Tackling problem drug use : thirtieth report of session 2009-10 : report, together with formal minutes, oral and written evidence / Committee of Public Accounts.

  • Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee of Public Accounts
Date:
2010
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Tackling problem drug use : thirtieth report of session 2009-10 : report, together with formal minutes, oral and written evidence / Committee of Public Accounts. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    24/36 (page 4)
    are very different to the rest of the drug using population. They are not drug users who were unlucky and became addicted. They will be concentrated in our poorest communities. They will be the people who have been in the care system. They will have been in and out of prison. They will have poor mental health. They will have been failed by the education system. They are people who would have a multiplicity of problems in their lives even if they had never stumbled across heroin or crack. If you can imagine how difficult it would be for you or me to overcome addiction, for that population it is much more difficult. On average, it takes four years, a number of goes round the roundabout and a number of false dawns but, in the end, most of them will either get better or they will be held stable, causing fewer problems to themselves and, through crime and public health risks, far fewer problems to the rest of us. Q12 Chair: When it is quite obvious that the way to deal with this is to get these people into long-term residential care, one-to-one, why have you closed the wonderful Middlegate Lodge in my constituency which had a national reputation for getting in the most difficult young people, treating them one-to-one at great cost, I agree, but better to treat them there, in rural Lincolnshire for several weeks, get them off drugs and give them a life, rather than closing this centre down because it costs money. Why did you do it? Mr Hayes: I did not, is the bottom line. Q13 Chair: Your regional director? Mr Hayes: No, not at all. There are a number of factors there. First off, you began by saying the solution is to get people into residential rehab. Are we talking about adult rehab or young people’s rehab? If we are talking about Middlegate and the young people’s system, it is very different. This Report does not touch on the young people’s system at all. Before we can move on to Middlegate, perhaps we need to sketch in what happens with the young people’s system. Q14 Chair: I want to get on to Middlegate or my colleagues will get angry. Mr Hayes: | recognise that you want me to be brief but if you bring issues that are not within the Report to the table then what do you expect? There are 25,000 young people receiving services because of their drug or alcohol use. 24,000 of them are not addicted. They are young people who are truanting, offending, where drug or alcohol misuse plays a part in that behaviour, but is not driving it. There is a very small number of young people who do have significant problems and a tiny fraction of them will need to be looked after in residential provision. This is the responsibility of the Department for Children, Schools and Families. Those services are commissioned not by the drug action teams and the partnerships that they represent. They are commissioned by children’s partnerships locally and they are commissioned underneath a strategy that the Department for Children, Schools and Families has for children with difficulties. Very few children who are addicted have only either an alcohol or a drug addiction problem. They tend to have a multiplicity of problems. DCSF and Children’s Commissioners are looking to build a web of services around those individuals to deal with their challenging behaviour, - their mental health problems, their offending, not just their drug or alcohol misuse issues. DCSF also says that children are dealt with much better within their own community. Q15 Chair: You do not really believe that, do you? Mr Hayes: | believe every word of it. Q16 Chair: You do not believe that full-time, one-to- one residential care for the really difficult young people is the best thing to do? Mr Hayes: What I believe is that very few of them actually need residential services, number one. Number two, those residential services can be provided nearer their home. One of the things we know about adult residential services as well as young people’s residential services is it is the eventual return to the community that matters, particularly if you are 15 or 16. You need to be as near your family as possible. You need to be as near your mates as possible. You need to be able to re- establish your life once you have gone through a period of crisis. The Government have said that is their policy for troubled youngsters. One of the troubles that kids who have difficulties have is around alcohol and drug misuse. One of the problems we have is that as a society we believe that a drug problem trumps everything else and exists in isolation. What Middlegate sees and you are putting forward as its unique selling point, that it is focused on the drug problem and is located in the middle of Lincolnshire, is actually what the DCSF strategy would see as being what is wrong with it. It is too focused on drugs and alcohol and not enough on the rest of the problems and it is not in the young person’s own community. Q17 Chair: One last question to you, Sir David. Clearly, it helps these people to be housed. We are spending a lot of money, £30 million, on housing. We all accept that but let us be real. We all know that local people do not want these houses next to them so what are you going to do about it? How are you resolving this problem? I know it is an unanswerable question. Sir David Normington: It is really. | cannot resolve that conflict of priorities. For any local authority that has all kinds of demands for its housing, in many areas drug users are going to be competing with lots of other cases which actually the public would think, probably rightly, were more deserving. What the £30 million represents is the amount of money that local authorities agree to spend on that. They are not compelled to spend that. They get a budget to support vulnerable people from the Department for Communities and _ Local Government and they actually spend £30 million of that on helping drug users. This can be, as you well