I am grateful for the opportunity for a short debate on the question of rehabilitation from alcoholism, and for the Minister's attendance to reply. This is not, it might be thought, the most populist subject, but it is very important. I want to explain why I chose this subject for debate and to set it in context.

The Minister is aware, I think, that an organisation called the Alcohol Recovery Project is based in my Constituency. I was privileged to be invited to speak at its 31st anniversary event in November last year. I have had many dealings with the organisation before—it is based near the Elephant and Castle in Newington Causeway—and that event coincided with the launch of a document it had commissioned, called "Preventing Homelessness Supporting Tenants with Alcohol Problems", which was written by Shelter and paid for by British Telecom—it was very much a partnership enterprise.

The request to speak set me thinking about issues that—like many people, probably—I tend to put to one side because they are both challenging and disturbing. I shall begin by sharing three examples with the Minister and the House. First, the Alcohol Recovery Project distributes a good leaflet, which has the following question on its front page: What is the common factor in: up to half of all social work caseloads; up to one quarter of occupied hospital beds; one quarter of accidents at work; over 8 million lost working days each year; half of all juvenile crimes; three deaths every hour?Think about drink. The answer is self-evident from the context of this debate. Drink has a huge impact on vast areas of our public life.

The second example concerns a man who came to my constituency surgery about five years ago. He was relatively the worse for wear when he came in and told me the story of his circumstances. Within two years he had gone from having a professional job as an officer in the army, with a stable marriage and home circumstances, to being on his own, on the street and an alcoholic. He had already tried to commit suicide and he made a further attempt subsequently. We can all be stable human beings one day or one year, but be thrown considerably off beam by circumstances.

The third example is a current constituency case. A family in my constituency suffered a terrible tragedy in the summer a year and a half ago, when one of the three adult sons lost his life diving into Greenland dock in the Surrey docks to save a friend who was drowning—both of them drowned. Not long after, the mother, who was disabled, had to go into a home, which left father—a pensioner—and the one son who was still at home looking after themselves. The result of the death and the loss of the mother from the home indirectly—I do not pretend more than that—meant that both father and son started to drink more heavily. They got into financial difficulties and, last year, lost their home. Some months later, we are still trying to find them housing. It has been terribly depressing. Again, I do not have to tell the Minister or colleagues that such cases are often nearly intractable and yet the people may be really deserving—they may be difficult sometimes, but they are deserving.

Those are examples of the issues that come the way of an organisation such as the ARP and many of the public services every day. I shall flag up the issues that are on the agenda of a project that caters for the wide range of organisational concerns and share some thoughts, reflections and requests. I do so entirely constructively and, I hope, in a way that can influence what the Government do—even during the remaining time of this Parliament—irrespective of who is in government after the election.

In the autumn, I asked people at the ARP what the issues were for them. First was funding, which will always be an issue. The second concerned advice, education and information about alcohol and alcohol-related products. The topical example last year was alcopops, which very much hit the headlines. The third issue was housing and all hon. Members know from their constituencies how under strain public sector or rented housing is, let alone housing for people with alcohol problems.

The fourth was how to deal with people who are homeless and have alcohol problems—very much a marginalised group. They are often seen as a threat and are not popular—in some senses, they are not nearly as appealing as young people who are homeless, or people who have come here as asylum seekers, for example.

Fifthly, as we often see in urban surgeries, there is a growing link between alcohol abuse and mental health problems. I am conscious that we are having this debate three or four working days before the Government are to produce their green paper on mental health, with which there is a strong link.

Alcohol abuse is self-evidently drug abuse. "The Oxford Textbook of Medicine" regards alcohol and drug abuse as a single issue, as both act on the mind. Most of us partake of alcohol and we know that it has an effect; it becomes a drug when it takes control of us, as other drugs do.

People's reasons for starting to abuse alcohol are multiple, as with other drugs: social attitudes, social changes, the quality of the social environment, family relationships, home, work, pressures and other factors impact on people in a way that may result in alcohol abuse and alcoholism.

A study in 1993 of people seeking admission to an in-patient alcohol treatment research unit found that 51 per cent. of the men studied, and 48 per cent. of the women, reported the use of one or more drugs in addition to alcohol. There is often multiple drug abuse by people who use alcohol to excess. All the evidence is that people who are simply abusers of alcohol are a minority of those who present themselves with drug abuse and dependency problems.

I understand—this is the really telling statistic—that there are 10 times as many alcohol abusers as other drug abusers. That is not an absolutely scientific figure, but if that is the order of the problem, we need to spend more time on the issue; but we seem to give more public prominence to other drug issues, as has been evidenced in the past few days.

A Scottish Office report in 1993 showed that research into the links between alcohol and offending is contradictory, unevaluated and often based on crude interpretations of data. It is also sometimes fairly subjective. That is unacceptable. We all have experience that suggests a close correlation between alcohol abuse and crime.

There is no lack of evidence, and that evidence is telling. The British Medical Association estimates that alcohol is associated with 60 to 70 per cent. of homicides—one third of victims are intoxicated at the time of death—75 per cent. of stabbings; 70 per cent. of beatings; and 50 per cent. of fights or domestic assaults. The Police Superintendents Association of England and Wales says that alcohol is present in half of all crimes. The National Association of Probation Officers found in 1994 that 30 per cent. of probationers and 58 per cent. of prisoners had severe alcohol problems, and it argued strongly for a clear strategy to reduce alcohol-related crime.

The all-party group on alcohol abuse, in a 1995 report, said that, in the view of all the professional agencies engaged in the criminal justice system, there is a need for a more concerted and coherent response to alcohol-related crime. It is estimated that alcohol abuse costs employers £2 billion a year. I support "The Health of the Nation" programme, but according to the evidence we are missing the target set in 1991 to reduce over-the-limit drinking in women to one in 18 of the population, and in men to one in six, by 2005. The National Audit Office's report last year said that it was unlikely that we would meet the target. There is no net downward trend in over-the-limit drinking among men, and a rising trend among women.

There is a philosophical and attitude problem to alcohol abuse compared with the abuse of other illegal drugs and of cigarettes. The social services inspectorate says that there is a built-in prejudice against people who abuse alcohol, but not against cigarette smokers or people addicted to tobacco or other drugs. That is one of the reasons why low priority has been given historically to those who abuse alcohol, as it has to those with mental health problems. There is a general perception that people with alcohol problems are less deserving; that they have brought their problems on themselves.

The recent record has not been good. The Office of Population Censuses and Surveys figures showed that the proportion of children in England aged 11 to 15 who said that they drank every week was 17 per cent. in 1994, compared with 13 per cent. in 1990 and that weekly consumption—not just the numbers but the total consumption—had increased. We now have alcopops, alcoholic lemonade and artificial insertion of alcohol into other drinks.

The Government used to ring-fence alcohol rehabilitation in their budget allocation process. In 1992, the then Secretary of State announced that ring fencing would end. The ARP took the Government to court and lost. Ring fencing finished with the introduction of community care. Although many local authorities previously ring-fenced voluntarily, budgetary pressures are driving them away from doing so.

The structure of the community care budget, which does not allow for ring fencing at national level, is unhelpful and undermines much of the work which difficult, deserving but not potentially popular projects such as the ARP are doing. They compete with other projects, funds and services. The National Health Service (Primary Care) Bill which is in the other place and will come to the House next month does not look as if it will make the position any better because the problems are particularly prevalent in inner-city areas and there is no guarantee that projects will be funded.

I commend—I have said so publicly before—the Government's "Tackling Drugs Together" initiative. It has been focused on specific drug issues. I do not think that it was intended to include alcohol. It has concentrated on other things. The all-party group recently called for a ministerial group on alcohol misuse based in the Home Office to co-ordinate policy in response to alcohol-related crime. The Government could make a similar commitment to tackling alcohol as they did to tackling drugs and launch an initiative later this year called "Tackling Alcohol Together". That would be to everyone's advantage. I am aware of what the latest parliamentary answer said. Such an initiative should have the same high-profile leadership as the Leader of the House has given to "Tackling Drugs Together". We need that sort of commitment and leadership.

We must have authoritative statistics. In one of its main recommendations, the all-party group said: The single biggest barrier faced by those who would wish to see an on-going strategy for concerted action to tackle alcohol-related crime is the absence of detailed statistical evidence. I am not being over-critical, but we need to get a grip on the facts.

Perhaps most important—I think that this is in the Government's mind, but I want to make sure that we are clearer on it—we need much better collaboration between the relevant agencies, including Departments, social services departments, housing departments and health authorities. The social services inspectorate reported about 18 months ago: In most cases services were inaccessible to service users who often had to jump through a number of hoops, and express high levels of motivation before gaining access to a service at all. My advice from the ARP is that we are struggling with the lack of 'joined-up thinking' between Central Government Departments, local government and NHS planning structures which don't consider the knock-on effect of proposals for change". The King's Fund report on mental health which came out about 10 days ago concluded that there was a lack of coterminosity in London. The Government intend to come up with proposals on mental health. I welcome that. I ask that we have a seamless service on alcohol-related issues, as we are to have for mental health, and that legislation be introduced which will allow the merging of health and social services so that they can co-ordinate and work together, pool their budgets and share responsibility for joint commissioning. We have to deal with these things together. I ask that we take on the thinking that has already been applied to the Green Paper on mental health.

I now come to my last two points. In November, soon after his appointment, the Minister answered a parliamentary question about what plans there were to assist general practitioners in detecting and treating patients suffering from alcohol-related illness. The Minister replied: We are currently considering what support we might give to purchasers of treatment and care for people with alcohol misuse problems. This would include general practitioners involved in the purchasing and planning of such services. We aim to produce, by next summer"— now this summer— guidance equivalent to the guidance we issued this year to purchasers of services for drug misusers".—[Official Report, 7 November 1996; Vol. 285, c. 626.] I welcome that as the peg and I would be grateful if the Minister could confirm that the Government see these matters as a priority. I would encourage him and offer to work for the maximum all-party support, even before the election, to ensure that we instate alcohol abuse and alcohol-related problems as a high priority on the social, parliamentary and Government agenda. There are many people out there who would benefit from such action and society would benefit incredibly.