Addiction: England and Wales

Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe Excerpts

Wednesday 12th September 2018 Grand Committee

Asked by

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the trends in different types of addiction in England and Wales.

[Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very grateful to have been given the opportunity to move this Question. We have a very interesting list of Peers down to speak from a wide range of interests and backgrounds. I hope that we will have a wide-ranging debate and that the Minister will be able to answer some of the questions posed. I am particularly pleased to see that Peter Chadlington, the noble Lord, Lord Chadlington, is on the list to speak. I look forward with great interest to what he will say about gambling. My reason for gratitude to him is that many years ago, he invited me to join the board of trustees of a charity, Action on Addiction, of which he was the chairman. In many respects, my journey commenced then; I joined because of my background and the work that I had done on alcohol.

I have much personal experience of addiction. I was on my knees and crashing when I was 40. I was a trade union official on the up but I was in great difficulty healthwise, my marriage was falling apart and I was given the prognosis that if I continued the way I was, leading the lifestyle I had, I would probably have been dead in two years’ time. I had to stop drinking, and I stopped. I say it not as a boast, because it is a day at a time, but I have now been sober for 36 years. Achieving that effected a major change in the direction of my life. I am forever grateful for all the support that I have had.

Addiction does not just affect the individual; it affects families and communities as well. I have learned a lot about how we can try to work on this subject. Noble Lords know that I have spoken frequently in the House on alcohol. I do not intend to spend too much time on that today as this is a broader debate. I express my sympathies for the Minister: she may find an awful lot coming her way that proves difficult to respond to, as it may be wide-ranging. However, I will say something on alcohol. The Government are working on an alcohol strategy. We have not had one since 2012. I should welcome any comments that the Minister has on the direction that is taking and when it is likely to emerge. I also advise her that the Drugs, Alcohol & Justice Cross-Party Parliamentary Group and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Alcohol Harm are shortly to publish a new charter on recovery for alcoholics. I will be looking to her and other Ministers to take an interest in that and to have early meetings with the authors of that document.

Today, I have also heard that an alcohol treatment levy is being sought by a charity, a combination of Alcohol Concern and Alcohol Research UK. There are great difficulties for treatment centres at the moment. Local authority budgets are being deeply cut, and in turn this has affected the treatments on offer for drugs and alcohol. Today, Jonathan Ashworth has been speaking in Birmingham and complaining bitterly about the consequences of the cuts and the declining opportunities for people with addictions, particularly to alcohol and drugs, to get recovery. One way forward suggested by the two charities I mentioned is a 1% increase in alcohol duty, which should be ring-fenced for alcohol treatment and given to local councils to try to recover some of the ground which has been lost in recent years with an end to some of the offerings available for alcohol treatment. So there are three bits of work there for the Minister, on which I suspect that she may have had some good briefings already.

I should also like to hear her views about the spat which has been taking place this week following the Public Health England conference at Warwick University. The CEO, Duncan Selbie, has said that he is entering into a partnership with Drinkaware to run a campaign. There have been strong reactions to that in certain quarters, along with resignations from Public Health England bodies. I know Duncan well and he has a very good heart indeed, but perhaps the Minister might care to say whether she is happy to see a public body going into partnership with a charity which is independent but is 80% funded by the drinks industry. In my view, if that funding was withdrawn, the charity would not exist within six months. There is an indirect link with the drinks industry. I will leave alcohol at that point and come back more generally to addiction right across the board.

I collect a variety of strange documents and for some reason I retained a Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology POSTnote on addictive behaviours, which was written as long ago as 2010. It is a lengthy and scholarly piece of work that deals particularly with research into the addictive dimensions of gambling, eating, sex and the internet. To those we could add a long list of other addictions. I have already mentioned alcohol and we know about drugs. In fairness, the Government have recently produced a drugs strategy. There is addiction to nicotine and in particular a strong addiction to sugar, which even in this House many of us may have. Many problems are related to that. We have seen a growth in addiction to psychoactive substances and there are great problems with that in prisons. We have seen a growth in the availability of and access to pornography, on a much wider scale than was the case 10 or 15 years ago.

There is also addiction to cannabis. There is a strong pressure group in the House of Lords for greater freedom and more liberal laws on cannabis, but linked to cannabis is the worrying drug known as skunk—an extremely strong version of it. Those who want to liberalise the law on cannabis should take a look at the problems we have in south-east London, which is classed as having higher levels of psychosis among its patients than anywhere else in Europe. We should be very careful before we start liberalising in some of these areas.

Then there is, of course, methadone. In 2005-06 methadone was barely known about but it is now a government-supported and regulated substitute for heroin. It was introduced by the then Labour Government with the intention of limiting the amount of money that would be spent on it as we tried to wean people off heroin and on to methadone. In some respects, this comes back to cannabis. You can see what happens when, for the best of reasons, you endeavour to reduce harm. We are now finding that from a starting point of virtually nil, apparently some £1 billion a year is being spent on methadone. I have done a lot of research to try to find out how much is being spent, but it is proving to be very difficult.

I shall be running out of time before getting anywhere with my speech. I want to talk mainly about the dramatic changes that have taken place since 2010 in technology. The Government have tried to address some of the changes in drug use, but it is technology that is driving many of these issues. The mobile phone is a casino in your pocket. It gives you access to marriage or divorce, or to pornography if you want it. We have seen such a big change in the space of a decade. We know now from research that there are five types of internet addiction: the cybersexual, in the form of cybersex and pornography; net compulsions related to online gambling, shopping, and stocks and shares trading; cyber relationships through social media, online dating and virtual connections is the third one. We have online game-playing, which is a very big problem, as many parents will say. The way these games are produced means that children become addicted to them. They have to purchase another game to keep the addiction running and parents have to spend more money. It is a very difficult habit to break. Finally, there is web-surfing and database searching, which many people do.

I worry in particular about AI. We will shortly have a very good report on artificial intelligence and a debate in the Lords based on that report. A government response to it has now come through. Many people can see that AI will be linked to addictive processes in the near future. We will have sex dolls, with people staying in their rooms and not communicating with each other. In Japan, for example, many people between 18 and 34 are not even having sexual intercourse, even though there is a low birth rate in Japan. What are they doing in their rooms? Who are they communicating with? We can see these dolls being produced in the Far East.

My 10 minutes are up, so I will be strict in observing the limit. This is a very wide-ranging topic covering many ethical issues, particularly what people are doing in terms of their relationships with each other and with their families. I hope that we will have a good debate and perhaps come back to this subject on another occasion.