government. I accept, as I think most people do, that it represents progress when we take someone whose life is chaotic, who is a drug taker and who is unable to work or to take responsibility for themselves in quite elementary ways and we stabilise their life—perhaps through some programme of replacement drug treatment—so that that they can perhaps address some of their underlying social problems and, in time, find a job. I would not want the Government to fail to recognise that, because a lot of people, including in the voluntary sector, work to try to bring about that progress, which leads to improved outcomes for the people affected and, in many cases, for their spouses, their children and others around them. The only caveat that I would enter is that the Government are cautious about regarding that as a desirable end point. Although some people may struggle to get beyond that point, most people—if they were talking about their own children, for example—would regard it as a desirable interim point. Ideally, however, they would like the end point to be that the person was free from addiction to whatever substance has made their lives so blighted and difficult in the first place. There is an interesting, worthwhile and entirely valid debate about the point at which progress starts to put down roots and just becomes the new normal. If someone has been moved from a chaotic life on drugs to an ordered and managed life on drugs, that is definitely progress. If, 10 or 15 years later, they are living an ordered and managed life on drugs, one could argue that it is time for a bit more progress, and we might try to get them through to an end point where they are no longer on drugs at all. What we do not want to do is to institutionalise the interim measure; we want to make interim progress, because that is better than making no progress at all, but we have to be careful about progress freezing before it has reached its most desirable destination. That is an insight into the conversations that we are having. Of course, if we are looking at payment by results, we then have to think about how we incentivise people not only to make progress but to complete the journey, rather than to leave it half completed. The Ministry of Justice is doing lots of extra and innovative work on rehabilitation and on how to help offenders. The Government were not minded to accept the Committee’s recommendation on drug testing in and out of prison because we remain of the view that random testing is superior and that people who know when they will be tested may take measures to avoid showing up as positive. Other people may have different views, but we had good motives for objecting to that recommendation. A lot of work is going on in the Ministry of Justice, rather than directly in my Department, on how we can help people who leave prison with a modest amount of money—£46, I think—and few other support structures to get back on their feet and rebuild a meaningful life, with housing and employment, rather than lapsing back into criminality. There are two interesting pilot studies on payment by results and on trying to incentivise prison providers to help people with rehabilitation once they have left prison. Keith Vaz: But the point is this: is it not wrong that so many of the people we send to prison get the drugs habit there? Does that not show that something is wrong with the prison regime? If people are tested, helped and rehabilitated when they are in prison, things will be much better for everybody when they come out. Mr Browne: My short answer to the right hon. Gentleman’s question is yes, it is wrong. It is a source of great regret and sadness that someone might go to prison, not as a drug taker or drug addict, and become one while they are there. I recognise there are practical difficulties with trying to restrict drugs in prisons, and people find ingenious ways to smuggle drugs into prisons, just as they find ingenious ways to smuggle them into other places, but the Government are doing work, as we should be, to try to reduce that threat. What I am saying is that we could just as well do random testing throughout the period people are in prison. I have been told that if we tell somebody they will be tested on a set day, they may take steps to make it less likely that drugs will be detected in their body on that day. We are not, therefore, against the idea of testing prisoners, and we are strongly in favour of trying to ensure that people do not take drugs in prison, while those who might be minded to take drugs are dissuaded or prevented from doing so, but the proposed testing regime would not necessarily automatically have the most successful outcome. On the Government’s approach to reducing demand, it is worth putting on the record that drug use remains at around the lowest level since measurement began in
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