Criminal Justice and Courts Bill

Debate between Lord Patel of Bradford and Lord Mancroft

Monday 14th July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Mancroft (Con)]

My Lords, I listened with great care to the noble Lord, Lord Patel of Bradford, in moving his amendment, and he laid out very accurately for your Lordships the perceived problem of misadministration of various sorts of drugs, particularly prescription drugs, in prison, and the manner in which they are prescribed and taken. The problem that the noble Lord describes to the House is probably entirely right. However, it may not have come over that it is merely an extension of the problem of prescription drugs outside prison. Often in your Lordships’ House we discuss drugs and drug-related crime, but we rarely get around to talking about the fact that, however many people may be taking illegal drugs, many more are addicted to prescription drugs, which causes immense problems for them and their families, as well as for society as a whole. Whether or not that addiction to prescription drugs is causing crime or is related to crime in some way, it is an enormous problem. All those drugs are prescription drugs, which means that they have already been prescribed by a doctor—and probably, as a consequence, misprescribed, or they would not be resulting in addiction and all the problems that stem from it.

We are not dealing with that problem outside prison, with the ordinary population—we are dealing with it incredibly badly. The Department of Health is wrestling with it in a rather inadequate way, and it is bouncing backwards and forwards between the Home Office and the Department of Health, as it has been for many years. I am not entirely sure why, if we cannot deal with it outside prison, we should dump that problem into prison and say to the prison authorities that we cannot deal with it when prisoners are ordinary citizens living in our society, but now that they have been convicted of a crime and are going to go to prison we expect the prison authorities to deal with a problem that we cannot deal with outside.

The noble Lord has accurately identified a problem, but I have some concern over whether Amendments 19 and 20 contain the solution. Perhaps it is the start of a solution—but if we cannot deal with it outside, asking the Secretary of State to lay a report, the results of which we can all guess, even if we do not know the details, does not seem even to get to the start of resolving this problem. I look forward to what my noble friend says in response, and perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Patel, would like to respond before then. However, although I accept the problem, I cannot see that this even remotely touches on a solution.

[Lord Patel of Bradford]

I completely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, about the issue of prescription drugs out in the community, given the ludicrous figure of literally 50 million prescriptions—I think—having been issued last year. However, there is a clear distinction between that situation and the situation in prisons. Mandatory drug testing was introduced to test prisoners for heroin in particular. However, following the introduction of mandatory drug testing, many prisoners who had been using cannabis, which stayed in the system for longer, started to use heroin, which stayed in the system for a shorter time. We got over that problem through introducing into the prison estate a very good integrated drug system, which has worked exceptionally well.

However, the drug abuse problem has shifted to prescription drugs. In prison after prison, prescription drugs are used as a commodity. People are being bullied on account of these drugs and violence is associated with them. We do not have the measure of this problem or know the extent of prescription drug abuse. Indeed, we have no idea about the problem of the so-called legal highs, which is clearly a problem in prisons, because the mandatory drug testing simply does not pick up those drugs. Merely to say that we will conduct mandatory drug testing for all drugs will not solve the problem. We need to analyse further how prisoners can safely take the prescription medicines they are prescribed and what policies need to be put in place to provide safe places for them to do so. We need data on prisoners’ prescription medicines and on the incidence of abuse to enable us to move forward on this issue. The intention behind the amendment is to obtain that data and for the Secretary of State to present them to Parliament in a report. That would give us the opportunity to improve the situation.