Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

Lord Soley Excerpts

Thursday 9th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Stowell of Beeston]

My Lords, I, too, support this initiative introduced by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff—so much so that I have put my name to Amendments 242 and 243. I will not detain the House for long in explaining why but, briefly, I, like everyone else, also have concerns about antisocial behaviour and crimes. They are the sorts of crimes that are often fuelled by alcohol. My interest is in how the people and communities affected by those crimes are impacted in terms of their own morale and their ambitions for themselves and their families. So when I first heard about this initiative proposed by the Mayor of London’s office, it struck me as something which made sense and was worth a go. For that reason, I thought that this proposal was seriously worth considering and I wanted to support it today, not just because of what it is trying to achieve in reducing the kinds of crime that affect people’s lives in a penetrating and long-term way but because the simplicity of the way it operates. As has been described in detail by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, if alcohol is found to have been the primary reason behind a crime, the offender commits to staying sober, is required to take a test twice a day for which he has to pay, and if he fails that test or does not turn up for it, then straightforward consequences occur.

The initiative has a clear aim and is simple in practice. It is inexpensive once the initial set-up costs are covered—it appears, from the information I have received, to be cost-neutral. The evidence shows that it can work; we have seen it work in the places in America where it has been in operation. For those reasons, I support and commend the amendment.

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I support the amendment too, but I do not wish to repeat what has already been said in considerable detail about the effects of alcohol on the National Health Service, social services, prisons, police and the general population. I was chairman of the alcohol education centre many years ago at the Maudsley Hospital in south-east London. The problem of alcohol has not changed in its results since the 1970s; however, because of its increased availability in terms of price and outlets, it is now a much greater problem, and we see it on our streets. What I like about Amendment 242 in particular, as well as the other amendments, is that such a scheme can be piloted and evaluated. There have been many attempts to deal with the street problem of alcohol and of other aspects such as drugs, and the experiments do not always work. Evaluation and piloting are, in my judgment, a good idea.

I know that the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, is right about the drugs problem. We should not ignore that, but alcohol is different in one very important respect. It is a very powerful drug—as powerful as many others—but it is socially accepted and expected. That means that people use it without drugs; some use it with drugs but a large number of people use it without drugs and to excess.

My noble friends Lord Brooke and Lady Hayter made the point that it is a question of resources. That is the sort of thing we should build up over a period of time and why I have directed my remarks primarily to Amendment 242. When we see young people on television who are drunk in the street, you know that everyone sitting in front of their television sets is saying, “What do their parents think? What do those kids look like?”. At times like that I make myself think back to how I behaved in my adolescence. I would not like to go into this in too much detail, but—and this is relevant to what the noble Viscount said—I am afraid it is recognised that it is not just a mark of masculinity for men but for women too it is a mark of femininity, in a rather unusual way. That troubles me considerably, because although we all sit in front of our televisions and ask what their parents will say, the reality is that in many cases the parents will not say anything.

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[Lord Soley]

My Lords—

[Baroness Browning]

I hope that the noble Lord will forgive me, but I wish to make some progress. I support the underlying principles of this amendment, but I am going to have to resist its inclusion in this legislation. However, I do not rule out its possible inclusion in future legislation for the following reason. I believe that many elements of the scheme that has been suggested, which the mayor’s office wants to bring forward—the so-called sobriety scheme—can be achieved without primary legislation. The Home Office will want to work with the mayor’s office to trial a scheme, possibly using conditional cautions, for example, before bringing forward primary legislation. We could test the risks and costs of such a scheme while piloting something quite quickly. The difficulty with just transposing the South Dakota scheme to the UK is that we would run into a lot of difficulties, not least with the European Court of Human Rights, because the South Dakota scheme requires somebody to attend a prison when they are breathalysed; if they do not pass the breathalyser test, they are immediately imprisoned. I think that habeas corpus might come into that somewhere along the line. Imprisoning somebody without trial is not something that we tend to do in this country.

Having said that, we are clear that this measure is worth while and is something in which we want to be engaged. If, as has been mentioned around the Chamber, the trial in London can be taken forward—we can work out all the problems with it and try to overcome them—it will need primary legislation. I assure the House that the Home Office will work primarily with the Department of Health, which is taking the lead on an alcohol strategy that is due out later this year. We will work quickly and closely with that department to ensure that we gain experience from the trial. If it is successful, we will see how we can mainstream it around the country.

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[Viscount Astor]

My Lords, in commenting on the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Stevenson, I should perhaps explain to your Lordships my interest in this matter. In 1997, when an electorate sent me from this side of the House to the other side of the House, I founded a late-night bars business. I do not have to declare an interest any more because we sold it two years ago. It was floated on the Stock Exchange. It was a very responsible operator and I gained a certain knowledge of the industry. On the last Saturday night we operated, we had over 30,000 patrons in our various bars round the country, in Wales and Scotland as well as England. So I had a little interest in the business. We saw ourselves as encouraging drinking, but not to excess, and we did not encourage drunkenness. Indeed, the Prime Minister was on our board, so, as you can see, we were enormously respectable.

However, our biggest problem was not what happened inside our bars but what happened outside, for numerous reasons. First, supermarkets were selling tins of lager for 50p when we were selling a pint of lager for up to £5. The problem was that people arrived having had too much to drink before going out. The Government have made some statements about minimum pricing. It will be interesting to see whether my noble friend the Minister can say any more on that.

The other problem, I have to say, was drugs. Someone would take drugs before they came in, with the result that one or two drinks magnified the effect to the extent that they could have been drinking all night. That was the issue. The ones that ended up on the street might have looked drunk but the reason behind it was a combination of drink and drugs. That is important, and that is why in the interest of public health you must bring in the whole thing; you cannot lose one and not the other. That is why I think the amendment is extremely interesting.

I would say in defence of bars that in the cities we operated in we had a very good relationship with the local authorities and with the police. We found that if there were no facilities for young people in cities, the problems were even worse because they had nowhere to go. They would go to the supermarket or the garage, as the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, would say, buy alcohol and end up being on the street, or wherever, causing a much greater problem than if it was properly regulated.

I do hope that your Lordships will think that drinking is not bad if it is properly regulated and properly organised. I recognise that my grandmother, who was the first woman to sit in another place, campaigned for 30 years against drink being sold. However, on her 80th birthday we persuaded her that Dubonnet was non-alcoholic and she drank away. I hope in that spirit your Lordships will see that drink in moderation can be quite a good thing.

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I, too, share the view that alcohol is not a bad thing and that done responsibly it is good. I also do not take the view, although I know the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, did not touch on it, that advertising is not the major problem it is sometimes made out to be. It is more complex than that.

I support these amendments particularly because of proposed subsection (2) in Amendment 244, which is quite an interesting idea as it would enable a local authority to focus on a growing problem in that area. I obviously do not want to rehearse the previous debate. I simply say to the Minister, who has become even more of a friend of mine now that she thinks I am a baby boomer, that in fact I am so pre-baby boomer that I am pre-war. But I like the idea, so I am with her on that.

However, I take issue with the view sometimes taken that things are fundamentally different now. The key difference, with which we have so much difficulty coping and which I am not sure can be dealt with fully in this Bill, is the availability of drink as a result of price to income and the availability of outlets. As regards all the things that people worry about, I have to say that, although I am not proud of it, in the 1950s we boasted about how much we had drunk the night before and went to work with hangovers. I would say to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, that one of the differences is that we would hide the drink and not leave it on the windowsill.

The role of women is fundamentally different. In the 1950s, their role was to get you home again. People would boast about how quickly they could drink. All those things were happening. The crucial difference is that you did not have enough income to do it regularly, so Friday and Saturday nights were bad. The other factor was the outlets. As the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, said, you can go to the supermarket. In the 1950s, you would drink in the bars. As the pub came to closing time, you would say, “We have got to buy some drink”. There were not as many off licences around as there are now. You could not buy it over the bar in most cases, so the barman would tell you that you have to go to the off licence. That usually meant going out of the pub into a pokey little room on the side, which would have enough room for only two or three people, where you could buy drink at greater cost.

The outlets have exploded and the difficulty for society to face is that, although we like alcohol—I include myself in that—and most of us can enjoy it responsibly, there are two big problems. A minority cannot drink responsibly and there is the very real problem, as we indicated in the previous debate, of young people trying to learn how to handle drink responsibly. There is not an easy answer to that. Ultimately, this problem is about ease of availability in terms of price to income and the outlets. Under subsection (2) of the proposed new clause in Amendment 244, at least in those areas suffering most—I would include from my past areas in east London—you could focus on some of the pubs and areas causing problems.

[Lord Clement-Jones]

My Lords, as a baby boomer myself I will not add to the confessionals this afternoon, but I would say to the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, that she was clearly a particularly well-behaved student. My recollections—though I think the expression is that if you remember the 1960s you weren’t there—were pretty similar. Despite not having known in advance that they were being grouped, I can see why Amendments 237A and 244 have been grouped. But the devil is in the detail and I prefer Amendment 244, with one rather large and glaring exception to which the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, referred. Notwithstanding the enthusiasm of my noble friend Lord Shipley, the drafting of a public health duty for a licensing authority is fraught with difficulties. It could cover a huge range of issues, not just issues relating to local A&E and so on but to pricing, siting and marketing of alcoholic products.