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Mr. John Hutton (Barrow and Furness): New clauses 7 and 13 are very sensible provisions to improve the Bill, and they should be incorporated into it. In his comments on new clause 7 in Monday's debate, the Minister--perhaps unintentionally--struck a rather complacent tone. He implied that the new clauses were not necessary, because sufficient powers were available to magistrates and other courts to require convicted defendants to undergo treatment for drug or alcohol dependency.

The Minister was right to mention those powers. As I am sure he is aware, however, the new clauses, particularly new clause 7, in two respects provide significantly greater confirmation of those powers than provided for in paragraph 6 of schedule 1A of the Powers of Criminal Courts Act 1973, which also confirms the powers.

First, under the provisions of paragraph 6 of schedule 1A, before the court imposes such a treatment order, it has to be satisfied that the person being convicted is dependent on drugs. If the Minister studies new clause 7, he will note that that test would no longer have to be satisfied.

I am aware that paragraph 6(9) of the schedule tends to broaden the concept of dependency by referring to a person simply having a propensity to misuse a serious drug, even though that in itself is a rather vague concept. The new clause cuts through such difficulties by making it clear that, if the defendant is using a class A drug, the power to compel him to undergo treatment is exercisable. That is a significant improvement.

Secondly, new clause 7 is more extensive, and therefore, I think, more effective. It provides the power to compel a person who has been convicted to undergo testing. As I understand it, paragraph 6 of schedule 1A of the 1973 Act provides that the court can compel a person to undergo treatment but has no powers to compel that person to undergo regular testing.

Of course, many people will argue that it is difficult to formulate an effective treatment programme if it is not accompanied by a power to require the person undergoing that treatment to be tested regularly in order to establish his or her level of dependency on drugs. If the test reveals that the person is using drugs continually and illicitly, the treatment programme is unlikely to be effective. The Minister might have inadvertently got the wrong end of the stick when he tried to dismiss the relevance of the new clause by saying that the necessary powers were already available to the courts--they are not.

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In those two significant respects--compelling a defendant to undergo testing and broadening the court's powers to require a person to be tested--new clause 7 would significantly improve the provisions of the 1973 legislation.

My hon. Friend the Member for Hammersmith (Mr. Soley) spoke extensively about the problems that our prisons face in dealing with drugs. There is a huge problem, which I am sure the Minister recognises. Of course, there is a huge drug problem in society at large so perhaps we should not be surprised by signs of drug abuse in the prison population, too. If we are to tackle the problem of drugs in prisons, it is hugely important that we are not complacent and do not rest on our laurels, saying that the existing legislation cannot be improved and that the necessary arrangements are already in place.

The Addictive Diseases Trust, which now calls itself the Rehabilitation of Addicted Prisoners Trust and which is doing excellent work in some prisons, estimates that drug abuse in prisons is widespread. It also estimates that more than 50 per cent. of prisoners have a chronic and often severe addiction, but very little specialised intensive addiction treatment is available in prisons. It estimates that, in some prisons, as many as 80 per cent. of prisoners are using drugs. Many inmates who were not addicts when they entered prison have become addicted--often under pressure from drug pushers--by the time they are released.

The drug culture in many prisons is sinister, not only because it directly challenges the authority of the prison governor and staff but because it establishes a counter-culture, in which power is wielded by drug pushers who use their control of the supply of drugs and their consequent influence in profoundly unhelpful and damaging ways. In this context, it is important that we constantly examine how we respond to the problem of drugs in prison and whether more work cannot be done by the Home Office and the Prison Service. The drug culture is a direct challenge to the way in which we run our prisons.

Anyone who has visited a prison and talked to prisoners knows how grim the reality is in prison. That is not to say that many prisons are not trying to develop effective strategies to deal with drug abuse, because they are, and we should congratulate the Prison Service on its work in that respect. Nevertheless, the picture is pretty horrifying in many prisons.

I do not whether the Minister read The Guardian of 10 August 1994. It may not be his usual reading--it is not usually mine--but it contained a letter from a prisoner. I read it at the time, and it struck me as painting an horrific picture of drug abuse in prison. I shall quote from it, as it is relevant to our debate.

The prisoner in question, who was serving a long sentence, described his drug taking--he was taking them intravenously--in this way:

"The syringe that we used today had been used approximately 100 times before by approximately 15 different prisoners.


It is a disposable insulin syringe, which I will describe briefly for you: the rubber at the end of the plunger has disintegrated completely through constant use. Instead of a rubber, we have a small piece of black polythene from a dustbin liner wrapped around the plunger and held in place by cotton thread.


The plunger itself is snapped in half and so the barrel of the syringe has been cut down accordingly. Each time the syringe is used, butter is smeared on to the polythene to facilitate the plunger to be depressed.

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The needle, of which we have only one, has been cut in half with nail clippers to remove a blockage. We use a matchbox to sharpen it.


It is not possible to clean either the syringe or the needle in between injections as this would entail removing the polythene and tying it all back on again. Thus the risk of infection is monstrously high . . . The highest number of prisoners I have seen using a similar syringe, one after the other, is nine."

The prisoner says that he considers himself lucky to have contracted only hepatitis B and hepatitis C through the use of shared needles in prison. He has managed to avoid becoming infected with the HIV virus, but I suspect that he will not be successful for very much longer.

The prisoner also writes:

"Despite many efforts to bring my addiction to an end, the sheer availability and the large number of addicts in prison mean that I consistently fail. There is no means of rehabilitation for addicts in prison and every reason for the addicts--particularly long-termers and lifers--to conceal their addiction."

That is a pretty grim and depressing picture, although things may have improved a little since 1994, when that letter was written.

For example, I am aware that the Rehabilitation of Addicted Prisoners Trust is now running a number of drug rehabilitation programmes in prisons such as Downview, Coldingley, Pentonville and Wandsworth. That is an excellent sign of progress, but there are still not enough rehabilitation programmes within the prison estate. It would be interesting if the Minister could say--perhaps not today but in the future--how many programmes there are and what their likely success rate is.

When Judge Stephen Tumim was the chief inspector of prisons, he commented favourably on the drug rehabilitation work being done at Downview. After his inspection, he recommended that the Home Office provide sufficient funding properly to evaluate the impact of that programme and the extent to which it had a more general application across the prison estate.

Taken together, new clauses 7 and 13 take us in the right direction. It would be a catastrophic mistake, in terms of the very purpose and function of prisons and certainly in terms of securing value for money for the taxpayer, if we continued to do so little about the problem of drug abuse.

As much as half of all property-related crime may well be drug-connected. There is undeniably a connection between drug abuse and property-related crime. The need of drug addicts to feed their habit, which may require £500 or £600 a day for heroin or crack cocaine, is having a huge impact on crime in many of our communities.

Drug problems are present not just in the inner cities, but in towns and cities across the country, and even in some rural areas. When offenders are sent to prison, we have a unique opportunity to try to correct their pattern of drug abuse. If we do not take that opportunity, the likelihood is that they will show up in prison again two or three years after being discharged--sometimes sooner than that--because their drug addiction was not effectively addressed while they were in prison. As the RAPT evidence has shown, there is a risk of drug abuse problems getting worse rather than better in prison, and feeding through to higher crime levels.

The two new clauses would take us forward. They would require more work from the Home Office in establishing rehabilitation programmes in prison, and

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would give the courts useful additional powers that they do not possess. I urge the Minister to think again about his position on the new clauses. He may feel that the wording is not perfect, although it draws heavily on the wording of schedule 1A of the 1973 Act, so it may be hard to criticise the new clauses for that. The new powers available to the court would take their testing and treatment powers in a positive direction. I therefore hope that the Minister is prepared to be more positive than he was on Monday.

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