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Mr. Julian Brazier (Canterbury): I rise to support my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) in urging the Government to accept the Conservative amendments. As he said, they would amend closure notices and orders in two principal ways, by separating drug taking from associated nuisance when notices and orders are made, and by extending the drug categories involved, so that drugs in classes B and C were also covered, as well as those in class A.
I hope that the House will excuse me if I draw on constituency cases of mine. I do not intend to speak for long. A case that is current in my constituency involves a young lady who has some mental difficulties. Her boyfriend, an extremely violent and unpleasant drug taker, moved in with her. After suffering sustained domestic violence, she fled the premises. She now lives in another town.
The young man continued to terrorise the neighbours, one of whom was a young male tenant in a neighbouring property. He had learning difficulties, but was nevertheless managing to look after his property. My constituent's former boyfriend remained heavily involved in activities with a variety of drugs.
The story is close to having a happy ending. The council and the police were able to take joint action, under existing legislation. However, the House should imagine what would have happened if the case that I have described were different in one of two possible ways. First, if the man had married the young lady before he began to beat her up—or at least had entered a long-term arrangement with her to the point that he shared tenancy of the property with her—the process of evicting him would have been much more complicated. In either case, he would have been a fully legal tenant, with all that that implies in connection with tenure. We shall discuss the question of tenure later.
The second possibility has to do with the extremely brave ladies who lived in the street. They came to see me at my surgery, and caused me to take action in the matter. They were faced with the threats of violence from the man at the centre of this case, but were willing to go public about what was happening. It is fortunate that the man involved was acting on his own. Had he been part of a gang that was terrorising the neighbourhood, the situation would have been very different when the matter went to court.
I shall explain why amendment No. 63, and the three or four associated amendments, are necessary. Although it is straightforward to show in a magistrates court that a property is being used for drug taking—all sorts of forensic evidence is usually available in such cases—it is by no means as straightforward to show that a property is a source of public nuisance. If people in the same street are too frightened to testify, how can magistrates establish that a property is the focus of a public nuisance? There is no doubt that the property to which I have referred was such a focus.
If the man whom I have described had been a legitimate tenant in the property, and not merely lived for a few months with the unfortunate woman who suffered violence at his hands, how could any court—magistrates court or Crown court—reasonably establish that the house was a centre for public nuisance? That is why it is important that the public nuisance test should be separate from the test of drug taking; if memory serves, that point was originally raised by Labour Members on Second Reading. Amendment No. 63 and its consequential provisions are essential if the Bill is to strengthen the police's armoury, as Members on both sides of the House want.
Ms Dari Taylor: Would the hon. Gentleman acknowledge the scale of the problem that we are discussing? I suggest that he moves to Teesside where the number of crack houses is growing exponentially. We do not have just one such house but many hundreds of them. We are talking about the effectiveness of police operations in dealing with a problem of that scale. Will the hon. Gentleman bear that in mind as he addresses the issue? Adding class B and C drugs to the clause, as the hon. Gentleman suggests, would undermine effective police operation.
Mr. Brazier: I hear what the hon. Lady says. I was just about to refer to the amendments on the extension of the powers to classes B and C. Before I do so, I hope that she will acknowledge that nothing that she said in either her speech or her intervention goes against the proposals in amendment No. 63 and their consequentials; they have nothing to do with extending the provisions to classes B and C. It is unfortunate that two sets of our amendments were grouped together as they have different purposes.
Amendment No. 63 deals with removing the requirement to show that a crack house is also a public nuisance. The hon. Lady's Labour colleagues were the first to object to that additional requirement. The amendment would insert the word "or" in place of "and" in the relevant provisions. It is obviously much easier to prove that somewhere is a crack house than that it is a public nuisance, because witnesses are not required.
The hon. Lady referred to the scale of the problem. The police are never forced to pursue any particular case. Policing priorities remain those set down by the chief constable, as they have been for many, many years. Our proposals would offer the police the opportunity—if they want to take it—to deal with houses that have become notorious. In every city in the country, including Canterbury and Whitstable in my constituency, we know of houses that are regularly used for class B and C drug taking. There are all-night parties and it is difficult for people in the neighbourhood to give their children an ordinary upbringing.
Nobody is forcing the police to pursue such cases. My hon. Friend the Member for Surrey Heath pointed out that one house that is on the way down can set the tone for a whole street and we can learn from the policing successes in New York in that regard. The Kent police force, whose chief constable, Sir David Phillips, is in his last week of tenure, is especially good and has achieved some of the largest crime reductions in the country. In Thanet, a neighbouring constituency to mine, the burglary rate is only 10 per cent. of what it was in the first week of Sir David's tenure. That is a remarkable record. If the Kent police were given the opportunity to use the legislation in respect of class B and C drugs as well as class A drugs, from time to time they would do so, to make an example of people and to prevent areas going to the bad before the problem got out of hand.
I promised that my speech would be brief. We have a ridiculously short time in which to discuss a great deal of material. I urge the House to support our amendments and to understand the differences between them. The first set of provisions should be uncontentious, as they were initially raised from the Labour Benches in Committee.
3.15 pm
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Caroline Flint): I am delighted to be taking part in the debate on this excellent Bill. I thank all the colleagues with whom I served on the Standing Committee. One of my first jobs on taking office was to request a document setting out everything that I had said in Committee. I am pleased to note that I said nothing then that I would not be prepared to say today.
I welcome the Minister for Housing and Planning, as he will be dealing with parts of the Bill. I also thank my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North-East (Mr. Ainsworth), who, in Committee, had to put up with quite a lot from me and others, as did my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham, East (Mr. Heppell) who was sometimes worried that every time he left the Room the Labour ranks were mutinying behind his back.
What was positive in Committee was that we had extensive time to discuss and explore a range of issues. Sometimes, we challenged the Minister and on many occasions my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North-East was a credit to his job, providing the reassurances that we needed. That was good.
I thank the Opposition for raising issues in Committee, as they have done today. Their concerns gave rise to considerable discussion in Committee and my hon. Friend the Member for Coventry, North-East agreed to consider their arguments on Report. As a member of the Committee and in the short time that I have been a Minister, I, too, have reflected on what was said and the issues that were raised about premises used for drug taking. We take the problems seriously and have held interdepartmental and external consultations on them with drug organisations and the Association of Chief Police Officers.
We also continue to receive representations from Back Benchers. The problems of antisocial behaviour show the importance of the links between constituencies and MPs. Few other subjects so reflect the strong role
that MPs play in representing the views of their community, in differing communities throughout the country.The power in this part of the Bill was devised to deal with a specific problem that police and housing providers asked us to address: the closure of properties where drugs such as crack and heroin are used and sold, and where intense nuisance is also found. It is to be used only when all other methods of tackling the problem have been exhausted, or would take too long, unnecessarily prolonging damage to communities as a result. Such powers are not to be used lightly. They are severe.
Amendments Nos. 62, 65 and 69 would expand that power to cover class B and C drugs. As press coverage has shown, we have given that proposal active consideration and we held external consultations, following the Committee stage. Nevertheless, after great thought, we decided that we should continue to focus the power exclusively on class A drugs—a point made particularly well by my hon. Friend the Member for Stockton, South (Ms Taylor). In the update of the national drugs strategy, we clearly stated our intention of focusing action on drugs in that way, which was widely welcomed. Class A drugs cause the greatest harm and are associated with serious nuisance, by which I mean violent nuisance. In deciding to reject the amendment, we remain true to our intention to reflect the actual harm caused by the sale and use of those drugs.
We have decided, therefore, that the creation of a new power to act against drugs other than class A controlled drugs would largely be a matter of presentation, rather than the creation of an appropriate power to control an actual problem. The Government intend to reclassify cannabis, as has already been mentioned, from a class B to a class C drug. That reflects the harm that it causes while making the drug classification system more credible to the public. However, that does not mean that we advocate cannabis use. The Government's policy is to concentrate on class A drugs and to restrict the power to close premises to those where such drugs are sold and used. However—
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