Offenders: Illegal Drug Addiction

14. What plans his Department has to support offenders to end an illegal drug addiction.

Our landmark cross-Government drugs strategy sets out an ambitious long-term vision and includes £780 million of additional investment in treatment and recovery—the largest ever single increase. This will increase and improve treatment services, including providing 950 additional drug and alcohol criminal justice workers. The specialist drug and alcohol workers will give the police, courts and probation the facilities that they need to assess offenders and give sentencers confidence that they can make greater use of community sentences, because they will know that the treatment will be available.

The police in Clwyd South and Wrexham deserve great credit for their work in breaking up county lines in north Wales. Will the Minister please provide more information about the other main aspect of the Prime Minister’s 10-year drug strategy, the £780 million devoted to new approaches to treatments, and how that will be put into effect in Clwyd South and elsewhere in the UK?

I am pleased that my hon. Friend is seeing the impact in his constituency of the remarkable work that his police force have been doing, mainly with Merseyside police, whose region is the chief exporter to his part of the world of that appalling practice of county lines. We have indeed been remarkably successful in driving the numbers down, but if we are to make that a permanent reduction we need to reduce the demand for those drugs, particularly from heroin and crack addicts. So we will be spending significant amounts of money, as he outlined, on treating their addiction, as well as making sure that they face the consequences of their crimes. That money will be channelled through local authorities. It will take time for them to rebuild and retrain the people required to deliver those services, but I am confident that over the next 10 years we will make a significant difference.