Immigration: Pausing the Hostile Environment

Douglas Ross Excerpts

Thursday 12th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Nokes]

I thank the hon. Lady for her questions. A lessons learned review, to be headed by Wendy Williams, has already been announced, and its terms of reference will be published. It will give independent oversight, which will help us to ensure that we have a clear picture of what went wrong and how we should take this forward. In the meantime, as Members have heard this morning, we are reviewing existing safeguards to make sure that those who are here lawfully are not inadvertently disadvantaged by measures put in place to tackle illegal migration. I have already made it clear that the Department for Work and Pensions is the lead Department in making sure that those who are in hardship have benefits both reinstated and backdated, but of course the compensation scheme will be the main mechanism via which individuals will be able to make sure that any compensation they are due is paid.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

I welcome the statement from the Minister and the Home Office today. She will be aware that the Windrush scandal is exactly that—a scandal. Those of us on the Select Committee on Home Affairs have questioned several Ministers on why it was allowed to occur without it being highlighted by the Home Office’s internal systems. There was a trend happening that seemed to go unnoticed by the Home Office and officials within it. Will she update the House on what is being done to ensure that future trends are noted far earlier, rather than having to be established through media requests and so on, as in the Windrush case?

[Caroline Nokes]

I thank my hon. Friend for the question. The lessons learned review is an important part of that, but my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary has been very clear that there is, and will be, a cultural change at the Home Office. We have to make sure that we are better at identifying such situations and responding with the appropriate speed. The lessons learned review will help us to understand what went wrong, and we most certainly are learning those lessons.

Fishing Industry: Visas for Non-EEA Citizens

Douglas Ross Excerpts

Wednesday 11th July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Nokes]

A very good question. Where is the hon. Gentleman this evening? Perhaps he had something better to do.

I am hearing clearly the message that the fishing industry, particularly in Scotland and Northern Ireland, faces particular workforce challenges, and I will be reflecting further in the near future on the case for a scheme to meet the industry’s labour needs.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

This is an issue in my constituency as well. One of our biggest problems is with fishermen having either to get rid of their boats, or to go out and crew them themselves. I have a very ill fisherman who feels the need to go out to catch fish himself because he does not have the crew, so there is a real safety issue. The Minister mentioned meeting colleagues in the House. Will she also come to Scotland and meet fishermen to discuss this matter?

[Caroline Nokes]

I thank my hon. Friend for raising the point about safety and for extending an invitation to come to Scotland to meet representatives of the fishing industry. I am extremely optimistic that I will have the opportunity to so do over the summer recess. It is important to me that I understand at first hand the issues faced by those working in the industry.

Two key points will be to the fore when we consider the industry’s future labour needs. First, as we leave the European Union, we will take back control of immigration and have an opportunity to reframe the immigration system. The Government want to ensure that any future immigration arrangements meet the needs of the UK as a whole and of businesses across all sectors of the economy. In making sure that that happens, we will need the best evidence available, which is why we have commissioned the independent Migration Advisory Committee to report on the economic and social impacts of the UK’s departure from the EU and on how the UK’s immigration policy should best align with the Government’s industrial strategy. The committee will report in the autumn, and the Government will take full account of its recommendations when setting out their proposals for the future immigration system.

Immigration Rules: Paragraph 322(5)

Douglas Ross Excerpts

Wednesday 13th June 2018 Westminster Hall

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

I will scrap most of my speech in front of me, but I thank you for calling me, Ms McDonagh; it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I genuinely congratulate the hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) on securing this debate. It is important that we discuss this subject. I am extremely grateful, as a member of the Home Affairs Committee, to have had the privilege of meeting campaigners and some of the affected people earlier today. That allowed the Committee members to hear some of the real hardships faced by a number of people because the immigration rules, which are there for a reason, are perhaps not being implemented in as useful and credible a way as possible.

We heard this morning that no fewer than 1,000 highly skilled immigrants face expulsion from this country under this paragraph. That is not right. The hon. Member for Glasgow Central mentioned the two individuals who owed HMRC £1.20 and £1.60; we heard that they were brothers and that that was their only offence against HMRC, yet the Home Office is using this rule potentially to remove them from this country. It seems that either a simple mistake or no mistake at all leads to law-abiding immigrants’ applications being refused out of hand. That means that no common sense is being used.

I was going to read from the letter to the Home Affairs Committee from the Home Secretary, but the hon. Lady did that. However, I urge the Minister to respond to this point: the Home Secretary said in the letter that he or the Immigration Minister would report back to the Home Affairs Committee by the end of May. Today is 13 June. I checked with the Clerk before this debate; despite chasing up the Home Office’s parliamentary officials this afternoon, we as a Committee still have no knowledge of the Home Secretary or the Immigration Minister’s response. We really need that as quickly as possible.

I asked our guests at the Committee this morning, because I did not want to put words into their mouths, whether it is the policy that is wrong or the implementation. I believe that they agreed that the policy is right—we are right to have these anti-terror policies—but the way it is implemented is wrong. I hope that the Immigration Minister will go from this debate and give case workers more clarification on how to use this policy the way it is intended, not to inflict suffering on people who should not be affected by it.

Windrush

Douglas Ross Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd May 2018 Commons Chamber

[Yvette Cooper]

I am going to repeat what I said: our Select Committee has not had a chance to discuss this, but clearly we would be the recipients of the papers, if the motion were agreed to. It is for the House to debate the motion and for the Select Committee to decide how to respond, which we would do responsibly, as other Select Committees have done.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

The right hon. Lady and I both serve on the Home Affairs Committee. Does she share my concerns about the Labour motion? As Chair of the Committee, she has requested significant information on our behalf from the previous and current Home Secretaries, which will be forthcoming, so I wonder why Labour is asking for even more. Did the Labour Front-Bench team discuss with her what information she had requested on the Committee’s behalf before tabling the motion?

[Yvette Cooper]

The hon. Gentleman is right that we have requested a huge amount of information, and we will continue to do so, because we must continue our work on the Select Committee, which is separate from any decision the House makes. As he also makes clear, individual Committee members may take different views in this debate.

I want to pursue some important issues around the Windrush scandal. The Select Committee wants to know about the review the Home Secretary has announced. Who will it be done by? I would have concerns were it to be done by a Home Office official, given the concerns and questions raised by the targets and bonuses, which might have involved even the most senior of Home Office officials. We look forward to receiving more information on that, as well as on how the taskforce will respond, on the legal framework that will now cover the Windrush generation, on the compensation framework, and on other matters too.

I am concerned about our conflating the debate on the Windrush generation with the wider questions of illegal immigration. We all agree, I think, that the Windrush generation are here legally—they are British citizens. I also question the idea that the only problem is with a group of people who, because they did not get the right papers in 1973, have inadvertently ended up in the illegal immigration system, rather than the legal immigration system; there are, I believe, wider issues, based on evidence we have taken. The problem is that our immigration system does not have a good enough process for resolving who is here legally and who is here illegally. It is a system that makes too many mistakes, as has been highlighted in our Committee reports, in the inspectorate’s reports, and in our recommendations. The problem is that when people do not fit into the boxes, the system does not help them. Too often, its spits them out. As we said in one of our recent reports,

“urgent action is needed to address errors in the enforcement process.”

I hope that the Home Office will respond to our recommendations.

In cases in which appeals are still in place, half of them go against the Government because the Home Office has got it wrong, but in many cases there are no safeguards, independent checks or appeals. We heard last week that when people apply for “no time limit”, as many of the Windrush families may have done, there is no way of appealing if the system gets things wrong, even if it is the Home Office that has screwed up or there has been some other error in the system.

We also know that there are problems with the burden of proof. A letter from a Home Office Minister explained that Mr Trevor Johnson’s application had been turned down because

“He has…been unable to demonstrate that he has been continuously resident in the UK for the years 1989 to 1990, 1994 to 1995 and 1997 to 1998.”

That means that he had provided proof of his residence for the remaining 45 years, but not for those three years. I could not give four pieces of proof of where I was in 1989 or 1994. I hope that the Home Secretary will now address that issue of the burden of proof.

The system is also terribly complicated, and no legal aid is available. It is impossible for those who struggle with literacy or mental health problems to navigate. It is also hugely expensive, and too often penalises people for simple mistakes. It was reported in The Daily Telegraph today that 600 highly skilled doctors, engineers and IT professionals who may have been here for many years are being denied leave to remain because of minor errors in their tax returns. I hope the Home Office will take that up, because it obviously extends beyond the Windrush generation.

There are also the questions about targets and the way in which they have operated. All Departments have targets, such as key performance indicators, but the problem in this instance is the absence of safeguards or independent checks to prevent the targets from distorting individual decisions. That is how injustices arise. Underlying all this has been the overall net migration target, which our Committee’s report recommended should be replaced. It includes emigration as well as immigration, it includes people who are here legally as well as those who are here illegally, and it gives the Home Office as a whole an incentive to encourage people to leave whether they are here legally or not.

If something is to come out of this awful case, it must be this: we value and support the commitment of the Windrush generation, but we must also look much more widely throughout the immigration system at the things going wrong. An immigration system is crucial to any country’s national identity. We believe that we are a fair country and a humane country, and we must ensure that those values are part of our immigration system.

Police Funding

Douglas Ross Excerpts

Wednesday 28th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Drew Hendry]

Indeed. We have seen that where there are fewer officers, there is more crime. Where we have additional officers—for example, in Scotland, as I have said—the impact on crime has been the exact opposite.

The funding pressures facing the Met should concern us all, particularly considering the counter-terrorism work that they engage in to keep us all safe. According to Sophie Linden, London’s deputy Mayor for policing:

“The terrorist attacks put big demands on counter-terrorism policing, but also on the Met police. For every pound spent by counter-terrorism policing, £2 is spent out of the Met budget to respond.”

The UK Government simply cannot jeopardise counter-terrorism work. I encourage them to engage with the London authorities to ensure that they have all the necessary resources to continue their excellent work to keep Londoners, and all who work in or visit the city, safe from the evils of terrorism.

I am not likely to be chatting on many doorsteps in England and Wales, but when I am out speaking to my constituents in Inverness, Badenoch and Strathspey, one of the priorities they want for their communities is to see our local police officers walking our streets—in our city, our towns and our villages. I am sure that voters in England and Wales would like to see the same level of policing in their communities. The anger felt by people across England and Wales towards this Government’s unwillingness to support the police properly is therefore completely understandable.

I can also appreciate the anger regarding the UK Government’s spin about their cuts to police budgets. This was wrong not only for the public but for those who keep us safe. It must have been embarrassing for the Prime Minister when she was rebuked about her claims that the Government were providing additional funding to local police forces. The chair of the UK Statistics Authority, Sir David Norgrove, released a statement on this point, saying that the Prime Minister’s claim could have led the public to conclude “incorrectly” that the Government were providing an extra £450 million for police spending over the next financial year. I am sure that the funding outlined by the Minister today will come under the same kind of scrutiny. The Government cannot hide behind political spin. They need to respect the police and the public and provide the genuine funding that will help keep communities safe.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman speaks about political spin on decisions. Does he regret the SNP Government’s decision to centralise our eight police forces into one national force—Police Scotland? When he is knocking on doors in Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, do his constituents tell him that our service is poorer as a result of that?

[Drew Hendry]

Everything that the hon. Gentleman says is belied by the statistics and the reports that have come out. Crime is at a 43-year low. It is down nearly 40%. People feel safer on their streets in Scotland, which I will come to later.

If this Government can find £1 billion for the Democratic Unionist party down the back of the sofa, they can support their police properly. They only need to find and show the political will to do so. The Scottish Government have set an example of how to support our police forces. One reason why the SNP continues to be popular is that we recognise how important a well-funded police service is to local—[Interruption.] Scottish Tory Members shout from a sedentary position, but they obviously have not looked at the recent polls, which underline what is going on.

[Douglas Ross]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Drew Hendry]

I will make some progress, but I may come back to the hon. Gentleman later.

We recognise how important a well-funded police service is to local people. One of our most popular and effective policies was, as I said, recruiting 1,000 additional police officers. When I knock on doors in Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey, people say they are grateful that there are more police visible in their communities these days.

That is in stark contrast with the Tory Government’s shameful record, which has seen police numbers fall by over 13% from 2007 to 2017. In reality, that means there are 32 officers per 10,000 people in Scotland, compared with only 21 officers per 10,000 in England and Wales. That is over 50% more police officers in Scotland.

The Scottish Government understand that our police authorities have to be equipped for the demands of the 21st century. However, meeting those demands does not mean abandoning the principle of local policing. I am delighted that the Scottish Government’s “Policing 2026” strategy sets out a commitment to retaining police numbers and to the value of local policing. It is because of that that the public continue to have confidence in our police forces.

The Scottish crime and justice survey shows that public confidence in policing is strong, with the majority of people responding to the survey saying that local police are doing an excellent job. Indeed, the survey said that people in Scotland feel safer than ever before, with 77% saying they feel safe or very safe in their neighbourhoods after dark—the highest score ever recorded by the survey. It also estimated that overall crime had fallen by a third since 2008-09.

[Douglas Ross]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way. He has twice mentioned crime falling. Does he accept the criticism that the SNP has received in Scotland for underestimating violent crime? In Scotland, if someone is punched, kicked or even hit with a weapon, that is classed as an offence and not a violent crime. The official victim toll of just under 7,000 rockets to under 70,000 when we include all assaults.

--- Later in debate ---

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

These past 12 months have served to remind all of us of the challenge facing our police and security services; terror has come to Manchester, London Bridge, Finsbury Park and Parsons Green, and even here to Westminster. These are uncertain times, and the first duty of any Government must be to keep our citizens safe. That is why funding, resources, and capability are all so important, and why I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate.

I must confess, however, that the Labour motion has confused me. Reading it, one could be forgiven for thinking that the Government have completely shunned their responsibility to keep us safe, yet nothing could be further from the truth. For example, in 2017-18, the funding for counter-terrorism stood at £707 million, and earlier this year, the Government announced that that will rise by at least £50 million for 2018-19. That rightly includes a £29 million uplift in armed policing from the police transformation fund. In a year in which we have seen the number of incidents requiring an armed response on the increase, I very much welcome the fact that the Government have taken the decision to bolster our capacity to respond.

I have listed some of the atrocious attacks that we have seen in the UK in the past year. Of course, we must also remember that for every attack that succeeds, countless others have been stopped, with lives saved, often without the public even realising. For that, we owe a debt of gratitude to our security and intelligence agencies. As we would expect, a lot of the data on intelligence budgets is classified. However, we know that the single intelligence account, which funds the security and intelligence services, will increase by 18% in real terms by 2021. The Intelligence and Security Committee has noted that there is a clear, upward trend in funding. The Government take seriously their responsibilities to protect us from harm, and match their rhetoric with resources.

I have largely stayed away from discussing funding for police forces, because funding for policing in Scotland is a devolved issue and is provided by the Scottish Government. Of course, Police Scotland will find itself with around £35 million extra every year thanks to the actions of Scottish Conservative MPs and the UK Conservative Government, who exempted the force from VAT last November. We had a rather theatrical episode earlier, in which Scottish National party and Scottish Labour Members tried to take credit for that, but it was Scottish Conservative MPs, working with a Conservative UK Chancellor, who secured the extra funding. That was despite howls of protest from SNP Members, who seemed more interested in justifying their decision to make Police Scotland liable in the first place than in working constructively towards a solution.

The additional money will be much needed. Police Scotland has gone from crisis to crisis, and it will take a concerted effort to restore public trust in the force. SNP incompetence has pushed policing in Scotland to the brink. Two chief constables have resigned and several other senior figures have been suspended for a variety of reasons. The SNP’s botched British Transport police merger has finally been paused, but I dread to think what the cost has been to the taxpayer.

A recent Audit Scotland report highlighted the failure of the SNP Scottish Government to prepare for welfare powers. All the recommendations could be applied to the SNP’s failure to prepare for the merger of BTP into Police Scotland. The report spoke about failures to estimate the full costs and properly resource workforce planning, and a general underestimation of the complexity of the project. I see a similarity between the SNP’s failure to prepare for welfare powers and its failure to prepare for British Transport police to be merged into Police Scotland. If Labour Members want to see a police force in crisis, I suggest that they look north of the border and see the mess that the SNP has made of policing in Scotland

Policing, counter-terrorism and intelligence gathering are too important to get wrong. The Leader of the Opposition has questioned the use of deadly force against terrorists and the SNP has proven itself utterly unfit to lead; only the Conservatives and only this Government have proved themselves capable of delivering the services and the protection that the country needs.

As the Policing Minister rightly highlighted in his opening speech, last week we were reminded of the bravery, professionalism and selflessness of policemen and women, when the House paid tribute to the late PC Palmer. I never tire of expressing my pride at being the husband of a policewoman serving in Scotland, and we will never tire of praising everyone in the emergency services for their courage, effort, professionalism and dedication. Their outstanding work keeps the rest of us safe, and I thank them all.

Salisbury Incident

Douglas Ross Excerpts

Thursday 8th March 2018 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

My hon. Friend is exactly right. Just because we want to approach this with a cool head in order to collect the evidence, it does not mean we do not share the outrage that he and his constituents clearly feel. When we have the evidence, I will return to the House.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

As the proud husband of a serving police officer, I welcome the comments from the Home Secretary and Members across the House in support of the brave men and women in our emergency services. Should this not also serve to remind us, however, of the pressures on their families, who every day do not know when their loved ones leave for work what they will face?

[Amber Rudd]

That is such a good point. It is not just the individuals who are affected but their families, and I know that the thoughts of everybody in the House will go out not just to the victims but to the families around them, who must be having such a worried and anxious time right now.

Oral Answers to Questions

Douglas Ross Excerpts

Monday 26th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Amber Rudd]

This is an area that we will constantly keep under review. It is an area that is sometimes covered by the Cabinet. We have the national cyber-security strategy, backed up by the National Cyber Security Centre. It is something we are very aware of and will continue to discuss in order to make sure that this country is kept safe.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

I have been contacted by a local optician in Elgin. He is a tier 2 sponsor, but because optometry is not listed as a priority profession, he has been affected by the tier 2 cap being reached in recent months. Will the Minister and colleagues in the Department of Health and Social Care consider including optometrists as priority professionals for tier 2 visas?

[Caroline Nokes]

The tier 2 cap operates to ensure that our immigration system brings the best talent to the UK while still controlling numbers. Any profession on the shortage occupation list automatically gets priority. The shortage occupation list is determined by the independent Migration Advisory Committee. It has not yet included opticians on the list, but as my hon. Friend will know, it is currently carrying out a major labour market review.

Refugee Children: Family Reunion in the UK

Douglas Ross Excerpts

Thursday 22nd February 2018 Westminster Hall

[Hugh Gaffney]

I respect those words, and that is exactly my fear—that if we leave the EU, we will forget that we still have a job to do as world leaders. I am an internationalist. The border does not stop at Carlisle for me, and it does not stop at Calais. I do not want us to become little Britain over the coming years, which is why that role is important.

I would like to share a brief story from back home in North Lanarkshire. In 2015, before I became an MP, my friend Angela Feeney and her daughter Maria were at home, drinking a glass of wine and watching the horrific news of the refugee crisis unfold on the TV. Sitting there, they decided to do something; they decided to be good citizens and act. Their original idea was to fill a car with clothes and drive from Wishaw to Calais to make a small contribution to the humanitarian effort. I was then the secretary of the North Lanarkshire Trade Union Council, and the Feeneys asked me for help and support for collections for their car and covering costs.

Soon after Alan Kurdi was found—the little boy on the beach—the original plan of taking a carload was no longer possible. By the time the news of little Alan had spread, interest was so great that we ended up sending trucks with two full warehouses’ worth of clothes and other necessary things, and thousands of pounds in donations, which were sent to people not just in Calais but around the world. I thank people in Scotland once again for the passion and the commitment that they showed to the Wishaw to Calais appeal.

I have some specific questions for the Minister to answer when she winds up this debate.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for securing this debate, for taking my intervention before he moves on to his questions, and for his understanding: I have a flight north tonight, so I cannot stay for the whole debate, which is why I cannot give a speech. Does he agree that despite everything he has said so far, we should, where possible, encourage refugee children to have a better environment in their home countries to prevent them even having to consider the dangerous trek into Europe?

[Hugh Gaffney]

I think that every child wants to stay in their homeland. I was proud to be born and bred in my community, and to become a councillor, because I am proud of my own land. Unfortunately, we have wars in this world, which involve bombs and bullets that those children have to dodge, which is why they run. Those children want to stay in their own homeland, as do their parents, but unfortunately the world that we live in, in 2018, has become so dangerous that those children and their parents must seek safety. I wish that we could sort the world’s peace tomorrow, so that everyone could live on this planet and share it as we should do.

Does the Minister agree that by amending our immigration rules to include an extended definition of family, as defined by Dublin III, we can ensure that our response to the crisis focuses on our responsibility to protect vulnerable children? Secondly, will she review the current policies on family reunion and commit to updating the House on what action will be taken? Thirdly, what plans do the Government have to reinstate legal aid for refugee family reunion cases? Lastly, does she agree that by taking action we can reunite vulnerable children with family members and stop their abuse by and reliance on smugglers and traffickers?

Immigration White Paper

Douglas Ross Excerpts

Monday 5th February 2018 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Nokes]

I am not quite sure how I can be clearer: we are leaving the single market, we are leaving the customs union, and we are seeking to implement a process that will last throughout the implementation period that allows those 3 million EU individuals living here, whose contribution we value, to register for their settled status as smoothly and as seamlessly as possible.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

My right hon. Friend says that she will continue the dialogue about immigration with the Scottish Government. When she is doing that, will she remember that a recent opinion poll said that almost 70% of Scots rejected the Scottish National party’s plans to devolve immigration powers from this place to Holyrood?

[Caroline Nokes]

I thank my hon. Friend for taking the trouble to point that out. Of course I will listen to voices from across Scotland.

Drug Consumption Rooms

Douglas Ross Excerpts

Wednesday 17th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Ronnie Cowan]

Certain aspects of the law are not devolved to Scotland and the laws we require to allow people to work in these facilities with impunity rest here at Westminster. I want those laws to be devolved to Scotland, because we have the appetite to do the job.

The Prime Minister’s response was that she knows some people are more liberal about drugs than she is. She is not minded to do anything, which completely misses the point. It is not about having a liberal attitude but about compassion and treatment for vulnerable people.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

Before we move too far away from law enforcement in Scotland, will the hon. Gentleman explain what the police’s response would be if he were to get the powers devolved? Would they be asked to ignore people in possession on their way to such venues, regardless of how far away they were?

[Ronnie Cowan]

The police would have the authority to stay within the law. We would not ask them to turn their eye from people who were breaking the law. The law would allow people to carry in their own drugs.

[Douglas Ross]

From how far?

[Ronnie Cowan]

The limit from which a drug may be carried in has not been defined. The point is that the Scottish Government and the Lord Advocate have asked for this facility to happen.

[Douglas Ross]

The Lord Advocate?

[Ronnie Cowan]

The alternative would be having people shooting up in alleys and contracting HIV and hepatitis C. That might be what the hon. Gentleman wants to see in Scotland; it is not what I want to see anywhere in the United Kingdom.

Nobody is saying that drugs are for everybody or that drugs are great. What I and many others are saying is that if we want to stop damaging society and help the many individuals who have a drug addiction problem, we need to change our approach. DCRs are not a magic wand or a silver bullet and they will not resolve every issue, but they are humane, productive and cost-effective. The total operating costs of the Glasgow safer drug consumption facility and heroin-assisted treatment facility are estimated at £2.3 million per annum. A 2009 Scottish Government research paper suggested that in 2006, the cost attributed to illegal drug use in Scotland was around £3.5 billion.

The Vancouver Insite DCR costs the Canadian taxpayers 3 million Canadian dollars per year. The facility claims that for every dollar spent, four are saved, as they are preventing expensive medical treatments for addicts further down the line. That figure is recognised in many other countries. A 2011 ruling by the Supreme Court of Canada concluded that Vancouver’s Insite safe injecting room saves lives with no negative impact on public safety in the neighbourhood, and that between eight and 51 overdose deaths were averted in a four-year period. A study in Sydney showed fewer emergency call-outs related to overdoses at the time safe injecting rooms were operating. A study of Danish drug consumption found that Danish DCR clients were empowered to feel

“like citizens rather than scummy junkies”

—their words, not mine.

These findings corroborate other investigations that DCRs are an essential step towards preventing marginalisation and stigmatisation. NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde estimates that the annual cost to the taxpayer of each problem drug user is £31,438. It further estimates that the introduction of a new heroin-assisted treatment service could save over £940,000 of public money by providing care for just 30 people who successfully engage with the treatment. Even if we did not give a damn about people with addictions, it would make good financial sense to provide those facilities. It is more cost-effective to provide DCRs than it is to pick up the bill after the damage has been done.

DCRs are more than just a practical solution; they are humane, compassionate and financially effective. I can think of only two reasons why the UK Government are so resistant to the proposal: either they are stuck in an ideological mindset that people with addictions are not ill but are the product of poor lifestyle choices, or they simply do not care. The UK Government have stated:

“It is for local areas in the UK to consider, with those responsible for law enforcement, how best to deliver services to meet their local population needs.

We are committed to taking action to prevent the harms caused by drug use and our approach remains clear: we must prevent drug use in our communities, help dependent individuals recover, while ensuring our drugs laws are enforced.”

That cowardly stance simply underlines the UK Government’s disengagement from the reality of the situation. It pushes responsibility on to the shoulders of local administrations and the police force, while refusing to furnish them with the legal powers to act responsibly within the law. The Home Office-led study “Drugs: International Comparators” from 2014 concluded that there was

“some evidence for the effectiveness of drug consumption rooms in addressing the problems of public nuisance associated with open drug scenes, and in reducing health risks for drug users.”

It also said that the ECMDDA report

“considers that on the basis of available evidence, DCRs can be an effective local harm reduction measure in places where there is demonstrable need”.

Despite the evidence that DCRs are financially viable, the United Kingdom Government have chosen to ignore it. Can the Minister please tell me why?

In conclusion, I once again ask: will the UK Government look at the growing body of evidence and change the law to allow DCRs to be opened in the UK without fear of prosecution? Will the UK Government devolve the relevant powers to Scotland to allow the SNP Government to pursue ambitious and innovative new measures to tackle the public health issues of unsafe drug consumption?

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Ryan. Thank you for understanding that I am unable to stay until the end of the debate and still calling me to speak.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on securing the debate, but I must say from the outset that I am against the introduction of these facilities. The problem with support for drug consumption rooms is that it is based on a faulty assumption that the issue with class A drugs is the circumstances in which they are consumed. It is true that many users of class A drugs are killed, injured or exposed to infection by particularly unsafe means of consumption, such as dirty needles. However, the answer is not to create state-sanctioned drug consumption rooms, but to address the real issue: the consumption itself. Our efforts must be focused on getting people off these drugs. Diversions such as drug control rooms only serve to distract from that purpose, or even make matters worse.

[Dr Dan Poulter (Central Suffolk and North Ipswich) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan) on introducing the debate. My hon. Friend makes a point about helping people to get off drugs. Surely the first step is engaging those people with medical services? The purpose of drug consumption rooms is to do exactly that, and to help people to engage in a safe way. That can be the first step to getting them off the drugs.

[Douglas Ross]

I agree that engagement is important; I disagree that the only place in which that engagement can take place is in these drug rooms. I stick by what I said earlier. We really have to ensure that we do not go down this route, because there is ultimately no safe way to take class A drugs—that is why they are classified as such.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle (Brighton, Kemptown) (Lab/Co-op)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Douglas Ross]

I will give way in a moment. Someone may use a drug consumption room once—they may even use it regularly—but there is no guarantee that they will use it all the time. As long as someone is addicted to these drugs, they cannot be kept safe. They certainly cannot be set on a course towards recovery, and the drug-free life that every human being deserves.

[Caroline Lucas]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Douglas Ross]

I think we are short of time, so I want to keep going.

Drug consumption rooms could even make things worse. Some drugs, such as heroin, work in such a way that many people build up a tolerance to them, so in order to get the same high and to satisfy their addiction, they end up having to take more and more of the drug. We therefore could be faced with the prospect of the state building a facility to passively watch over someone sinking deeper and deeper into an addition that becomes more and more likely to kill them with each hit. Instead of building drug consumption rooms and trying in vain to make addiction to these drugs safer, we should be redoubling our efforts to help people overcome their addictions altogether.

When it comes down to it, the only safe approach, and the only thing that we should be encouraging, is detox and abstinence. That approach also has the added benefit of being less regionally biased. I for one cannot foresee many drug addicts in Moray, which I represent, making use of a drug consumption room in Glasgow, but drug addiction is not limited to the large cities or the communities close to them. This issue affects all parts of the country, including small and relatively remote rural communities such as my own. There may be fewer addicts in Moray than in other parts of Scotland, but they deserve the same level of support. The issue should not be reduced to a postcode lottery.

[Grahame Morris]

Members of this House and members of the public have strong feelings on this issue, so it is important that we consider the evidence and the arguments. The hon. Gentleman says that he is against drug consumption rooms. I am not familiar with the situation in Moray, but I understand that shooting galleries exist. In my constituency, they are located in private dwellings, with drug addicts using dirty needles and tainted drugs of unknown quality and strength. Why does he believe that dangerous, private shooting galleries are preferable to drug consumption rooms?

[Douglas Ross]

The hon. Gentleman started his remarks by saying that we must base our decisions on evidence. The evidence from Professor Neil McKeganey, founder of the Centre for Drug Misuse Research said:

“we surveyed over 1,000 drug addicts in Scotland and we asked them what they wanted to get from treatment. Less than 5% said they wanted help to inject more safely and the overwhelming majority said they wanted help to become drugs free.”

That is the evidence that I am looking at.

I want to further explain how this issue has an impact on more rural areas. The opioid epidemic in the United States has shown us how drug addiction crises can become a dispersed and largely rural phenomenon, rather than something confined to parts of cities within reasonable distance of a drug consumption room.

There are, of course, other issues, such as policing—an issue that is close to my heart, given that my wife is a police officer. We obviously could not have police officers standing outside a drug consumption room ready to arrest anyone who walks in for possession, but where do we draw the line? Do we have an exclusion zone, within which the police do not arrest people for possession? As I was trying to ask the hon. Member for Inverclyde, what if someone is further away, but still claims to be en route to the consumption room? Do we prosecute them? Could it even be used as a valid legal defence? After all, it would be the Government actively setting up these places where drug possession and consumption are condoned. That would set us on the road to a sort of selective decriminalisation.

The hon. Member for Glasgow Central (Alison Thewliss) and the Scottish National party want powers over drugs, including the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, to be devolved to the Scottish Parliament, but I believe the UK Government are correct to expect the police to enforce the law. I do not support SNP Members on that matter. We all want to help drug addicts, bring addiction levels down, reduce the number of deaths and injuries, and cut the crime rate, but drug consumption rooms are not the best way to do that. The best and right thing to do is to enforce the law and focus on getting people off drugs altogether.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

The KPMG study found that there were no drug deaths among the people who had used and engaged with the rooms, of whom there were 4,400 over that time. During that period, there was an 80% reduction in the number of ambulance call-outs relating to drug issues in Sydney, and a reduction in the average number of overdoses in public locations by more than three quarters. The rooms provided 9,500 referrals to welfare services in the wider communities. Most importantly, they won the support of residents and neighbours.

One of the things we hear time and again—I am sure this will be brought up—is that people do not want these things in their backyard. As colleagues have said, the reality is that they are in people’s backyards—quite literally. I remember canvassing up flights of stairs in tower blocks, and people were shooting up right in front of me. They had nowhere to go and no support was offered. The only thing we can do is ring the police, but we know that in a day or so the revolving door will start again. How does that help with the pressure on our police? How does that help with the pressures on our communities? The reality is that it does not.

Globally, countries have gone down two tracks: the prohibition track or the treatment track. At the same time, in all those jurisdictions, usage has slightly decreased. However, in jurisdictions that go down the prohibition route, the harm caused by those harder drugs has rocketed and the number of people getting stuck in long-term habits has increased. Under the treatment route, as we have seen in Portugal and so on, we have seen long-term usage go down and the harm slashed. Surely that is what our policies must be about: the harm to communities and individuals.

I will not speak for much longer, because I know that lots of other colleagues want to speak, but I will touch on some of the issues that have been raised about policing. I feel the policing issue is something of a straw man argument. If there is a centre that people are asked to go to for treatment and to abstain from drugs and stop their addictions entirely, should those people be stopped from going to the centre on the off chance that they might have drugs on them because they are addicts? Should they be followed home? Should we try to entrap them? We do not do that at the moment, so suggesting that the police would need to do that with DCRs is a straw man argument.

No law is perfect, and there are grey zones, but surely it is better to work within those legal grey zones, deal with issues through dialogue with the police and save lives, than to have a system in which we have a hard and fast rule and thousands and thousands of people die. Some 56 people died from 2014 to 2016 in my city of Brighton and Hove—it is also the city of the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas), who I am sure will testify—which is actually lower than in previous years.

[Douglas Ross]

To clarify, I was not suggesting that the police are going out and searching everyone on the way in to DCRs. I was suggesting that there is a reasonable concern that, if someone in the vicinity of a drug room is stopped and searched and found to be in possession of something like heroin, they could say they are on their way to the drug room and may therefore not be charged. That is why the Lord Advocate in Scotland was not able to give his permission for the example in Glasgow.

[Lloyd Russell-Moyle]

It is interesting that that does not seem to be a problem elsewhere. That is all I can say. Let us base this on evidence from elsewhere. I have spoken for long enough, so I shall sit down.

--- Later in debate ---

[Crispin Blunt]

I wholly agree. My hon. Friend, with his medical background, speaks with authority on this matter. Drug consumption rooms plainly, on the basis of evidence around the world, ought to be part of our attempt to treat people who find themselves in the wretched position of being addicted to the most difficult and dangerous drugs. It is simply about the evidence. No one has died globally in a properly overseen drug consumption room, and yet in our country, 1,707 people died as a result of illicit heroin use in 2016. The extraordinarily stark contrast between the figures in Portugal and Scotland alone ought to make all of us think very carefully about the implications of our current policy.

[Douglas Ross]

I hope my hon. Friend will agree that while no one has died in a drug consumption room, that does not mean that no one who has used a drug consumption room has died as a result of drug taking. As I said in my speech, we cannot get everyone to go every time. Some go once, and some go every now and then. We cannot force them to go every time.

[Crispin Blunt]

No, of course my hon. Friend is right, but I am not entirely sure what the merits of his point are.

[Douglas Ross]

It does not solve the problem because people still die.

[Crispin Blunt]

The truth is that we will never solve the problem. Humanity has been using drugs in one form or another for thousands of years. My hon. Friend almost certainly uses a drug, unless he is a teetotaller.

--- Later in debate ---

[Douglas Ross]

This month I am.

[Crispin Blunt]

Then frankly my hon. Friend is in quite a rare position. The vast majority of people—certainly Members of this House—use a drug perfectly legally, and that drug is called alcohol. It happens to be the drug that the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs said is probably the most dangerous drug in use in the United Kingdom in terms of its impact. He is a football referee, and having seen football crowds he will know the difficulty of policing crowds under the influence of alcohol. Alcohol is a significant and difficult drug.