EU Drugs Strategy: EUC Report

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2012 Lords Chamber

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[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

That this House takes note of the Report of the European Union Committee on The EU Drugs Strategy (26th Report, Session 2010–12, HL Paper 270).

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, the European Union Committee report on the European Union drugs strategy for 2013 to 2020 was published on 16 March of this year, and I am glad now to have the opportunity to bring it to your Lordships’ House for debate in my capacity as chairman of the Home Affairs sub-committee that conducted the inquiry. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Henley, for the Government’s full and helpful response to the report. In his letter of 10 May, he described our report as “extremely timely”, and so it was.

On 8 June, just a month later, the Council agreed that the EU did indeed need a new drugs strategy for 2013-20, and that it should be adopted by the end of this year. That in itself was a welcome development. Vice-president Reding, the commissioner responsible for this area of policy, described the strategy in somewhat slighting terms as,

“a nice piece of literature”—

and “wishful thinking”. We took a different view: that a new strategy was needed to show the direction in which the member states wished to go. The Danish presidency clearly agreed with that. The first draft of the strategy has already been discussed in the Council’s working group, and I understand that it is to be published shortly. So we got our views in ahead of the game, which is what this House should aim to do whenever possible with its thematic reports.

Our report made a number of recommendations, and I have time to refer to only a few of them. The point that I wish to emphasis the most, and to which we returned more than once, is the need for an informed and objective public debate on the drugs policies of the different member states as an integral part of the negotiation and adoption of the new drugs strategy. We were struck during the course of our inquiry by the paucity and poverty of any such public debate anywhere in Europe. This should be remedied.

In the course of our inquiry, we learnt about the policies of a number of member states, from the Swedish zero-tolerance approach to the experience of Portugal, where the possession of drugs for personal use was decriminalised in 2001. Portuguese law also greatly improved the harm reduction measures available to drug users. We took evidence from Jose Socrates, the former Prime Minister of Portugal who introduced that policy, and from the director of the Portuguese Institute for Drugs and Drug Dependency.

What the committee did not do was consider whether to make any recommendations for a change in the law of this country towards the decriminalisation of possession and use. That would have been outside the terms of reference of our EU committee, and we took no position on it. What we did was to urge forcefully that the formulation of a new EU drugs strategy offered a golden opportunity to widen the public debate on these different policies, in the hope of achieving a better meeting of minds on the best way forward in the EU in general and in this country in particular.

We stressed that such a debate should be “informed”, “objective” and “dispassionate”—and we chose those words with some care. The press have an important role to play. However, I am afraid that some organs of the United Kingdom press are notoriously lacking in objectivity on this subject. The noble Baroness, Lady Meacher, in her evidence, singled out the Daily Mail. The noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, told us that it had behaved “grossly irresponsibly”. In the unlikely event that the Daily Mail reports this debate, I shall no doubt be accused of seeking to have drug trafficking legalised. I hope not. Even the Daily Mail should recognise that there is an argument to be made that imprisoning drug users is not necessarily best for them, best for society, or even the best use of our prisons. That argument has nothing whatever to do with the legalisation of drug trafficking.

As I say, I hope that publication of the new EU strategy will trigger such a debate. I am not, however, overconfident of that. The Council has already, without any public debate, agreed on 19 points that will shape the strategy. None of them deals with national drugs policies. Nor should they, because the Commission and Council agree that this should remain within the competence of the member states. However, EU drugs policy is an impressive instance of subsidiarity and action, and we found no one who advocated changing it. Somewhere in the document that the Council has shaped up so far, though, there could and should have been some recognition that member states can learn from one another in formulating their policies.

Perhaps the Minister could tell us whether he agrees, and if so what steps the Government can take to broaden the debate, both nationally and internationally. In that context, I welcome the initiative by the UK’s Drugs Policy Committee to hold a public debate on 19 November, entitled “New Generation, New Problems, New Drugs: Time for a New Approach”, at which the right honourable Oliver Letwin will make the keynote speech. I hope that that debate, including the Government’s contribution to it, will cover the international as well as the domestic aspects of the issue.

I turn to the question of new psychoactive substances, or NPS, as they are known. The Government’s action plan, published on 17 May, contained a commitment to ensuring that the new EU strategy includes activity to tackle the problem. To that extent we welcome it, but it does nothing to counter our criticism of the current EU legislation: that it is slow, cumbersome and ineffective. He pointed out that in the space of six years only two substances have been banned using the EU Council decision. It took the EU one and a half years to ban mephedrone. By that time, 15 member states including the UK had already banned it under their national laws. The Government have undertaken to promote robust co-ordinated action at EU level to tackle NPS. Does this include helping to design and implement a rapid and effective EU planning procedure?

The reduction of drug trafficking and the destruction of international criminal networks is, naturally, one of the objects of the current strategy and will undoubtedly be one of the objects of the next one. There is no doubt that the tracing and confiscation of the proceeds of crime is potentially one of the most powerful weapons in the armoury of states, although it has yet to fulfil that potential to the full. The role of Europol, which devotes something like one-third of its work to this field, is vital, and that is something that the Government will need to keep in mind as they conduct their audit of EU competencies and as they approach the Protocol 36 decision in 2014.

There are two additional steps that the Government could take on the confiscation of proceeds, and I hope that they will. The first relates to the draft directive on the confiscation of the proceeds of crime. In a report published in April the committee recommended that the Government should opt into the draft directive. I repeated that when the report was debated on 22 May, and the recommendation that we should opt in was endorsed without dissent by this House. The draft directive was debated in another place on 12 June, and in advance of that debate the Government announced that they would not be opting in at this stage. I believe that that was putting political expediency ahead of the national interest. The key issue here is not whether we in this country already have in place all the measures in the draft directive—we have. Rather, it is whether we can shape the directive so that we can recover the proceeds of criminals who hold them in other member states. I hope that the Minister can assure me that when the negotiations are concluded and the directive is ready for adoption, the Government will revisit that decision and do so in a positive spirit.

The second step that the Government can take is one that they and their predecessors should have taken long ago: to sign and ratify the Council of Europe convention on money-laundering, the Warsaw convention. The committee has raised this question time and again in this House in taking evidence from Ministers and officials and in correspondence with Ministers, and I make no apology for returning to it yet again. The previous Government undertook to ratify the convention early in 2010. For this Government, the noble Lord, Lord Henley, assured the committee that he was pretty sure that the United Kingdom was compliant with the convention, but that the Home Office did not currently have the resources to review that. I asked him when the Government would sign the convention, to which he replied,

“I would hope we would do so within the next year or so but I am not going to be any more precise than that”.

The response to our report was in fact even weaker. The Government are confident that the work required to enable them to reach a fully informed position in respect of signing and ratifying will “progress significantly this year”. What does that mean? Surely it would not take much more than a week—or, I would suggest, the amount of time that it has taken to write the brief for the Minister and all the officials who came to our committee—to check to see whether there are in fact provisions of the convention not already implemented in our law. If any such provisions are found, steps can then be taken to remedy the situation.

A failure to sign one of the major international instruments for combating serious organised crime, including drug trafficking, frankly does not give the impression of a Government who take the fight against crime all that seriously. In the light of the issues raised by HSBC’s failure to enforce its own money-laundering procedures, that hardly seems to be the message we should be conveying at this moment. Our failure so far to sign and notify the Warsaw convention weakens our hand in pressing other European countries, which may well be a good deal less compliant than we are in this matter, to do so.

The Council’s conclusions state that,

“in formulating the new strategy appropriate consideration should be given to recommendations put forward by high-level scientific societies”.

The committee, alas, cannot claim to fall within that description, but we did take a great deal of high-level evidence on which to base our conclusions and recommendations. We hope that the Government will not only respond positively to them, as they have begun to do, but will help to persuade other member states to do so too.

I would not wish to conclude my remarks without paying a tribute to the work of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, in Lisbon. EU agencies often come in for a good deal of flak, sometimes deservedly so. The EMCDDA seems to us to be performing a genuinely valuable function with modest resources. It is important that it be enabled to continue its excellent work.

Our report raised a number of serious questions. I have by no means referred to all of them. I hope the Minister will answer those questions, and I look forward to hearing his replies. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord for his response to the debate, which was helpful in many respects. I can assure him that I was not the slightest bit worried that the Daily Mail might be up in the Gallery; I was merely worried that its recording of anything I said might not be all that accurate. If that paper is not there, the problem will not arise.

The one point I still regret a bit is the Warsaw convention. At the risk of banging on about this, I point out that it is not that we believe that the British Government’s money-laundering arrangements are not consistent with the Warsaw convention—I accept what the noble Lord says, that they almost certainly are—it is the example that we set by not signing and ratifying an international convention that deals with a matter of great importance to us, and where we want to encourage others to see that we take it seriously and to take it equally seriously themselves. That is the basis on which I continue to urge him to find the one or two man hours necessary to achieve this, particularly in the light of the not very pleasant story about HSBC. I do not want to go into that as it is not proper to do so here, but one can see that we would not want the impression that we are a bit sloppy about these things to get around. I am sure that he does not want that, and neither do I.

I shall not reply to the debate. I thank all noble Lords who have participated; it has been extremely gratifying that so many people participated from outside the narrow limits of the EU Select Committee and the sub-committee that I chair. It was not, as these debates, alas, quite often are, simply the usual suspects, and for that I am extremely grateful. We had a debate that can best be summarised in the single word “thoughtful”, and that is as it should be. It was a thoughtful debate with a lot of different views being expressed, and I hope that it will help the Government among others in their formulation of policy.

I conclude with a point raised by the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, in her contribution; she has a lot of expertise and of course a specific role in this matter. I think that I understood her to say that she was not quite sure that there was that much difference between what we did here and what the Portuguese now did under their new policy. That struck a chord with me; I think that she is right. The big difference is that the Portuguese are proud of what they have done and go around telling everyone about it, while in this country, although we have a much more humane policy—the Minister referred to this—with much more emphasis on harm reduction than in the past, it still remains the policy that dare not speak its name. That is why the best contribution that the report produced by my committee could make would be if it started a wider thoughtful debate about these issues. I beg to move.

Motion agreed.