Drugs Policy — House of Commons, 2017-07-18
Topic: Law and Crime
John Mann (Labour, Centre-left): Mr Deputy Speaker, you are ever wise, ever accurate and ever factual. Bassetlaw saw a 400% reduction in acquisitive crime. Why? Because it was the drug addicts committing most of the crime For 11 years people could go through the front door of their GP’s surgery. Not everyone was happy. I have read the medical advice—not all of it, but hundreds and thousands of papers—and basically there is a two-thirds success rate for chronic relapsing illness, meaning that two thirds will be sorted, wherever the illness is, and a third never will be. There is a cohort of people who will always have problems, and they tend to go in and out of prison regardless, but there are far fewer of them because we have reduced the number by two thirds, leading to huge savings That does not totally solve the problem, but it allows the rest of the community to get on with their lives without being plagued. Pensioners were not having their windows smashed every five minutes by people who stole a fiver—the normal heroin theft is to break a pensioner’s window and grab the first thing in sight. The fear and the cost of repairing the window is far bigger. Frankly, I think that if most pensioners knew they would just leave the fiver outside. That is what life was like What do the Government do? Two things. First—this is a big improvement in this new drugs strategy—they say, "Recovery, recovery, recovery. We are not going to bother maintaining anybody." That change is vital. That is what they did in the Netherlands, France, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand—in fact, in every country I went to. They all left it to the doctors In 2002 only three countries did not have health authorities in charge of drugs policy: the United States—obviously—us and Iran. When I went to Iran to talk about drugs policy, I found that they had just changed it. They had done that—this is my assessment, not what people there said—because, basically, all the drug addicts had been sent to be looked after by the religious leaders, who would put them in recovery. But it did not work, which was undermining the religious leaders. So those at the top in Iran sent people over to Australia to study the medical system there, and they came back and introduced it in Iran, which therefore now has a medicalised system—and there are big improvements. You see, doctors are rather good at treating people because they know what they are doing. Yes, they sometimes use methadone or buprenorphine treatments, and sometimes they bring in mental health therapies, but the system worked well through the NHS What have we done? In 2010, we threw all that out the window and gave it to the local councils, and all of them—including Labour councils—in their great stupidity privatised it. What do those Labour councillors say? "We know better than the GPs and the NHS. It’s got to be joined up. It’s got to be more than the NHS." So they took it away from the NHS and, since 2013 in my constituency, people have not been able to walk through the front door of their GP practices Guess what has happened? I had a meeting on Saturday, in Retford. There have been hardly any burglaries in Retford in the last 100 years, but there are record numbers this year. Who is committing them? The druggies—people who are drug addicted but cannot go through the front door of their GP practice as they could before. I cannot get them in. I used to guarantee to every family: "I’ll get you an appointment within a couple of days." And I did, and it was easy. They went in and saw their GP. They engaged with their GP, and it was hugely successful My recommendation to the Government and to my own party—perhaps my right hon. Friend the Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) will pass this on to my leader—is to put this portfolio in health. That is what the Labour party policy review that I chaired in 2009 recommended, and it had 4,000 submissions. The leader at the time and the one after him ignored it. Third time lucky. Put the portfolio in health and say that a critical part of the policy is that the NHS—primary care GPs—will manage the patients. Say that people in this country have the right to be treated by their GP. Yes, more is needed from other services—absolutely: getting people into jobs, keeping control of crime and getting people into stable housing, but the NHS is at the heart of the issue By the way, why on earth have the Scottish Government moved away from their successes a few years ago in places like Glasgow towards this nonsense of people coming out of the recovery system after six months? The Government said, "Six months and that’s it—out you come." That appears to have changed.