Mr. Burrowes: The Minister rightly stresses the importance of early intervention and youth services, so does he share my concern that throughout the country there is only one small residential facility funded by statutory services—Middlegate—where young people can receive help with addiction?

Edward Miliband: The hon. Gentleman has told me something that I did not know. We have increased the number of residential places, and the issue of young people and addiction is important.
The report also addresses personal debt, and we can agree with much of what it says. We have tried to provide more advice for people who suffer from personal debt and to increase the amount of affordable credit. There is common ground on that subject, and we must make further progress.

Further on in the debate David Burrowes added:
It is pleasure to contribute to the debate, in which I have a particular interest as the deputy chairman of the addictions working group. In the short time available, I hope to draw on some of our material. I apologise for the pressure it may have caused on the printing machines that we used to get the report out, but I make no apologies for the depth with which we sought to tackle the problem of addiction to drugs and alcohol. We looked primarily into the underlying causes behind that massive problem of addiction.

We sought to take the inquiry deeper than some other commissions, which ask the great and the good to give their words of wisdom. We heard from a balance of the great and the good, but we sought to go out to the different areas of the country to hear from those who are profoundly affected, both addicts and their families and those in the field. I hope that the report was informed by their experiences.

I can also draw upon 11 years of work as a criminal solicitor dealing with many clients who were addicted to drugs and alcohol. We should be concerned both about the 300,000 people with an opiate or cocaine dependency and the increasingly younger people who are being affected by the misuse of alcohol. It is important to look at individuals and, in my years as a criminal solicitor, I have learned that the characteristics of those affected are that they are drug addicts, often with a learning difficulty. They may have come from single-parent homes and had little or no contact with the father or any role model.

My first client at Enfield police station, who ended up as my last client, graduated through crime to become one of the most prolific burglars in Enfield. He is now serving a stretch at Pentonville, but he had become disconnected from society and consumed by his addiction, which affected those most dear to him. There were times when he connected with society, mainly when he was in his role as a father and he suddenly realised that he had a relationship with society and those around him. It is important for policy makers to capture such individuals at those times and to ensure that they realise that they have a role in society.

The Government want such people to stop committing crimes, but that is it. They are happy in many ways to see such people parked up on a methadone programme and not going any further. However, we have higher expectation— we want them to recover, become part of society and take their responsibilities seriously as fathers, citizens and employees. Such individuals are parked up in prisons, but some are in other institutions such as hostels, child care facilities and the like. They are most at risk of never getting out of the cul-de-sac they are in.

The Government have approached that matter by throwing money at it. We talk about public spending, and £7 billion has gone into the fight against drugs. That is no mean amount, but how has it been spent? It has been spent to the detriment of the funding of alcohol dependency treatment, which has suffered a cut of 6 per cent., but it has gone primarily on methadone prescribing, with £111 million—one third of the pooled treatment budget—going into prescription. That is a concern for those in the field, addicts and recovering addicts. In many ways, the expectation has not gone beyond methadone prescribing. There is a place for methadone prescription, but it has to be part of a supportive programme.

Professor Strang, the director of the national addiction centre—who is often prayed in aid by those supporting a harm reduction approach—says that one of the valid criticisms of some methadone maintenance programmes is that they are “little more than dispensaries.” There is no recovery plan or support programme. That is a concern to addicts in particular. Lee, an addict who graduated from the Phoenix programme in Sheffield, said:

“I was maintained on methadone for years and years and not once did the doctor or drugs worker say, ‘Well look have you ever thought about rehab?’ You’re still in your home town, with the same people, the same drugs, the same everything. And you are very blinkered. Common sense will tell you that you need to get out and break the circle...if you’re still there. on a methadone script, people still use, you’ve got no chance at all. When I first came here, I thought ‘I need to get off drugs’ and that was it. But then I learnt as I went on, that it was about learning life skills which I never learned from being on heroin and methadone for 22 years.” The concern now is that we have “geriaddicts” who are simply parked up.

If one method is the Government throwing money at the problem, the other is targets. Someone once said:

“Government targets are asking me to view my business in a way that’s just not capturing the work that we do. It’s about getting bodies into a system, head counting, and just watching them, it’s sheep dipping, basically.”

It has also been said that the Government seem to be more concerned with targets and how many people enter treatment than with outcomes and trying to achieve positive results—that they are more concerned about numbers than freeing people from drugs.
There is a concern that we might be addressing drug addicts simply as statistics—that we are thinking only of targets and ticking boxes, and of removing addicts from the criminal justice system. There is a worry that we have a top-down approach that does not enable them to be freed from their enslavement to drugs and to take part in society, and that that does not enable us to deal with them properly as individuals. The Government’s drugs strategy is under review and we might hear more about that later this month. The worry is that that might culminate in the adoption of a paternalistic “we know best” approach that disempowers local people, communities, service providers and commissioners. The best providers are voluntary ones—those offering residential treatments.

Let me sum up by quoting someone called Leanne. She said:
“When someone says to me about family values I didn’t know what that meant, but now I have a real family and I feel I actually belong somewhere.”
She managed to break out of her cycle of abuse and addiction because those who cared—particularly voluntary and faith-based providers—did not treat her merely as a statistic.