Drug-related Deaths

Patricia Ferguson Excerpts

Wednesday 5th November 2025 Commons Chamber

[Charlotte Nichols]

My hon. Friend is exactly right: Change Grow Live is a fantastic organisation. Multi-year funding schemes with clear outcome metrics, such as faster time for treatment, improved retention and improved naloxone coverage, will make a difference in bringing down the figures I have talked about. That is the path out of this crisis.

I recently received a letter from my hon. Friend the Minister for Policing and Crime stating she could not support overdose prevention centres because of concerns about organised crime supplying the drugs there. Overdose prevention centres are a frontline, evidence-based intervention that save lives and public money, reducing ambulance call-outs and A&E attendances, cutting public injecting and needlestick injuries, and creating a bridge into treatment. I recognise and share the Minister’s concerns about supply but, with or without such centres, people will use the same drugs, either in alleyways and stairwells or in safe hygienic settings where sharps are disposed of, and where staff can intervene and build relationships that can be the foundation for recovery from addiction.

The Scottish Affairs Committee recently published a report into problem drug use in Scotland and Glasgow’s safer drug consumption facility, and it is interesting to note the call for legislative action from the UK Government and Parliament and the fact that they seem to share my frustration with the Home Office’s ideological rather than evidence-based approach on safer drug consumption facilities.

In written correspondence to me, my hon. Friend the Minister for Policing and Crime also maintains that supplying essential safer inhalation equipment would contravene current legislation, and that the Government are unable to support such a provision or to provide a legal pathway to address this. Encouraging drug users to change their method of consuming drugs from injecting to inhaling can be an important harm reduction step, yet while supplying clean hypodermic needles is exempt under section 9A of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, the Government continue to support a policy of criminalisation of potential providers and users of safer inhalation equipment.

[Patricia Ferguson (Glasgow West) (Lab)]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for taking an intervention, and indeed for bringing forward this debate. As she has referenced, the Scottish Affairs Committee has done some work on this issue and has visited the safer drug consumption room in Glasgow, but it has also looked at facilities in Norway and Lisbon. The disappointment we have is that at the moment the Thistle operates under the prosecutorial discretion of the Lord Advocate in Scotland and that could continue indefinitely—she has made that clear—as could her permission for other centres to open. We need a change in the legislation that would allow such centres to be set up across the country if necessary. There is going to be a three-year assessment of the Thistle, and if that assessment comes up with the results that we think it might, then surely that evidence should be used to inform Government policy. Our particular disappointment is that the Government seem not to think that is relevant.

[Charlotte Nichols]

I absolutely agree and I took a note from that report:

“However, it was clear from the Minister’s evidence that the Home Office will not make legislative changes, even if the evaluation finds that the facility has been effective in meeting its aims.”

That is ideological, not evidence-based, which is why I believe the Home Office is fundamentally incapable of dealing with drug deaths and drug harm in our communities.