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Crime: Reoffending

My Lords, I agree with every word of the excellent speech made by my noble friend Lady Linklater. I wish to speak about prisons and drug addiction, and I declare an interest as the chairman of Alcohol and Drug Addiction Prevention and Treatment (ADAPT), a charity that runs two major clinics that provide residential care for addicts. I want to draw the attention of the House to how pressure on prison places has been made worse by an extraordinary failure of government policy in the treatment of drug addicts. A few years ago, the Government rightly recognised that the best hope of curing addicts was in residential care, and they made more money available, but the way in which that was done has, perversely, led to a decline in the use of residential treatment. First, the money provided was not ring-fenced, and it was used by local authorities and other fund-holding bodies for other purposes. Secondly, drug action teams (DATs) were given targets which they found in practice they could meet most easily and cheaply by maintaining addicts on methadone or by sending them on community programmes that had severe limitations in meeting the needs of those referred. The Home Office, rather late in the day, is now urging DATs and other bodies to send addicts to residential treatment, but referrals are only slowly beginning to recover. The result of this mess is that in some units occupancy rates of residential places fell to less than 40 per cent, which makes them wholly uneconomic. In a recent answer to my noble friend Lord Avebury, it was denied that there was widespread disinvestment in residential places. That is neither our experience nor that of other charities which offer residential places. Our view has been confirmed by EATA, the representative body for drug addiction charities. What does this mean? Fewer addicts are cured and the pressure on prisons resulting from drug-related offences, which, as the noble Baroness, Lady Massey, pointed out, probably constitute the majority of crimes, has increased. Ironically, at the same time, the National Treatment Agency offered grants from a£54 million allocation for new residential services. That is called joined-up government. Last October, I asked to see the Home Secretary urgently to discuss a proposal that would reduce the pressure on prison places and ease the financial difficulties of charities providing residential care. It would also save some public money. ADAPT proposed that we should provide some 60 to 70 beds in our clinics for 10- to 12-week courses for early prison discharges and as an alternative to custody. We have considerable experience in this field and our work with addicts was praised by Charles Clarke when he visited one of our clinics about a year ago. We pioneered the bail assessment scheme in the 1990s, which offered drug treatment before sentencing and worked very well. It kept a substantial number of people out of prison and off drugs, until the scheme was abolished in 1996, as a result of Michael Howard’s cuts. We worked with all categories of offenders, including murderers and sex offenders. The scheme that we proposed could have been extended to other residential clinics with similar experience, and we reckon that, over a year, it could save perhaps 1,000 prison places. I asked to see John Reid because only the Home Secretary could have got such a scheme moving quickly. I had no response. About 14 days ago, after several telephone calls, I was finally told that, by coincidence, a reply from a junior Minister was on its way that day. That was nearly three months after my urgent approach to the Home Secretary. When I was a junior Minister in the Home Office in the mid-1960s, when the Home Office’s reputation was somewhat higher than today—and I am sure that this would have been the view also of the noble Lord, Lord Elton—neither Roy Jenkins nor I would have treated a serious and important proposal by a formerHome Office Minister with such disdain and discourtesy. The reply I finally received was feeble. It told me, as if we did not know, about, "““the relapsing nature of drug addiction””," and said that very few prisoners could be assessed as suitable for diversion to the non-secure accommodation available. With respect, this is arrant nonsense. Of course, some people undergoing treatment do not complete their course, but the relapse rate on our courses is far lower than that of prisoners released directly into the community. I have talked to prisoners undergoing rehabilitation courses in prison who are desperate to keep off drugs and who would love to go to a residential treatment centre after completion of their prison course. They know that when they return to their cells at the end of their treatment, the drug barons will have left drugs there to get them back on the habit. On release, most prisoners go back to their own localities, where the dealers are waiting for them. Does the Home Office really believe that very few of the 80,000 now in jail could safely be diverted to non-secure accommodation? That ignores the experience of residential treatment centres. Offenders undergoing treatment in our residential clinics do not present significant management problems, and the impact on our local communities is minimal. We deal with people under all forms of regulatory orders, such as home detention curfews, drug rehabilitation requirements and the whole range of licences, and, as I said, our patients cover the whole spectrum of criminal offences. The success of the former bail assessment scheme is highly relevant. Indeed, there is no reason why that scheme should not be reinstated. If the Home Office is concerned about the risk of non-secure residential treatment, surely a good chance of successful treatment getting offenders off drugs is a much better bet than the high risk of offenders becoming more heavily addicted while in prison. The negative, offhand treatment of our proposals is not only depressing but scandalous. More residential places will be closed; more addicts will commit crimes; more will go to jail for drug-related offences; and our record will be confirmed as the country with the highest prison population, some of the worst prison conditions and one of the highest drug addiction rates in the European Union.