Drug Consumption Rooms

Debate between Grahame Morris and Douglas Ross

Wednesday 17th January 2018 Westminster Hall

[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.

Smart Meters Bill (First sitting)

Debate between Grahame Morris and Douglas Ross

Committee Debate: 1st Sitting: House of Commons
Tuesday 21st November 2017 Public Bill Committees

[Grahame Morris]

Q Can they be used for any other purpose?

Rob Salter-Church: No. We are wholly supportive of the Government taking these powers to ensure an orderly conclusion to the programme.

Angus Flett: The financial governance I have makes it highly unlikely that the special administration will be required. The way I am structured is that I invoice my customers and they are required, under licence conditions, to pay me within five days. I also have the facility to take a month’s worth of my invoicing as a credit balance, so I carry cash.

The way I invoice my suppliers is between 20 and 30 days. I also have a £5 million keep well deed from a shareholder and a guaranteed bond of £10 million that I can draw down on. The special administration is set up so that, in the highly unlikely event that we became insolvent, it could administrate and keep the lights on until another organisation could be found to take us over. The costs of that administration can be recovered back on my customer base. So it is a sensible measure, although highly unlikely to be required.

[Douglas Ross (Moray) (Con)]

Q Our earlier witnesses were speaking about the ways to the roll out and, ultimately, not being able to meet original timeframes. In the report earlier this year, you were looking at roll out and some potential problems with it. The number of installers was highlighted as an issue. Is that still an issue? If we as a Committee agree to a number of things about extending the timescale, will there still be a problem with there not physically being enough people able to do the job?

Rob Salter-Church: The 2020 target for completing the roll-out as set by Government was always going to be a challenge, and it remains a challenge, as was said earlier. One of the things Ofgem has done is put in place a framework where we require suppliers to submit to us a plan for the roll-out, setting themselves annual targets that we can enforce against if they do not meet those targets.

We scrutinise the plans that we see from suppliers; if they say, “We will install x number of meters per year”, we do not just take it for granted that that is going to happen. We require them to show us what that will mean for the installer capacity that you might need. What does that mean in terms of the contracts that you are going to have to sign to buy meters, and so on? We scrutinise that to give confidence that the suppliers have got arrangements in place to make their plans deliverable.

The information you are referring to that we publish is our conclusions, having looked across the piece at some of the biggest risks to the programme, which suppliers must remain focused, laser-like, on managing. Indeed, getting hold of enough installers is one of those issues.

Suppliers’ plans for 2017 are broadly on track for meeting their installation targets at the end of this year. A couple of suppliers are slightly behind, but not significantly so. What that tells me is that, yes, there is a real challenge to get to ’20, but suppliers are pretty much on track with the plans that they have set themselves for how they will meet their obligations.