Draft Community Infrastructure Levy (Amendment) (England) (No. 2) Regulations 2019
Debate between Lord Mann and Sarah Newton(5 years, 4 months ago)
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Sarah Newton
Thank you. I am sorry. I was a little confused as to whether the hon. Gentleman had come to the end of his speech.
As somebody who advocated this openness and transparency, to call it a bureaucracy tax is a misnomer, because the parish councils in my constituency really want to know how Cornwall Council is allocating the section 106 and the CIL funding. People in the villages and communities are sometimes very suspicious about decisions made at the centre about infrastructure, and suspicious that the funds are not flowing from the individual developments in their communities into the infrastructure that they would like to see, such as new schools, road junctions or cycle pathways.
Enabling greater transparency is a good thing, but councils have to bear some cost in doing this—
John Mann
I advise the hon. Lady that the best bit of legislation from this Government originated from a Labour Government. Neighbourhood planning was wisely taken up by both the coalition Government and the current Government with my strong support every time. If there is a neighbourhood development plan—Bassetlaw is a leader and has more plans than any other council in the country—25% goes into the local community. Parish and town councils are boldly going forward with their plans and are able to draw down more money. It is the best single piece of legislation by this Government and their coalition predecessor, albeit stolen from a very good Labour Government idea, but that is good politics. Why a bureaucracy tax as well? We do not need it. Neighbourhood planning is one of the good things that the Government have managed to do.
Drugs Policy
Debate between Lord Mann and Sarah Newton(7 years, 4 months ago)
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Sarah Newton
My hon. Friend makes an important point. What I would be prepared to do is write to her setting out the range of powers that already exist. I know from my constituency that the police are not always aware of all the civil powers they have, in addition to the criminal powers, to tackle some of the antisocial behaviour associated with persistent drug use. I understand and recognise the challenge she is portraying. The troubled families programme is designed in part to help those families where a drug user has substance misuse problems and, in so doing, help the children living in those households.
John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)
We have already had more mentions in the first 10 minutes of the police than we have police officers in Bassetlaw. Will the Minister confirm that we remain the only country in the world, other than the United States, where the Government lead for drugs is in criminal justice, as opposed to health? If the approach is evidence-based, why is that the case?
Sarah Newton
I am sure there are many more police officers in Bassetlaw than there are Members in this Chamber this afternoon. I am proud that our drugs strategy is world-leading, and is recognised to be so, because we take this cross-government approach. This is not a simple issue. Tackling substance abuse and preventing people from taking drugs is not a simple thing to do, which is why we take this whole-government, joined-up approach. Our colleagues from the Department of Health are firmly involved in our activity, as is almost every Department.
Sarah Newton
I just do not accept the premise of what the hon. Lady is saying. We do not take it in the way that she describes. We see this very much as a partnership or a joined-up whole Government approach. Of course health and recovery is at the centre of our strategy. It is not a fair interpretation to say that this is led by justice. It is about a joined-up whole system approach. Recovery remains a vital part of the Government’s approach.
Sarah Newton
I will make a bit more progress. We are absolutely determined to improve support for those dependent on drugs by raising the quality of treatment, and to improve outcomes by ensuring that people get the right interventions for their needs. That means ensuring that they can access the full range of services to help them rebuild their life, which may include mental health, housing, employment and training services, and a lot of support for a stable family life, free from crime. I am pleased that we will appoint a national recovery champion, who will drive progress by visiting different parts of the country to identify good practice and ensure local collaboration. We will also encourage partnership working and transparency by developing a new set of outcome measures to give local areas further support through Public Health England.
For the first time, we are setting out global action. We are already taking a global lead on our psychoactive substance work, encouraging data exchange to give us a richer picture of international trends, and bringing in global bans on the most harmful new psychoactive substances. We will continue our work through the United Nations. We have a balanced, evidence-based approach to drugs. Collaborating with partners around the world will help to give us a better intelligence base and enable us to take better action.
I hope that Members will see that this is a truly cross-Government strategy that requires the commitment and coming together of many Departments. The Home Secretary will establish a new drugs strategy board, of which I will be a member. It will include people from all the key Government Departments, Public Health England, and national police leads. Then we can all plan together to implement the strategy and hold each other to account. I am confident that the strategy is grounded in the best available evidence. We consulted extensively with key partners working in the drugs field, and I am sure that the strategy will make a lasting difference, but we know that there is no easy way to tackle drugs and the harms that they cause, and we need to do much more. Our strategy is flexible enough to enable us to respond to emerging threats.
Finally, by working together across government, locally and nationally, we can genuinely deliver the safer, healthier Britain, free from the harm of drugs, that we all want.
John Mann
Mr Deputy Speaker, you are ever wise, ever accurate and ever factual. Bassetlaw saw a 400% reduction in acquisitive crime. Why? Because it was the drug addicts committing most of the crime.
For 11 years people could go through the front door of their GP’s surgery. Not everyone was happy. I have read the medical advice—not all of it, but hundreds and thousands of papers—and basically there is a two-thirds success rate for chronic relapsing illness, meaning that two thirds will be sorted, wherever the illness is, and a third never will be. There is a cohort of people who will always have problems, and they tend to go in and out of prison regardless, but there are far fewer of them because we have reduced the number by two thirds, leading to huge savings.
That does not totally solve the problem, but it allows the rest of the community to get on with their lives without being plagued. Pensioners were not having their windows smashed every five minutes by people who stole a fiver—the normal heroin theft is to break a pensioner’s window and grab the first thing in sight. The fear and the cost of repairing the window is far bigger. Frankly, I think that if most pensioners knew they would just leave the fiver outside. That is what life was like.
What do the Government do? Two things. First—this is a big improvement in this new drugs strategy—they say, “Recovery, recovery, recovery. We are not going to bother maintaining anybody.” That change is vital. That is what they did in the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand—in fact, in every country I went to. They all left it to the doctors.
In 2002 only three countries did not have health authorities in charge of drugs policy: the United States—obviously—us and Iran. When I went to Iran to talk about drugs policy, I found that they had just changed it. They had done that—this is my assessment, not what people there said—because, basically, all the drug addicts had been sent to be looked after by the religious leaders, who would put them in recovery. But it did not work, which was undermining the religious leaders. So those at the top in Iran sent people over to Australia to study the medical system there, and they came back and introduced it in Iran, which therefore now has a medicalised system—and there are big improvements. You see, doctors are rather good at treating people because they know what they are doing. Yes, they sometimes use methadone or buprenorphine treatments, and sometimes they bring in mental health therapies, but the system worked well through the NHS.
What have we done? In 2010, we threw all that out the window and gave it to the local councils, and all of them—including Labour councils—in their great stupidity privatised it. What do those Labour councillors say? “We know better than the GPs and the NHS. It’s got to be joined up. It’s got to be more than the NHS.” So they took it away from the NHS and, since 2013 in my constituency, people have not been able to walk through the front door of their GP practices.
Guess what has happened? I had a meeting on Saturday, in Retford. There have been hardly any burglaries in Retford in the last 100 years, but there are record numbers this year. Who is committing them? The druggies—people who are drug addicted but cannot go through the front door of their GP practice as they could before. I cannot get them in. I used to guarantee to every family: “I’ll get you an appointment within a couple of days.” And I did, and it was easy. They went in and saw their GP. They engaged with their GP, and it was hugely successful.
My recommendation to the Government and to my own party—perhaps my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) will pass this on to my leader—is to put this portfolio in health. That is what the Labour party policy review that I chaired in 2009 recommended, and it had 4,000 submissions. The leader at the time and the one after him ignored it. Third time lucky. Put the portfolio in health and say that a critical part of the policy is that the NHS—primary care GPs—will manage the patients. Say that people in this country have the right to be treated by their GP. Yes, more is needed from other services—absolutely: getting people into jobs, keeping control of crime and getting people into stable housing, but the NHS is at the heart of the issue.
By the way, why on earth have the Scottish Government moved away from their successes a few years ago in places like Glasgow towards this nonsense of people coming out of the recovery system after six months? The Government said, “Six months and that’s it—out you come.” That appears to have changed.
John Mann
If it has, that is brilliant, but we should never have gone back to that nonsense in the first place; I am sure the Minister will blame the Liberals. That is what we had in 2002: the revolving door. “Oh, you’re out—you’re clean.” “Who says I’m clean?” “Well it’s six months. You have to be.” It was a bit like how it is in the prisons: strangely, someone has some Naltrexone and “Oops! You’re clean!” That is the stats fiddled. Frankly, I could fiddle those stats. It is the system that does it. Totally meaningless.
Let us have a bit of honesty. We would still have a problem. We would not get rid of it all. Dealing with Spice is not as straightforward as dealing with heroin, and the GPs do not have all the answers. But if someone with an addiction goes to a GP, the GP pulls in mental health services, and that does work. Across the world, people have found that. So let us not misquote what happened in Portugal, where I have been, because what I am talking about is the key to that system. Let us not misquote what happens in the Netherlands, where they have kicked out most of the coffee houses and they specifically demonise heroin—very sensibly at the time, in my view. The position for quite a while was, “Our problem is heroin. Do what you want, but you’re not doing heroin”, and they got on top of it. We are not in that situation, so we do not need that kind of overly crude approach. We can look at what the Swedes do and what the French do. In France, the GPs will not do it. With single-practice GPs working from their own home, it is easy—go to the local chemist and get the prescription, and do not even bother supervising it. Do not complicate it, that is my advice, and then we will get better results.
I can only give it as I see it. I have got the documents—the research is there. To new colleagues in all parts of the House, I say, “Read the assessments of what has happened, because there is a plethora of materials that demonstrate this.” We will not get rid of the problem, but we can significantly be on top of the problem. There are some improvements, but frankly not enough. Yet again, the Home Office is the wrong Department. Of course the police advisers all want to decriminalise drugs, because it gets crime down. I have heard this for 15 years: “If we decriminalised and didn’t arrest, crime would come down and the problem would be solved.” No, that is not the answer. Lots of good stuff could be done in terms of how we police and do not police. There are lessons we could learn from abroad.
The starting point is to shift the portfolio to health. We should be bold enough to say, “It doesn’t fit in with how this place works, but we’re doing it anyway. When we’re in power the portfolio will be in health.” That in itself would transform the situation in this country because then we would have to make sure that primary care is funded and would be able to stop wasting money elsewhere. Local councils: love them or loathe them, they haven’t got a clue—big error. We should tell our Labour councils, “Stop privatising and give it back to the NHS.”
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lord Mann and Sarah Newton(7 years, 10 months ago)
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John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Sarah Newton)
The hon. Gentleman has made a very important point. Hate crime has no place whatsoever in our society. It destroys communities and people’s lives, and we are taking every possible action against it. We have the strongest legislative framework in the world, and that includes working with internet providers. I can absolutely assure the hon. Gentleman that we have agreements with internet providers, and that when hate crime is identified, they will take the horrendous stuff down.
Oral Answers to Questions
Debate between Lord Mann and Sarah Newton(8 years ago)
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John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Sarah Newton)
Recovery from drug misuse remains at the heart of our approach. More people are recovering from their dependency now than in 2010, and the number of heroin and crack cocaine users in England has continued to fall, with the number going below 300,000 for the first time since 2011. We are developing a new drugs strategy with other Government Departments and key partners, which will be published soon.
John Mann
With most drug services having been privatised across England in the past three years, the figures that the Minister has just quoted are fake, aren’t they? They are fake figures. Outcomes are no longer being measured on a health basis, are they? Will the Minister tell us what the outcomes currently are when it comes to heroin treatment?
Sarah Newton
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for his question—[Laughter.] Decisions about services and how they are commissioned are made locally, as he well knows. The figures are far from fake; they are independently reported. I would think that he, as a local MP, would actually be praising his local services, because the latest data I have show that people have quick referrals to their service—96% of people who need access to treatment are receiving it within three days. In fact, his local area has a really good track record of engaging with people, and making sure they do not drop out of treatment and get good results from treatment programmes.
Finance Bill
Debate between Lord Mann and Sarah Newton(12 years, 4 months ago)
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Sarah Newton
My hon. Friend makes a good point. This affects master bakers, whether of pork pies, sausage rolls, steak pies or chicken pies, the length and breadth of the country. Those self-employed, highly skilled master craftsmen can carry on producing their much-loved regional foods, which we enjoy all over the country and which make our country so distinct, as we celebrate our rich and varied food heritage. I hope that that addresses any misapprehensions among Labour Members about the benefits of the pasty tax.
Much has been made of the Government’s U-turns. I welcome having a Government who, when they launch a consultation, as they did after the Budget, actually listen to representations on a range of measures, and I am pleased that the Chancellor is driving our economy in the right direction. We have to reduce our deficit and get our expenditure under control. The hard-working families and small businesses in my constituency understand that, and frankly will feel let down by this retread idea of a 2.5% reduction in VAT—the only proposal we hear from Opposition Members. But, of course, we do not know whether that will be their proposal tomorrow, next week or next month, because the shadow Minister could only say that it was the proposal today. If that is their only proposal and if it is only for today, how can families in my constituency have any confidence that they would drive the economy in a better direction? I am confident that the Chancellor is on the right road, and I am certain that focusing on the Budget, making sensible changes along the way, is the right way to go.
John Mann
Does the hon. Lady agree that it is good news that the Chancellor listened to me on pasties, on caravans—after I invited him on holiday with the Prime Minister and me in a caravan—and on petrol? Does she also agree that it would be even better news if he also listened to me on churches and VAT on listed buildings?
Sarah Newton
I am glad that the hon. Gentleman makes that intervention, because I was going to talk about that issue. First, however, I would like to make a little more progress on the analogy I was drawing to the House’s attention. We all get behind the wheel of a car from time to time—sadly, at the moment, I cannot, but I hope to be back there before too long—and when on a journey we are often certain of our destination, but sometimes we are not as good navigators as we would like and have to put on our sat-nav to help us, and sometimes we get an instruction from that irritating person on the sat-nav saying, “As soon as the road ahead is safe and permits, please do a U-turn.” At that point, do we throw up our hands in horror and say, “Oh, it’s just appalling to have to make a U-turn”, or do we think, sensibly, that to reach our destination in a safe and timely way it is appropriate to make the occasional U-turn? I have no problem with the Government making U-turns if it gets us to our destination in a timely and safe way.
The hon. Gentleman asked me about the changes to listed buildings. Having the beautiful Truro cathedral in my constituency, I was concerned about the proposals and immediately consulted the diocese and a wide range of churches in my constituency about their implications. I brought all that information to the Chancellor’s attention, as, I am sure, did Members across the House, and I was satisfied with his response. The Second Church Estates Commissioner, my hon. Friend the hon. Member for Banbury (Sir Tony Baldry), is to be congratulated on how he co-ordinated all our efforts and on the work he has done with the Church Commissioners and the Treasury. Their solution is both practical and actionable, and has met with the perfect satisfaction of churches in my constituency.
I know that many Members wish to join in the debate, so I shall conclude. It is immensely important that we have a Government who listen, who consult on proposals and who then act on them. Whether on fuel duty, pasty taxes, caravan taxes or fuel taxes, my constituents are immensely pleased and relieved that the Government have listened and helped hard-working people and small businesses during these difficult times.