Clause 9 - Initial assessment following testing for presence of class A drugs
Drugs Bill
9:45 am
Ms Caroline Flint (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (reducing organised and international crime, anti drugs co-ordination and international and European issues), Home Office; Don Valley, Labour)
I invite the hon. Gentleman to see some of our drug intervention programmes. The concept that they are about dumping people in the criminal justice system, with no connection to the wider community, is ridiculous.
The whole point of the scheme is to stop what was the dumping of people in the criminal justice system, where their drug addiction was not dealt with. People could go to the courts and to prison and deal with a whole range of professionals along the way, but there would never be any joined-up thinking. Someone would leave prison, but no one would know, and whatever drug treatment that they had received in prison would be undone within 24 hours. I am afraid that that still happens today, which is why we are putting resources into stopping it as much as possible.
We are fighting against that, and multi-agency working with community-based teams is already happening. If one visits a drug action team in an area where they have such a programme, and one sits down and talks to the people who are running it, one will find that a mixture of different statutory agencies are involved. They include the local authority, the police, the health service, voluntary agencies and community groups, with, of course, at the heart of them, the individual.
The amendment would provide that an initial assessor may be the GP of the person required to attend the initial assessment. My point is that we are talking about people being arrested at all times of day and night. They have just been tested for class A drugs. The police have contracted the arrest referral workers to work certain hours and to be at the key point in the process. I do not even agree with the concept that the GP should be involved at this stage, but, with the best will in the world—