Mr. Jon Owen JonesTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department by what measures he judges the success or failure of his policies on the use of illegal drugs. [158221]
§ Mr. Charles ClarkeFor the first time Departments and agencies nationally and locally have been brought together to work in partnership towards joint performance targets. The Home Office has been at the fore of the 10-year strategy launched in May 1998 to break the link between drugs and crime. The strategy was underpinned with an additional £217 million over three years for anti-drugs activity from the 1998 Comprehensive Spending Review. This is in addition to the £1.4 billion spent annually on anti-drug work. The targets for the 10-year strategy as set out in "Tackling Drugs to Build a Better Britain" are
halving the numbers of young people using illegal drugs, especially heroin and cocaine;halving the levels of re-offending by drug misusing offenders to protect our communities from drug-related anti-social and criminal behaviour;doubling the numbers of drug misusers in treatment; andhalving the availability of drugs, especially heroin and cocaine, on our streets.The Government's anti-drugs strategy clearly recognises that law enforcement continues to be vital in tackling the drugs problem in the United Kingdom. The police service at all levels will continue to concentrate on targeting drug dealers and traffickers and bringing them to justice. There is a particular emphasis on Class A drugs, as these cause the greatest harm. The strategy encourages the police to work with other agencies to disrupt local drug markets and to force drug dealers off our streets, thereby reducing the harm to our communities and the exposure of young people to drugs. The strategy builds on the existing work by the police with the aim of reducing levels of street dealing and the availability of drugs in communities.
The Drug Treatment and Testing Order (DTTO), a community sentence aimed at serious drug misusing offenders, has been available to courts in England and Wales since 1 October 2000. Its main aim is to get offenders to stop re-offending, with the longer-term aim of getting them off drugs for good. The decision was made to roll-out the DTTO in the light of an independent evaluation of three pilot schemes which found that on average there were significant reductions in the spending on illegal drugs and number of crimes committed by 145W offenders subject to DTTOs. A reconviction study will be undertaken in due course to establish the longer-term impact of the order.
The Government are well on the way to ensuring that all police forces in England and Wales have Arrest Referral Schemes in place to help drug-misusing arrestees to access the treatment they need ahead of our 2002 target. While it is too early to properly measure the success of this scheme, initial feedback from October to December 2000 suggests that half of arrestees seen by arrest referral workers had not accessed treatment previously, which suggests a positive impact on crime.
In the Prison Service, in the short term we look at measures such as the random mandatory drug testing (MDT) rate or the take up of drug treatment. Both show extremely encouraging results with the random MDT rate falling from 20.8 per cent. in 1997–98 to a projected figure of 12.5 per cent. in 2000–01. We expect over 37,000 CARATs (Counselling, Assessment, Referral, Advice and Throughcare services, the new drug package of treatment services) assessments to have been completed in 2000–01. In the long term, the Prison Service is establishing independent research to measure the effectiveness of its drug strategy in reducing both drug misuse and reoffending rates.