Lord Rosser
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Psychoactive Substances Bill [HL]
Lord Rosser Excerpts(9 years, 4 months ago)
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Lord Rosser
“( ) Condition C is that the offence was committed on prison premises.”
Lord Rosser
“Secretary of State’s duty to increase public awareness of new psychoactive substances
(1) The Secretary of State must establish a scheme to promote public awareness of new psychoactive substances, including the dangers these substances may pose.
(2) The duty referred to in subsection (1) includes, but is not limited to, the requirement to introduce measures to—
(a) increase public awareness of new psychoactive substances; and(b) assist schools in educating pupils about the dangers associated with new psychoactive substances.(3) The Secretary of State must publish, and lay before each House of Parliament, a report on the actions undertaken in pursuance of this section, within six months of sections 4 and 5 of this Act coming into effect, and annually thereafter.
(4) The report shall include, but need not be limited to—
(a) measures that have been taken to increase public awareness, including the cost of such measures;(b) measures that have been taken to assist schools in educating their pupils;(c) a subsequent review of the effectiveness of the measures taken; and(d) any further measures that the Secretary of State plans to undertake in the future.”
Lord Rosser
In Committee, we discussed an amendment providing for the Secretary of State to establish a scheme to promote public awareness of new psychoactive substances, including the dangers that these substances may pose, and to provide an annual report to Parliament. Amendment 51, which I am moving, is in a similar vein. In his response in Committee, the Minister referred to a meeting that was to take place with Public Health England and the Department for Education earlier this month. He said:
“The Bill is primarily a law enforcement measure, setting out definitions et cetera, although it is part of a wider context that includes education. As to whether we should have references to education or treatment programmes in the Bill, I personally favour things that are very clear and focused about what they want to do. What we hope to achieve through education is a very important part of the context. I undertake to reflect on that between now and Report”.—[Official Report, 23/6/15; col. 1570.]
Since the discussion in Committee, we have had the letter of 2 July to the Home Secretary from the chair of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, which set out the ACMD’s views on the Bill. That letter says:
“The ACMD would like to help the Government in refining the Bill by making recommendations”.
It goes on:
“The ACMD is willing to suggest detailed amendments … helping develop an implementation strategy including information, education, treatment and harm reduction services which may be required for users of Novel Psychoactive Substances”.
The ACMD then includes in its recommendations that the Government should,
“ensure adequate resources are in place to support education, prevention, acute health interventions, treatment and harm reduction services to prevent and to gather evidence of Novel Psychoactive Substance-related harms”.
Therefore, the ACMD was talking with regard to amendments to the Bill on information, education and treatment, and clearly had some doubts about whether adequate resources were available. In her reply, the Home Secretary made no response to the ACMD offer to “suggest detailed amendments”, including on the issues of education, treatment and harm reduction. Perhaps the Minister could fill in that gap when he responds.
On the ACMD recommendation in respect to the provision of adequate resources, the Home Secretary referred to,
“a comprehensive action plan on psychoactive substances to further enhance”,
the Government’s,
“response to prevention, treatment and information sharing”,
and to refreshing the Government’s,
“over-arching approach to reducing the demand for drugs … enabling … a broad approach to prevention”,
to be taken.
I believe the Home Secretary may also have received a letter from a number of organisations involved in this field which expressed concern about the educational and preventive response from the Government about the risks to young people from new psychoactive substances. The organisations said that the current approach to preventing young people coming to harm from NPS is insufficient to meet the scale of the problem and have asked the Government to consider the proposals recommended by the Welsh Government’s Health and Social Care Committee. That committee, of course, recommended a targeted public awareness campaign for young people, as well as one specifically for parents, an evaluation of current education programmes, investment more generally in drugs education in schools, and NPS training for front-line staff. In addition, we have already had the report of the Government’s expert panel, which also included recommendations on education and awareness.
I am not sure what the difficulty was with the amendment in Committee, and I hope that the outcome of the Minister’s reflection since Committee, which he said he would undertake, will prove to have been positive. After all, he said in his recent undated letter to my noble friend Lord Howarth of Newport:
“I feel strongly that prevention is at the core of how we tackle the misuse of drugs and keep our young people safe from drug related harms”.
What we do not want is government—any Government —maintaining that it has comprehensive action plans and is refreshing overarching approaches to address the issues arising from the use of new psychoactive substances, as the Home Secretary has done in her reply to the ACMD, when there is no requirement on government to then report to Parliament regularly on what those measures are that have been introduced and implemented and how successful or otherwise they have been in resolving the problems they were designed to address.
I have already referred to the Minister’s comment in Committee:
“What we hope to achieve through education is a very important part of the context”.—[Official Report, 23/6/15; col. 1570.]
That is fine. But what, in detail, do the Government hope to achieve through education, and how and when will they update us on the progress they are or are not making towards whatever it is they have decided they are seeking to achieve through education? Can the Minister give some specific answers to those specific questions I have just posed, or, alternatively, accept this amendment, which provides the framework through which the Government could report regularly to Parliament on their objectives with regard to the use of and public awareness about NPS, and the extent to which the measures they have taken have been effective?
One thing appears clear and that is that any education, treatment and prevention programmes in respect of new psychoactive substances to date have been less than fully effective. If they had been, presumably we would not have felt the need for this Bill. Legislation, law enforcement and criminal sanctions are important but so, too, are education, training and prevention programmes and measures if we are to address fully the use and supply of psychoactive substances. A Bill that deals with only the former aspect and makes no reference to the latter, and which lays no duty on the Secretary of State to report on the measures taken and their effectiveness, is surely incomplete and does not recognise the equal importance of education, information and prevention.
I simply conclude with one further point and question. In his recent—again, undated—letter to me setting out the Government’s amendments for Report, the Minister referred to the fact that the Government already report annually on their drug strategy. If the Minister can confirm that that is a report to Parliament and that it will in future contain information on the matters in respect of new psychoactive substances referred to in my amendment, it may be that my amendment is no longer needed. I beg to move.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, the amendment which has just been moved by my noble friend Lord Rosser ranges more widely, and very valuably, by comparison to my more limited Amendment 53 in this group, which is confined to the question of education and would require the Secretary of State to,
“require that all secondary schools report annually on their drug education programmes”,
and requires that Ofsted and the equivalent agencies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland,
“when reporting on the performance of secondary schools, include an assessment of the extent and quality of drug education provided by the school”.
It goes on to require that:
“The Secretary of State shall request that each further and higher education institution publish annually a report on its programme to reduce harms caused by the use of drugs by its students”.
The noble Lord, Lord Bates, with characteristic helpfulness, organised a meeting on the theme of education and prevention which a number of us were able to attend. We met people from Public Health England, and also present was an official from the Department for Education. It was a very interesting and very useful meeting, and I am most grateful to the noble Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm, for making that possible. I was particularly impressed by the thoughtfulness, energy, commitment and good sense of the representatives from Public Health England. I was also very encouraged by the work that they have in train, which they described. They have been somewhat limited by their lack of resources. Our meeting was on the eve of the Budget. I expressed the hope—in semi-jocular fashion—at the end of the meeting that the next day would see their budget quadrupled. They smiled a little wryly. In fact, the next day the Chancellor announced a £200 million cut to the public health grant to local authorities. That must be highly problematic for other departments—the Home Office, the Department of Health and, I dare say, the Department for Education.
The Home Office’s annual review sketches out—as is its fashion; it does not deal with anything other than sketchily—some of the educational approaches that are being undertaken. It talks about the Rise Above project; it talks about the government-sponsored website Talk to FRANK; it talks about communications campaigns that have been undertaken in 2013 and 2014; and it refers to the New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) Resource Pack for Informal Educators and Practitioners, which I have read and which I admire very much. It is full of good sense and gets the tone exactly right. So, to that extent, there is some modest encouragement.
The annual review also talks about the Government’s:
“Promotion of good practice in demand reduction in NPS at EU and international level, led by the UK”.
I found that assertion to be a trifle unconvincing. If we consider the work that has preceded it in Portugal, the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, it is difficult to see that the United Kingdom Government are in the lead in this process of developing preventive and educational strategies.
Lord Rosser
I thank the Minister for his response and all noble Lords who have spoken in the debate. I certainly did not intend to be less than complimentary about the Home Secretary’s reply. I made the comment that the Home Secretary had made no response to the ACMD offer to suggest detailed amendments, including on the issue of education, treatment and harm reduction. I do not think there was a response on that aspect in the Home Secretary’s reply.
The Minister has hit the nail on the head: the issue is not what the programmes are and what the Government have but what it is they wish to achieve. The Minister said that what we hope to achieve through education is a very important part of the context, but I do not know where it is laid down what the Government have decided they want to achieve through education. What is the goal? What is the objective we are aiming for? We have a lot of programmes but I am not sure how we will know whether those programmes have achieved anything if we do not know what goal the programmes are designed to achieve. In any review or examination, which was one of the main purposes of the amendment, we will need to know how effective the measures have been. That is one of the issues raised in the amendment where it refers to,
“a subsequent review of the effectiveness of the measures taken”.
I appreciate that the Minister has moved some way, both with the proposal in his letter to me of a review of,
“the operation of the Act”,
and with what he said this evening about writing to those responsible for the annual report on the Government’s drug strategy and inviting them to consider including information about new psychoactive substances. I am very grateful to the Minister for that response and for coming some way towards meeting us on this amendment, albeit that he does not feel able to accept the amendment as it is. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Rosser
“Annual reporting
(1) The Secretary of State must publish an annual report on new psychoactive substances.
(2) The report under subsection (1) must be published, and a copy laid before each House of Parliament, within six months of the passing of this Act and annually thereafter.
(3) The report under subsection (1) shall include—
(a) the number of prosecutions, and convictions for sentences, for offences under sections 4 to 8 of this Act;(b) the operation of powers created under sections 12, 13 and 32 to 35 of this Act;(c) the number of new psychoactive substances identified in the UK;(d) the number of hospital admissions linked to new psychoactive substances which were—(i) poisonings;(ii) mental health related; and(iii) other;(e) the number of new psychoactive substances controlled under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971; and(f) the number of exemptions for psychoactive substances granted under section 3.”
Lord Rosser
We had an amendment in Committee that called for the Secretary of State to publish an annual report on new psychoactive substances. We then set out some of the information that should be included in that report. This amendment basically seeks the same. The lack of basic data and information was an issue identified by the Government’s expert panel. These issues included the difficulty for any one agency of keeping abreast of all the new developments. The acknowledgement that the Misuse of Drugs Acts 1971 needs to be supplemented by other legislation has meant that more professional networks, including trading standards, require information. The current time lags between data collection and publication of data obtained by current networks mean that the systems cannot be employed in the service of providing more timely early warning-type information. Finally, there is a need to collect, analyse and distribute information in a more systematic and timely fashion to help inform policy and practice at both a national and local level.
In his recent letter to me on the government amendments for Report, the Minister said that the Government were not persuaded of the need,
“to produce an annual report on the operation of the Act”,
but that they,
“agree that … there is a case for a one-off duty to review the operation of the Act and to lay a report on the review before Parliament”.
Accordingly, government Amendment 55,
“requires such a report to be prepared and laid before Parliament within 30 months of the coming into force of Clauses 4 to 8 of the Bill”.
In his letter, the Minister continued:
“This timetable would allow for the collection of two years’ worth of data on the operation of the Act”,
and that data were,
“of the kind set out in your amendment 105 at Committee stage”,
which would help to inform the review.
Is the noble Baroness able to say a little more about the information that will be provided in the review referred to in government Amendment 55 and the extent to which it will include the kind of issues referred to in my amendment on annual reporting? Surely, after the first review of the operation of the Act, which the government amendment says will be within 30 months of Clauses 4 to 8 coming into force, there should be regular updates since the facts about the effectiveness of the operation of the Act and the measures taken may change.
Alternatively—what I ask comes back to what the Minister said on the previous amendment—will the information that we have called for in our amendment also be covered in the annual report on the Government’s drugs strategy, to which, as I have said, the Minister made reference in relation to the previous amendment on education, training and prevention? I beg to move.
Lord Howarth of Newport
My Lords, my Amendment 54 in this group ranges more widely than that of my noble friend, and might indeed be regarded as somewhat clunky. However, it is intended to be illustrative of the range of issues that I think ought to be covered in a proper annual review or annual report issued by the Home Office.
I have looked at the three annual reviews issued since 2013. The February 2015 review of the progress of the Drug Strategy 2010 consists of all of 28 pages of text. It covers some of the issues indicated in my amendment which I think ought to be covered in an annual review, but far from all of them. I am afraid to say that it seems to me a thin and superficial document which is simply not commensurate with the importance and complexity of the issue and the major social challenge that drug abuse presents. It is also an inadequate form of accountability to Parliament, being as flimsy as it is. It contrasts with the European Drug Report, which is produced annually by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, which is a much more substantial document, containing tables, graphs, citations and footnotes—an altogether more serious and substantial report. We do not find that kind of material in the Home Office’s annual review.
The Minister said in her foreword to the latest annual review, “We are not complacent”. That is good. However, on page 10, she spoke about:
“Promotion of good practice in demand reduction in NPS at EU and international level, led by the UK”.
That is a fine assertion but, as I said in the previous debate, not to me a convincing one. Regrettably, the annual review does not go on to tell us what this promotion has meant or what the good practice in demand reduction should be.
The expert panel’s report said on page 53 that adequate monitoring of whatever the policy proves to be,
“needs to be in place”.
I think that it was looking for a substantial annual review. It also seems to me that the implication of the letter from Professor Iversen to the Home Secretary of 2 July is that a whole range of issues need to be kept under solid and informative review.
The expert panel report contains a very important section on pages 35 to 36, in which it sets out the key opportunities and the key risks of the policy that the Government have embarked upon in this legislation. Among the key risks are those of supply, demand, enforcement, harms, forensic science, legal issues and communications. Among the opportunities are, again, supply, demand, enforcement, harms, forensic science, legal issues, communications and costs, so, according to the expert panel, there are both opportunities and risks entailed in the Government’s policy. I suggest that certainly the Government’s initial report, which they have promised to issue within 30 months, but also the annual review issued by the Home Office, ought to deal in very substantial measure with all those opportunities and risks that have been found.
The section of the European Monitoring Centre report on prevention tells us that the use of NPSs by young adults ranged from a high of 9.7% in Ireland to a low of 0.2% in Portugal. It also tells us that Sweden, which practises a draconian prohibitionist policy, has the second-highest drug-induced mortality among 15 to 64 year-olds. These are among the sorts of pieces of information that ought also to appear in the Home Office’s annual review.
Page 15 of the last edition of the annual review, in the section discussing restricting supply, referred briefly to liaison with Pakistan, Afghanistan and West Africa, but had nothing whatever to say about liaison with China and India, which are the key countries in terms of NPSs. On page 19, we are told that the UK,
“chaired a G7+ country Expert Meeting … in Berlin in November 2014”,
which led to agreement on a “set of actions”, but we are not told what the actions were. On page 23, we are told that there is a strategy of:
“Transferring the responsibility for developing locally led, integrated, recovery orientated treatment systems to local authorities”,
but there is no discussion of the funding situation for local authorities—the very large cuts there have already been, followed, of course, by the cuts just announced to the funding for Public Health England.
Baroness Chisholm of Owlpen
My Lords, I undertook to reflect on the various amendments that were tabled in Committee. Having reflected, as the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, stated, we have brought forward Amendment 55 in this group.
As I indicated in Committee, post-legislative scrutiny of all primary legislation takes place three to five years after Royal Assent. We accept that there is a case here for special treatment. The Government are bringing forward their post-legislative scrutiny of this particular piece of legislation and will place a review of the operation of the Act on a statutory footing.
We remain firmly of the view that that the duty to undertake a review should be a one-off requirement, rather than a continuing annual requirement with all the costs that that would entail. We are not persuaded of the benefit of undertaking a bespoke review of this legislation year after year. I appreciate that the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, is not confined to a review of this legislation, but my point about the resource constraints carries ever more weight when one looks down the list of matters to be addressed in the noble Lord’s annual review of the Government’s drugs strategy.
Given these considerations, the Government’s amendment simply requires a review of the operation of the Act and places a duty on the Home Secretary to prepare a report on the review and lay a copy of the report before both Houses of Parliament within 30 months of the Bill coming into force. As noble Lords know, a period of 30 months has been specified in order to allow for the collection of up to two years’ worth of data post implementation.
The need for a review of the Bill was one of the issues raised by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs in its letter of 2 July to the Home Secretary. In the Home Secretary’s response, published yesterday, she said:
“The Home Office is keen to work with the ACMD and would welcome the opportunity to have an early discussion on both the scale and scope of the review having regard to resource constraints, and how to make best use of existing data and evidence”.
Until we have had those discussions with the advisory council, it would be wrong to commit now to the review taking a particular form. I can say that I would expect the review to cover much of the ground identified in the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Rosser.
Turning to Amendment 54 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Howarth, I agree that many of the issues he raises need to be looked at from time to time. That is why we already produce an annual review of our 2010 drugs strategy. The most recent annual review was published in February and highlighted the progress made across the three strands of the strategy—namely, reducing demand, restricting supply and building recovery. The report also set out our future commitments, including new initiatives and actions to respond to emerging evidence and the changing nature of the drugs market.
I recognise that substance misuse is not an issue that government can tackle alone. We value contributions made by our key partners to support the delivery of the 2010 strategy, including: our independent experts, the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs; law enforcement agencies, including the National Crime Agency; international partners; and those working within the prevention, treatment and recovery sector. We are also committed to ensuring that, where possible, we assess the effectiveness and value for money of the 2010 strategy. Furthermore, our action to restrict the supply of illicit drugs is complemented by activity through the serious and organised crime strategy, which was launched in 2013 and which has been the subject of its own annual report. Together, the strategies are making significant steps forward in tackling the supply of drugs by organised criminals in the UK and overseas.
We recognise that drugs are a complex and evolving issue, so we will continue to develop the strategy and consider other approaches to help us respond to emerging threats and challenges. We will also continue to report in a proportionate way on progress in tackling these threats and meeting these challenges. I hope that noble Lords will agree that on reflection the approach taken in Amendment 55, coupled with the existing reporting on the 2010 drugs strategy, is the right way forward and, on that basis, that the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, will be prepared to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Rosser
I thank noble Lords who have spoken in the debate and the Minister for her response and for addressing government Amendment 55. I am obviously a little disappointed that there is apparently to be a one-off review, with no further review, although I note the observation made by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth. It rather begs the question: if the Government are determined that it will be a one-off review and no more, what happens if the report that comes out is rather negative in respect of the operation of the Act? Surely if that were so, there would be a strong case for a further review within a fairly short time to see whether the situation had improved, and perhaps to set out what had happened in relation to any recommendations there might be in the review of the operation of the Act. There is presumably not much point in having such a review if problems are found and no recommendations are made as to how they might be addressed.
That issue will probably have to be left for another day, but I am not sure that it is necessarily wise for the Government to shut the door on any further review of the operation of the Act when that very review might make a case for one within a short time, particularly if it finds that the situation is not as satisfactory as one might have hoped. However, I appreciate that the Government have made some movement with their Amendment 55. I also note the noble Baroness’s comments that much of the information set out in our Amendment 52 is likely to be covered in the review of the operation of the Act under government Amendment 55. In the light of that, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.