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The Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons (Mr. Tony Newton): I intervene
not to pre-empt my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary's speech, but simply to express my appreciation of the way in which the hon. Gentleman is addressing the House on a subject that is important to hon. Members of all parties; and to underline the fact that I very much share his emphasis on improving the effort in schools. I shall carefully examine everything that he has said. I have been putting a considerable effort into encouraging private sector involvement throughout the country in various ways, including the drugs challenge fund, which has proved very successful.
My intervention provides me with an opportunity both to give the hon. Gentleman a pointer and to express my thanks in another direction. One of Nottingham's major economic features is Boots the Chemist. The company has done a great deal, including running its own anti-drugs information weeks in its stores throughout the country. It is a good example of what the hon. Gentleman and I wish to encourage.
Mr. Allen:
I am very grateful for the right hon. Gentleman's intervention. I am also pleased to see the Under-Secretary of State for Social Security, the hon. Member for Gedling (Mr. Mitchell), in his place.
Tremendous linkage with local business in Nottinghamshire has been one of the features underpinning the project's success. Opportunities are available to cast the net more widely, to make good the very small amount of income necessary to produce the basic materials, such as T-shirts and badges which, through celebrity endorsement, make DARE recognisable to a child, not merely in the classroom but on Saturday morning television when their favourite pop star wears a DARE logo, as has happened in the United States, where, for example, famous basketball players endorse the DARE campaign.
Fourthly, for DARE to spread, we need a core group of DARE-trained police officers seconded either to the Home Office or, if the Home Office cannot or is unwilling to handle it, the Department for Education and Employment, to form a national unit for DARE training and a central resource for best practice in all DARE work. That requires a tiny reallocation of the central budget, but would give the most tremendous signal to chief constables, who would be far more willing to use resources to staff the scheme with local police officers as a result. After all, the commitment by the chief constable of Nottinghamshire, for example, of £650,000 a year for the 24 officers involved in DARE is sizeable.
Another appealing thing about DARE in these stringent financial times is that it does not drain public resources. Apart from the fact that it saves taxpayers millions of pounds in the long run, DARE uses existing resources allied to private sector funding. Having said that, I pay tribute to the £6 million per annum committed by the Minister and her Department to the grants for education support and training scheme and other anti-drug funding, which is very welcome.
Fifthly, an area that falls very clearly within the Department's remit is the need to conduct proper long-term research along the lines of the 10-year evaluation in the United States to assess and continue to improve the effectiveness of DARE. I wrote to Lord Henley about that on 25 June 1996, and he promised an evaluation of one of the anti-drug programmes by the end
of the year. Perhaps the Minister could write to me about the outcome of that evaluation, and comment in broader terms about the Department's research into the effects of DARE.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment (Mrs. Cheryl Gillan):
The hon. Gentleman might like to know that we will be publishing an evaluation document covering all the GEST projects, including the DARE programme carried out by Kirklees local education authority, which I believe is the one he is discussing. It is not available as I speak but will be shortly, and I shall be very happy to send it to him.
Mr. Allen:
I thank the Minister for that very helpful reply. The £65,000 spent on that survey is an incredibly small investment, but will have a tremendous multiplying effect if we can learn the lessons of the Kirklees project and the Nottinghamshire example.
Mrs. Gillan:
The figure is £80,000.
Mr. Allen:
I stand corrected--£80,000. It is going up as we speak.
Sixthly, how can we take the tremendous work done for nine-year-olds--let us imagine that we can do it nationwide--into secondary schools? People need a refresher. I understand that the key age for a booster to young people's resistance to drug offers would be 15 years old. In Nottinghamshire, the county council is working with the police and health promotion officers to develop such a follow-up. The Department may want to call for papers on that and request that officials discuss how it is going.
Seventhly, I wonder whether the Minister and the Leader of the House--I am delighted that the right hon. Gentleman is present--feel that we should knock some heads together on the budget process that police forces have to go through, which is a serious problem for chief constables. I know that the process is part of the Home Office's empire, but I should like to explain why it has appalling consequences for young people's education and health.
Putting bobbies into the classroom through a DARE project prevents thousands of crimes and saves billions of pounds-worth of drug-related crime. Such prevention means that we do not have to chase the drug abusers, lock them up, put them through the courts, build prisons or pick up the human pieces consequent to drug-related crime. Yet the statistics upon which chief constables' budgets are based and allocated give greater weight to one burglar being caught than all the drug-related crime being prevented, making it more and more difficult for chief constables to allocate resources to drug programmes. That is complete stupidity, and must end.
Many chief constables are eager to experiment with a DARE project but are not able to show on the bottom line that it prevents crime. By definition, since the crime has not occurred, it cannot be quantified. Nottinghamshire's 24 DARE officers would doubtless enable chief constables to say that they had caught X burglars. Such budgeting is therefore counter-productive. I do not want to destroy the way in which the police account for their activities, but I hope that the Minister will be able to take that point away and discuss it with her colleagues and the chief constables, so that we can arrive at a prevention strategy.
Eighthly, I would like the Minister to use her muscle and authority to end the nonsense of the misuse of the Drug Trafficking Act 1994. I shall explain how. The drug confiscation fund, with which I know the Leader of the House is very familiar, is made up of the proceeds of drug crime, which is a good idea. That fund can be used for drug-related policing--so far, so good--but I understand that the Home Office's interpretation of such policing relates only to enforcement not prevention. I understand that that is an interpretation of the statute, not a requirement of it.
I therefore very much hope that, if the Home Office cannot see that money spent on prevention yields many more times its value than chasing the symptoms, the fund will be made available to other Departments--perhaps the DFEE--or some other distribution body.
It is perfectly sane, indeed quite ironic, to take money from the drug barons--their ill-gotten gains that they have squeezed out of our young people--and turn it against them by educating young people, so that the drug barons' market is not provided in future. I hope that that very nice irony appeals to hon. Members on both sides of the House.
It is not acceptable for Members of Parliament, Ministers and shadow Ministers to wring their hands and whinge about how difficult and intractable the problems are; that is not an acceptable posture for anybody in Parliament or the Executive.
DARE proves that the problem is tractable if we have the political will to tackle it. The evil of drug abuse must be tackled seriously. Removing its market--uneducated young people--is the biggest contribution we can make. If we merely pursued the consequences, it would be nothing short of a dereliction of duty, as we have it in our power easily and cheaply to inoculate our youngsters against this evil infection.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Education and Employment (Mrs. Cheryl Gillan):
First, I congratulate the hon. Member for Nottingham, North (Mr. Allen) on his success in the ballot. I am pleased that he has chosen to raise an issue of such importance to the Government and to the country.
I was delighted that my right hon. Friend the Lord President could be present for most of the debate, as well as my hon. Friend the Member for Gedling (Mr. Mitchell), who, as Nottingham's sponsor Minister, has taken a close interest in the drugs prevention programme in Nottingham; I believe that the DARE--drug abuse resistance education--project visited by my right hon. Friend the Prime Minister was in his constituency.
I also thank the hon. Member for Nottingham, North for his kind remarks, and especially for his invitation to visit the DARE project in Nottinghamshire. Sadly, he will know that I cannot give a commitment, but I shall look as sympathetically as possible at any invitation that may arrive on my desk, and, if at all possible, take it up. He will understand that that will probably be impossible in the coming two weeks.
We all know, from the familiar names of individual tragedies, that preventing drug misuse and protecting our young people from drugs cannot be anything but a national priority. As the hon. Gentleman has so recently become a father--he and both mother and child have my very good wishes and congratulations--he is doubtless more aware of the problem than most.
Before I deal with the Nottingham DARE project and the hon. Gentleman's comments, I want to offer a little background on the Government's overall approach to drug prevention. I hope that that will cast some light on some of his specific points and demonstrate that much action is already in hand.
"Tackling Drugs Together", the Government's three-year strategy for combating drug misuse, puts new emphasis on preventing young people from taking drugs. On the prevention front, it brings together the resources of the Home Office, the Department of Health and my Department in a concerted effort to prevent young people from being drawn into the world of drugs. Therefore, the whole ethos of the White Paper is to put a new emphasis on education and prevention, to reduce both the availability and acceptability of drugs to young people.
The great value of the strategy is that it has set up a mechanism to ensure that the title of the White Paper, "Tackling Drugs Together", is followed through in practice. We lay great stress on the value of co-ordinated action under the leadership of the Lord President and his Cabinet Sub-Committee on drugs, as well as the officials in his central drugs co-ordination unit.
Colleagues in the Department of Health oversee a £5 million-a-year campaign to alert young people to the risks of taking drugs and to inform parents about the effects and dangers. The campaign has recently targeted Ecstasy, LSD and speed in radio and magazine advertisements. It has also produced a booklet, "A Parent's Guide to Drugs and Solvents", which was launched by the Prime Minister last May. In less than a year, 1.7 million copies of the booklet have been distributed, equipping millions of parents with the facts. The Department of Health also supports the national drugs helpline; in the two years since it has been operating, it has answered more than 500,000 calls.
The Home Office central drugs prevention unit supervises the operation of a series of local and regional projects through its 12 drug prevention initiative teams, which show what effective drug prevention action local people can take in partnership with others in the community. All DPI projects are fully evaluated and the resulting good practice is made available nationally. That research will help to inform future programmes of drug prevention work in line with the hon. Gentleman's expectations. The east midlands team, which includes Nottingham, works closely with local agencies to develop those aims, including a project to devise culturally appropriate drug prevention materials within schools; I consider that particularly important.
My Department has made available £6 million in each year of the strategy to enable local education authorities to train teachers and to develop innovative approaches to drugs education. Those projects have been evaluated and we shall publish a document summarising the findings of the reports.
We shall also have the reports from the Office for Standards in Education on drug education in schools and on the contribution of the youth service. Ofsted has found that, in response to guidance issued by the Department to schools in May 1995, around a third of primary schools and three quarters of secondary schools have introduced policies for drugs education and for dealing with drug-related incidents.
All those documents, I am pleased to say, will be published on Monday. They will be distributed widely to professionals and made available free of charge to schools. I hope that the booklet will provide a useful pointer to those seeking to develop drugs education programmes as to the range of options that exist. We shall also look terribly carefully at the conclusions of the Ofsted report to see how we might build on our existing work programme in the coming 12 months of the "Tackling Drugs Together" strategy and beyond.
That clearly demonstrates that schools share our concern to ensure that the issue of drugs is not ignored. They have not shirked their responsibility to address what is a sensitive educational issue. Schools have a clear role to play and the evidence shows that they are playing it with increasing conviction.
One way in which schools often choose to tackle the issue is through the involvement of outside professionals in the classroom. When conducted in a reasonable way, complementing existing provision, such partnerships epitomise the spirit of the White Paper, which places great stress on the need for close co-operation.
The DARE scheme in Nottinghamshire is a worthy example of such partnership. Bringing together all elements of the community, and especially schools and the police, its benefits can go much wider than the vital focus of drug prevention. I have been impressed by all that the hon. Member for Nottingham, North has had to say in praising the scheme in Nottinghamshire and I shall take careful note of his words. The scheme promises better relationships with the police, improved self-esteem and healthier decisions by our young people. Above all, it promises to make a significant impact on drug misuse in the east midlands.
I know that the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary were suitably impressed on their visits to the scheme. I am pleased to be able to take this opportunity to applaud the valuable work of the DARE trustees in Nottinghamshire. Other police forces and local education authorities will no doubt want to look closely at the emerging results of the Nottinghamshire programme as they consider whether DARE has a contribution to make in their work.
Local needs and circumstances will always, quite rightly, determine the best course in any particular area, but I am pleased that the agencies in Nottinghamshire have been able to agree a way forward that they consider meets the needs of Nottinghamshire and its pupils.
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