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12.1 pm
Mr. Peter Atkinson (Hexham): I am glad to follow my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North-East (Mr. Congdon), who made some extremely sensible comments about young people.
I served on the Committee which considered the Bill, so I have been closely associated with all its stages. It is a bit of a pity that there has been a temptation to use it as an opportunity to condemn young people's behaviour, as well as to condemn brewers and the manufacturers of alcopops. The Bill is nothing more than a law and order measure. It will be used to control disturbances caused in particular by young men who cause problems in town centres.
I hope that we are not in the middle of a Band of Hope meeting. The Bill should not be used to attack young people or drink. Drinking has an important part to play in our culture. My hon. Friend the Minister made a lengthy contribution to the previous debate, which was also on alcohol, so I suspect that he deserves a drink now. Drink taken sensibly enriches our lives; it certainly enriches mine from time to time.
We must get away from the idea that the Bill is to do with the control of the sale of alcopops or drunkenness. Public drunkenness is a problem, but it is not a new one. I do not believe that our town centres are any worse than they were 30, 50 or 100 years ago. Young men have always got drunk from time to time, and sometimes that leads to disturbances.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Croydon, North-East that town centres today are better than they were 50 years ago. They are certainly better than they were when I was a young man. I also agree with him that young people are extremely responsible, particularly about drinking and driving.
In Newcastle, thousands of young people gather at Bigg Market on a Friday, Saturday and Sunday night. Newcastle is an important student centre, so many young people live there and go out on those nights to enjoy themselves. There are problems from time to time, but most students enjoy themselves without causing any trouble. I welcome the fact that they enjoy themselves.
Mr. Fabricant:
I had the privilege to stand for the constituency of South Shields in 1987, so I am familiar with Newcastle. If the Bill had been law a few years ago, would my hon. Friend care to speculate whether Gazza would be causing fewer problems on the streets of Newcastle late at night?
Mr. Atkinson:
I am a great defender of Mr. Gascoigne. He is a substantial character in the north-east; he has been involved in one or two lively incidents, but the north-east is a lively place. Mr. Gascoigne, certainly in his footballing capacity, has made a great contribution to the football culture of Newcastle, which is the UK capital of soccer.
Mr. Tim Smith:
What about Chelsea?
Mr. Atkinson:
I shall not go into the merits of Chelsea, but I know where my support lies.
In our discussions on the Bill a number of concerns were raised particularly by my hon. Friend the Member for Bristol, North-West (Mr. Stern), who is unable to be here today. There was some misunderstanding of the nature of the Bill. It gives the police powers that they need and for which they have asked; we leave it to their discretion as to how to implement it. In Committee, we made too much of a meal of the Bill's small print.
We can trust our police, who police our cities very sensitively and effectively. The police will not abuse the extra power, they will simply use it to deal with those at whom the Bill is predominantly directed--troublesome 13, 14 and 15-year-olds who are given drink. They are the young hooligans who cause so many problems in our town centres. The problems are caused not so much by older people, but by the young people who get hold of drink. One can see them in bus shelters with tins of lager--not necessarily strong lager, but ordinary lager; they are not allowed into pubs so they congregate on the streets and in town centres and cause problems, particularly for elderly people.
The Bill is not about the detail of whether the police should have the right to confiscate the drink or whether they should be certain that the bottle contains alcohol--one of the questions raised in Committee. In Committee we discussed whether the police could identify an orange substance as an alcopop or simply orange juice or lemonade. It is up to the police to decide whether they have a reasonable suspicion that what is in the bottle is alcoholic and whether they have the right to confiscate it. I believe that, if police officers take the drink from young people, they should pour it down the drain and send them home.
The Bill is not about making criminals of young people, but about preventing them from getting into trouble and becoming criminals--that is where its strength lies. When my hon. Friend the Minister outlined the Bill's provisions, he accepted that. We do not want the powers in the Bill to be used by the police to arrest 14, 15 and 16-year-olds; we want the police to take drink off such young people so that they do not move from one place to another with it. If necessary, the police should take their names and addresses. The police can then call at the parents' home--as happened with the Weymouth experiment--and say, "Do you know where your child was on Friday or Saturday? Did you know that he was drinking in the street?" That is the way to tackle drunkenness among young people. They should not be arrested and hauled before the juvenile courts. It is not sensible to make young people criminals unnecessarily.
Mr. Tim Smith:
My hon. Friend has talked about not making young people criminals, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Dr. Spink). But clause 1(3) states that a person
Mr. Atkinson:
My hon. Friend is right--the Bill contains that final measure. If a person refuses to comply, he can be arrested and charged with a criminal offence. The question whether the policeman acted reasonably or
I shall deal with another small point that we discussed in Committee. It involves the message being sent out to the corner shop and small off-licence owners who often sell drink to under-age people. In Committee, we mentioned the case of a corner shop in Barnsley that was notorious for supplying young people with alcohol. The message emerging from the House today should go to those shopowners who continue deliberately to sell alcohol to young people. We all know the problems affecting corner shops in this country and how difficult it is for them to survive, but nothing irritates the average corner shop owner more than one owner seeking to capture the illegal market in selling drink to under-age people. That upsets all honest corner shop owners and the police. The authorities should use all their powers and employ random purchasing methods to ensure that corner shop owners do not encourage young people to drink.
Lady Olga Maitland (Sutton and Cheam):
I warmly welcome the fact that the Bill has reached this important stage. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Castle Point (Dr. Spink) on having so ably and skilfully steered it through to Third Reading. I am astounded that such legislation has not been introduced before now. It strikes me as astonishing that at present, although young people are prevented from entering a pub and drinking, they are able to have alcohol in a public place. The Bill will crack down on a serious problem and block off an important loophole in the law.
The urgency is best illustrated in a report that appeared recently in, I believe, The Daily Telegraph:
Everyone I have met, whether in the House or in my constituency, has complained about young people congregating in and around parks, bus shelters, high streets, railway stations or back streets. When in such groups, those youngsters drink alcohol, and they probably indulge in solvent abuse or even drug abuse. It is a serious
problem, and it is important that we should prevent those young people from doing great harm to themselves as well as terrorising local communities.
It is evident that the large number of young people who commit crimes--the peak age is between 14 and 17--tend to have been drinking at the time of their offence. I have no doubt that, if we can remove the curse of alcohol from them, that will be a large step forward in bringing down levels of juvenile crime.
What I find interesting is that girls are just as likely as boys to take part in these drinking activities, which is a new phenomenon that I had not previously taken on board. The fact that children as young as nine have been found carrying alcohol is cause for concern and--there is no doubt about it--we must take action fast.
As has been said, it is important that, in tackling young people's alcohol consumption, we do not merely turn them into a criminal statistic. It is important that we take preventative action--a protective course of action--and try to remove those children from the risk of danger before they cause themselves permanent harm.
Discovering the reasons why young people go down the route of taking alcohol is an integral part of the initiative that includes trying to confiscate it. Young people take alcohol for several reasons, one of which is to show off to friends. It is bravado--showing that they are one of the chaps. In my opinion, the imagery that is conveyed by society as a whole makes us all responsible. The media and commercials glamorise drinking, and it is very important for young people to be properly educated as to how to handle drink and as to the circumstances in which it is acceptable to have alcohol and those in which it is not.
Parents deserve our sympathy because when they try to instil discipline in their homes regarding the right way to drink alcohol they find their efforts undermined by the glamorisation of binge-drinking, especially when it is carried out by leading figures such as pop musicians, football stars and cricketers. Those cult figures are role models, and if they are seen to be losing control of themselves, young people are given the message that it is acceptable.
I have sympathy for parents who ban drink from the home or say to a child, "You may have some wine, but we shall water it down," which I used to find enormously humiliating when I was a small girl. My father used to rather ostentatiously pour the water into a wine glass, but he had a reason for doing so because he was trying to communicate the message that, although it is acceptable to drink, it must be done in moderation. There is a well known phrase, "A little bit of what you fancy doesn't do you any harm." However, we are discussing what happens when it goes beyond the streets of acceptability.
Sometimes young people get bizarre ideas about the role of alcohol. I have never forgotten the story of the general practitioner who had to receive a patient in his home. The patient arrived at about 10 am when the doctor was upstairs, and his five-year-old daughter received the patient, took the patient into the consulting room and asked, "Would you like a gin?" She felt that alcohol was an acceptable part of life.
As children grow up and find that alcohol is easy to get hold of, another problem arises. In high streets, young people go into an off-licence or supermarket and fool the sales girls or the shopkeeper into selling them
alcohol--which, of course, is breaking the law--or send in a teenager who is over the age of 18, who can lawfully buy that alcohol and then hand it over to a younger person. That happens all too often.
The Bill has one weakness in that it deals with only the possession of alcohol in a public place. I wish that we were able to legislate more widely and insist that byelaws be enacted throughout the country to ban the consumption of alcohol in designated public places. That happens in about 33 local authorities and it should be given virtually 100 per cent. coverage as it would be a big step forward.
To return to dealing with young people, we must pass on the clear message that drinking alcohol in a public place, or at all under the age of 18, is not acceptable. Alcohol Concern supports the Bill and I welcome that fact. It is particularly concerned that more effort should go into deterring licensees from selling alcohol to those under 18. Alcohol Concern feels that more effort should be put into test purchasing, to find out which licensees are lax and sloppy about assessing whether someone to whom they are selling alcohol is over 18. Perhaps we also ought to ensure that there are more powerful penalties for licensees who break the law. Their licences ought to be suspended far more frequently and a heavy fine would certainly serve as a penalty that would deter others.
"who fails without reasonable excuse to comply with a requirement imposed on him under subsection (1)"
is guilty of a criminal offence.
"Police found children as young as nine drinking on street corners during a campaign to crack down on under-age drinking in Cleveland."
Over a couple of Friday nights, the police rounded up 200 youngsters who
"were made to pour gallons of alcopops, cider, lager and sherry down the drain".
Some were arrested and taken home by the police, who explained to their parents exactly what had happened. That was a large-scale operation, which was set up because of the enormous number of complaints from residents who had been victims of vandalism, intimidation and lager-loutish behaviour, and who felt completely powerless to do anything about it.
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