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Anti-Drug Awareness

I am following the hon. Gentleman's arguments very closely. I would just like to go back, if I may, to the issues of assessment and evaluation. They take place at two levels. First, there is evaluation of what is done locally, and it is even more important that that evaluation is scientific and clear when there is a plethora of schemes operating in lots of different localities. I therefore hope that the Home Office might consider finding a way it could help people to evaluate effectively how the schemes are being implemented. In particular, if people are pioneering a scheme, as we are in Nottingham, I hope that the Home Office will consider helping at that local level. Secondly, there is assessment of what policies are effective. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will consider joining those of us who feel that the situation here is rather like that which existed in the United States, where there were more than 600 different policies on drug education, bullying, early intervention and so on. The US Department of Justice then asked a university to rank those policies order so that there would be a small group of policies, so that people who wished to pick up on those policies and do something effective could go to one source and have a national policy assessment centre to find which policies were most effective. I think that all parties could agree on having a similar source of information at the national level here—one which recommended the best of all the policies being experimented with.