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1.24 pm
Mr. Michael Clapham (Barnsley, West and Penistone): I am pleased to be called to make a contribution to this important debate, and I shall focus on my local community, Barnsley. I think that the Government's approach--the national plan--will work, and I was glad to hear the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Mr. Flight) express what I took to be support for it.
The national statistics make frightening reading, but I shall not go through them because hon. Members can, if they wish, pick them up in the anti-drugs co-ordinator's first annual report on the national plan. People are now younger and younger when they first experiment with drugs and that causes us a great deal of concern. The evidence shows that the main drug is probably cannabis, but I have some statistics from Barnsley that will shock the House. In my constituency, heroin is the main drug and its use is widespread.
The Government's programme, "Tackling Drugs to Build a Better Britain", outlines four areas on which we should concentrate--first, work to help young people to resist drugs; secondly, protecting communities; thirdly, ensuring that treatment is available for those who want it; and finally, stifling the supply of drugs. I mention those four planks, because I shall show how they are being implemented locally. The remit of the local approach,
especially after the Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and the fact that local authorities are working with the police, is now much wider than that of the drug action teams, although they are still very important and at the forefront of the current work.
In Barnsley, we have had a crime prevention partnership for five years which has been reconstituted under the crime prevention legislation. I have chaired the policy board for some five years, so I see what is happening locally. The new structure--the safer community partnership--provides an overarching mechanism that links together coherently all the work that is being done within the local authority.
Drug taking in Barnsley has increased. Despite all the work that the local authority has done on regeneration, there is still a long way to go. The 1997 household needs survey showed that the average income on council estates in Barnsley is between £5,000 and £6,000. The average income across the borough is £11,000, and that compares with an average income in Yorkshire and Humberside of £18,300. Those figures illustrate the depressed state of the local economy, which has put enormous strains on the local social structure.
It is estimated that 30 per cent. of the population in Barnsley have a disability or a disabling disease. Some 17,775 people receive incapacity benefit and 34 per cent. of children come from households in receipt of income support or family credit. Those statistics are evidence of the strains caused by the running down of the local economy, which happened quickly over four years.
Heroin arrived in Barnsley in 1994; until then its use was little recorded there. Now, the drugs action team estimates that between 3,000 and 5,000 people in the area regularly use heroin. Figures in the report by the anti-drugs co-ordinator show that a heroin user needs between £10,000 and £20,000 to feed his habit. At the lower end of those figures, that means that the cost to the local community of crimes committed to meet that habit is between £30 million to £60 million, and at the top, between £50 million and £100 million. We estimate that 80 per cent. of local crime is carried out by people who need to thieve to feed their habit. So the impact locally is enormous.
My wife is a social worker who deals with child abuse, and I regularly see the way drug use and the drug culture impacts on families, as I work in the community and meet the people on my estates. There has been a predictable increase in anti-social behaviour across the borough. People going to the estates to get drugs from dealers hang around and make life terribly miserable for those who live there.
People living on the estates in the village of Wardle Green in my constituency recently decided that enough was enough. They organised themselves, with help from local councillors and the police, and were thus able to get on top of the problem. The local authority had to evict a person, but two other bully-boys followed him and that success has led to every other house on the estate joining the neighbourhood watch system.
Although the drug action team is at the forefront of the effort in Barnsley, the Barn project deals with young people under 18 who seek help. Statistics show that, in the period between 1 October 1998 to 31 March 1999, the project has helped 81 young people. Of those, 46 per cent.
were on heroin, 18 per cent. used cannabis, and 16 per cent. had problems with alcohol. Again, that shows that heroin is the main drug used in Barnsley.
The women and drugs project in Barnsley is one of only two such projects in the country. It helps women with a drug misuse problem, or whose partners have such a problem. The services that it provides include counselling, a drop-in centre, a well woman clinic and beauty therapy. There is also an antenatal clinic, which is most important. It is staffed by midwives from the obstetric liaison group, who also offer a helpline for pregnant drug users.
In addition, the substance misuse team is staffed by nurses with psychiatric training, while personnel from the Barn project and other schemes offer extra help. Barnsley also has a patient detoxification unit at Kendray hospital. The unit has been working well: until recently, the waiting time for treatment was only one month. However, it is run on bare minimum funding, and I understand that two staff have left recently. The result is that the detoxification centre has had to cut the service that it provides. I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary will see what he can do to provide the centre with a little more finance to ensure that it can continue its work.
Finally, there is the Barnsley arrest referral project. It was set up in February, and Sova, the national charity that operates the scheme along with Barn and the National Association for the Care and Resettlement of Offenders, says that it is working well. In six months or a year, statistics will prove whether that is so.
One more project deserves a mention. The communities that care project, funded by the Joseph Rowntree Trust, centres on young people, seeking to identify risk factors in the community and to neutralise them. We have high hopes for the project. Oxford and Sheffield universities are doing much of the analysis, and we hope to implement the results of the project in communities other than Barnsley.
In addition to our general aim to tackle drugs to build a better Britain, we must give further assistance. As well as creating policy, we need to create jobs. The new deal is working well in Barnsley, with 675 jobs created for young people. However, there is a long way to go. We need jobs and industry, and I hope that the regional development agencies will be able to focus on local needs.
Mr. Brian White (Milton Keynes, North-East):
I am glad that the hon. Member for Arundel and South Downs (Mr. Flight) mentioned the history of drugs. It is often forgotten that most of the British empire was founded on drug pushing. We do not tend to remember that part of our history. We need also to deal with the inconsistency
A constituent of mine has written to me over several months about her daughter's problems. At the end of one typewritten letter, she added, in handwriting:
We have talked about drugs education this morning. A former addict said that there are three phases to drug taking. The first is drugs for pleasure; the second is drugs mainly for pleasure, but with some pain; and the third is drugs with only pain. That describes part of the problem. There are all the scare stories that drugs are harmful, but the evidence that people have when they first take them is that they are pleasurable. I do not smoke, but I have been a passive smoker all my life--my parents smoked, my wife smokes and my kids smoke, so I have no chance. When people start to smoke they say that they get pleasure from it. Only later, as the hon. Member for Chesham and Amersham (Mrs. Gillan) described, do the pain and the problems of addiction start. We must recognise that fact.
Also, we must recognise that many drug users do not cause crime. They do not rob, but feed their habit with money that they earn. They have responsible jobs and carry on a normal life. They do not cause problems for the criminal justice system. However, for many other people, drugs have caused their problems with the system. It is important to differentiate.
We must also consider the way in which the various agencies react. A constituent of mine was responsible for about 1,000 car thefts. When the police eventually caught him, they gave him a choice of going to jail and serving a two-month sentence, or going to a detoxification unit in prison for a longer time and coming out drug-free. He chose the latter, but because he was in prison longer, he exceeded the limit for the number of days that he could leave his council house and so he lost it. What was the point of him going through that extra process voluntarily to be beaten by the system? One of the key problems that we must tackle is how other agencies, when taking individual decisions, relate to people who are trying to come off addiction.
Another problem with those who are coming off an addiction is that of what are called nomadic addicts--people who attach themselves to addicts and make their lives miserable. They are like limpets--they attach themselves and drag them down. My constituent writes:
Many of the comments that were made about drug action teams are true and I will not repeat them for the sake of brevity. I must point out to my hon. Friends
the Members for Barnsley, West and Penistone (Mr. Clapham) and for Hemsworth (Mr. Trickett) that I represent a constituency where there are jobs--more than 5,000 were created last year--but we still have a drugs problem. Jobs are not enough. They are important and I am not saying, "Don't create jobs", but other measures have to be taken to deal with the drugs problem.
"I wish you could do something."
The impact of drugs on families tends to be forgotten, so I want to discuss the relationship families and friends have with the agencies. My constituent wrote that her daughter arrived at her home one night, begging for money, sweating and shaking. Her house had no electricity, and was boarded up after the front door had been smashed in. My constituent wrote:
"I have the sure knowledge that if I give her this money I am stopping somebody being broken into".
She said that she would stop some shop being robbed. She knew that if she gave the money, the drugs that her daughter would purchase could kill her. What sort of choice is that? That point is critical.
"The other problem is her friends, they do not want her to have any treatment, mostly through jealousy".
That is a key problem, which we must recognise.
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