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Anti-Drug Awareness

There is a limit to what can be covered in one debate, and I do not wish to run over time. However, I should like to reassure my hon. Friend that in pursuing an early-intervention package, One Nottingham funds several anti-tobacco initiatives, including efforts to prevent people from smoking. I have some notes on the alcohol part of the drug and alcohol awareness strategy, but I have had to skip over them rather quickly. However, both those addictive substances are definitely on the agenda, and they are being covered. Another issue that others could learn about from Nottingham is collaborative working. Partnership is a much abused word, but I hope that we in Nottingham have proved that community involvement, partnerships and collaborative working—whichever phrase one likes to use—are not just add-ons that are nice to have, but are essential. Just as we have said that crime is too important to be left to the police, so drug education and the tackling of drug problems are too important to be left to enforcement or to the health services. This issue is everyone's problem, and I hope that we show that in what we do locally. We need to ensure that substance misuse training is embedded in all mainstream services, so that everyone has the right set of skills. The Drug Aware award is a fine example of something encompassing all our local partners—the local NHS, the city council, criminal justice agencies, the alcohol industry, trading standards, children's services, the fire service, both of Nottingham's universities and the Nottingham business improvement district. A vast array of people is committed to making this policy work. Data tracking is another important issue that One Nottingham and the Drug Aware effort will highlight. We need more localised and up-to-date data collection if the early intervention package is to be effective, not least on drug misuse and teenage pregnancy. Drug misuse trends, patterns and hotspots are identified through data collection and fed back to partner agencies through the crime and drugs partnership's tackling violent crime group. In addition, a new data collection system has been introduced at our hospital's accident and emergency department to collect data on attendances for assault to help the CDP and police to identify hotspots for alcohol-related violent crime in particular and to enhance the intelligence base for enforcement action. However, the CDP has encountered data-tracking obstacles in its work at a local level. We have repeatedly had to make do with national statistics from general household and national alcohol consumption surveys, for example. That gap in local data sources means that it is more difficult to develop a localised, let alone personalised, solution to the problem. Of course, there must be safeguards, but there must also be a greater commitment to putting data to work at regional and local levels. I have asked the Minister to consider establishing a troubleshooting unit at national level to cut through some of the unintended consequences, misapplication and mythology around data protection, which might become every bureaucracy's favourite excuse if we are not careful. We must develop 11 to 16-year-olds' key social and emotional capabilities as a backdrop to tackling symptoms such as drug and alcohol abuse, low educational attainment and high levels of antisocial behaviour and teenage pregnancy. The Home Office must reach out to the Department for Children, Schools and Families and make a strong case for a statutory requirement on all schools to provide Life Skills 11-16, including modules on drug abuse and teenage pregnancy, and that should be covered in Ofsted assessments of schools' performance. I am committed to trying that in my constituency, and I hope that the local strategic partnership, One Nottingham, will consider funding such a proposal throughout our city. Local entrepreneurship, however, is no substitute for national policy led by a committed Minister. In addition, there must be a clear Government commitment to building drug education into mainstream teacher training, through both initial teacher training and continuing professional development. Finally, there must be consistent resources for universal drug education. Locally, One Nottingham is funding the Drug Aware award for three years; when it has proved itself, it will be taken over by mainstream providers. Nationally, Government must insist that every locality does something similar. Local agencies could easily fund this if a Minister made a case to the Treasury proposing that they keep half the proceeds of every drug rehab place saved. Treasury rules and civilisation as we know it might fall apart at such a suggestion, but let us incentivise people to invest in education, rather than pay the massive continuing costs of rehabilitating a smaller number of individuals. In conclusion, we in Nottingham have worked with the grain of Government thinking in bringing forward our Drug Aware policy, which we believe is a state-of-the-art effort within the United Kingdom. The Government now need to look at the plethora of schemes nationwide and promote a model drug education scheme that can be adapted for use in every part of the UK. Nottingham's Drug Aware programme might be the forerunner of such a scheme. If the Minister, my friend, sets that guidance rolling in his last act as a junior Minister, he will save billions of pounds and thousands of wasted lives, and will have the understanding and thanks of every parent in the land.