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Mr. Dhanda: I do not mean to interrupt my hon. Friend's flow—he is making a very good point about his home city—but as a former resident in his constituency, I wanted to endorse his comments. I spent five very happy years in Lenton, at the university of Nottingham. Nottingham is one of the most sought-after places to live in the entire country, and like many others I spent some of the happiest times of my life in that city. I commend everything that my hon. Friend says about Nottingham.

Alan Simpson: I am grateful for that intervention, which illustrates one of the reasons why, on coming to Nottingham as a student, I stayed and have never wanted to leave. But I have to recognise that some of the
 
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things that families were telling me over the weekend paint a rather different picture of life in the inner city since my children's school years. Indeed, I have been confronted in a stark way with the huge changes that have taken place since my own childhood.

At the age of 14, it was easy to identify the many young males aged between 13 and 15 who cycled around estates delivering vegetables or groceries. Yet families tell me that the sight that they most frequently readily identify now is of young teenage men age cycling around delivering drugs. In Nottingham, such kids are known as "shotters", because they deliver shots of drugs on behalf of drug dealers. The process is fairly simple. They stick the consignment of crack cocaine or heroin between their buttocks, get on their bike and deliver the package to whomever the dealer has specified. Some £30 a day is the going rate, which is much better than the pay for delivering vegetables, so one can see the financial attraction. The process begins with a simple and innocent set of instructions: "Just deliver this package to the fellow on the corner." As a result, kids are being drawn into this world.

The families told me that they want us to stand with them in support of strategies that intervene at every level of that process, and preferably long before the drugs reach the kids on the streets. Those families also said that we need to understand that the same "benevolent" dealers also have a pretty unscrupulous and exploitative record in terms of their kindnesses towards children. These people offer children access to crack cocaine, and such "kindness" very quickly gives way to a set of demands that draw children into prostitution. We are confronted as much with the cynical and cruel theft of childhood—the theft of a generation's childhood—as we are with the problem of hard crime and hardened criminals. In many ways, the biggest challenge that we face is the theft of the security in which children can play on, and live in, estates.

Communities in every part of the city are saying that we have to find ways to separate their children's lives from the activities of those who deal in drugs and guns. That will be difficult. We already know that, in addition to those involved in shotting, some kids are being asked to stash drugs. I am told that very rarely are the main dealers of drugs and guns found in possession of them. Parents are terrified that, unbeknown to them, their children are being asked, "Will you just stash this somewhere safe? Don't open it; just put it somewhere safe and you'll be looked after." We have to understand that in getting people to come forward, we must make it clear that, however tough we are going to be on those caught with guns, we will not be tough on the kids who are inadvertently being drawn into this world at the sharpest end of all. Our intervention should constitute almost a rescue mission, to ensure that the children who are pulled out of those broader networks are not criminalised at our first point of contact with them.

We need also to address another complaint that was regularly made to me over the weekend. Why, I was asked, are guns are so easily available? I am told that it is possible to rent a gun for £200. The deal is that if it is returned unused, a £100 refund is given. Families in these communities are telling us that we—as a Government and as a society—have to prevent our entering an era in which guns are as easy to rent as
 
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videos. We must tackle that absurdity at the level at which we interrupt the supply of drugs and guns.

I have a number of specific proposals about the strategies that we need to employ to deal comprehensively with the problem. We need partnerships between Government and national agencies, between Government and local authorities, and between local authorities and local communities. People tell me that the first thing that they want from the Government is additional resources to allow us in Parliament to be confident in our ability to intervene on the supply of drugs and guns to this country. They repeated the message that the easiest way to take guns off the streets is to prevent them from getting there in the first place. They want the Government to ensure that sufficient resources are deployed to make life tough for dealers in drugs and guns.

In Nottinghamshire, pressure is being brought to bear through the "More Cops for Notts" campaign. That is an issue in its own right and I do not want to distance myself from it, but in some respects it is separate from the specific issues that the Opposition have raised today. I would love to believe in my heart that an extra 1,000 police on the streets of Nottingham that day would have saved Danielle Beccan's life. Can I in all honesty say that? No, I cannot, and it does not help if I pretend otherwise.

We have to get the resources to target dealers of guns and drugs. There might be a case for deploying additional police, but if we do, I want such resources to be akin to the people who turned up in the film "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" every time Butch and Sundance got off a train. Butch and Sundance would look behind them, see dust in the distance and ask, "Who are those guys?" I want the drug dealers and gun dealers to know that the resources that would drive them out of Nottingham would not be happy if they ended up in Leicester—that they would continue in pursuit of such gangs wherever they went. This is a national problem that happens at the moment to be manifesting itself specifically in Nottingham. We have to deal with the problem by deploying national resources in a national strategy.

Mr. Kerry Pollard (St. Albans) (Lab): My hon. Friend talks about the national dimension, but does he accept that we must also consider the huge significance of the international dimension? I was on board HMS Sheffield in the West Indies two years ago, while efforts were being made to stop crack cocaine coming to the UK from Colombia via Florida. So before considering the specific issues that my hon. Friend mentions, we must consider the international dimension and get right the rules of engagement of our forces, who are trying to stop this stuff getting into the country.

Alan Simpson: I accept that and it forces us to address other difficult issues about how best to approach those with a hard drug dependency. However, the issues raised with me on the doorstep include the point that Britain is an island. People know that there are many problems beyond our reach or competence as a single country to deal with—the work has to be done on the basis of international collaboration. However, the question is whether it is right to assume that, as a Government, we can do nothing more to halt the supply of the guns and
 
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drugs that come into the UK—and the answer is no. It has to be the case that we can find more effective intervention strategies to attack the supply side both where it is generated and where it enters this country. I also know that, at the local level, the resources that people ask for to deal with these problems are not primarily police related. People are looking for resources, security and clarity from the Government about strategies to empower communities to be an effective part of the process.

David Taylor (North-West Leicestershire) (Lab/Co-op): My hon. Friend lives in the centre of the very city that he represents. I know the area very well. When he talks about numbers, deployment and the responsiveness of the police in Nottingham city centre—it has quite a bleak reputation within the east midlands—does he agree that things could be improved somewhat if the licensing regulations in the city centre were radically altered to free up police from their current roles on Thursday to Sunday evenings? If that happened, it would help to stem the reduction of much-needed resources and help in the fight against drugs and guns.

Alan Simpson: I agree with my hon. Friend's point and I remind him that those were precisely the amendments that I tabled to the Licensing Bill. They would have given local communities and the local police much greater powers to object to some of the large-scale watering holes that currently absorb disproportionate amounts of police time on a Friday evening.

My point about the use of existing resources is that local people told me that what they needed from the central Government was to feel that they, the Government, were there with them on tackling a number of issues that they rightly viewed as their own. They wanted resources to allow them to break the links between kids and gangs. They wanted the backing of the Government for some of the initiatives taken by mothers, for example, working across the communities traditionally regarded as hostile to each other, to trash the myth and foolishness of that inter-community conflict. They want to know that the information that they pass on to the police can be given safely—in ways that will not imperil their lives.

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