Ten-Year Drugs Strategy

George Howarth Excerpts

Monday 6th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his words of encouragement. It has been an enormous effort across the whole of Government to put this plan together. I congratulate my team, and I thank my fellow Ministers who have worked on putting it in place. My hon. Friend is quite right that we need to focus very much on drugs in the home. The funding that is put in place, although it is routed through the Department of Health and Social Care, will go to local authorities, which will then be able to design their own services locally to fit their own requirements and demographic. Some of that might be in the home, some of it might be residential, and some of it might be on an out-patient basis. We do not want to be prescriptive at this stage, but this will be channelled through local authorities, which can design services appropriately.

[Sir George Howarth (Knowsley) (Lab)]

I welcome the measures set out in the Government’s new strategy and the funding that goes with it. I particularly welcome the emphasis on disrupting supplies and dealing with those who already have addiction problems. One piece of the jigsaw that seems to be missing, although I may have missed it, is targeting of so-called drug barons and the extent to which money laundering is going on in this country, always through legitimate businesses and increasingly, I think, through some private landlords. Will the Minister say a word about how the Government intend to tackle that specific problem?