Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill

There is a substantial measure of agreement that has been masked by some sharp interchanges, which do not reflect the general sense of the Committee that alcohol and alcohol-related offences are very serious problems that need to be addressed and that while voluntarism must be given a chance to work, we would not be looking at this paragraph in the schedule if we did not find that ultimately an element of compulsion was necessary. I agree entirely with and am a great fan of the pilots taking place in the National Health Service on brief interventions following what Robin Touquet of St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington calls ““the teachable moment””—that when you get in the A&E department a young person or adult who has had an accident, or someone who is brought before the police for some criminal offence, you can sometimes persuade that person to think about his drinking habits by referring him there and then to an alcohol social worker who will persuade him that these habits have not been useful to him and that he needs to look at his way of life. So voluntarism is essential to the first stage in looking at people who come into the criminal justice system or the health system as a result of the consumption of alcohol. But it is not enough, and that is why we have this provision in the Bill. I remain concerned that, as the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, has pointed out, alcohol treatment accounts for only a tiny fraction of the total money available for drug and alcohol treatment as a whole. The Minister has explained that, while we have always had drug treatment orders, this brings alcohol into line for the first time. I applaud that principle; but then we have to look at the way in which alcohol and drugs treatment are each funded and ask whether that is commensurate with the damage caused by alcohol and drugs within the criminal justice system. My submission is that the funds available are not commensurate and we need to think very carefully before we leave this part of the Bill—perhaps not now, but on Report—about how we structure the help that we are going to give. While I am not totally wedded to the idea that the Royal College of Physicians should be in charge of the process, there needs to be a strategy. I accept everything that the Minister said about the need for local control, but that has to be within some sort of framework of validation and you cannot have totally ad hoc designs for these treatments in every local authority or PCT. The noble Lord did not comment on my reference to the Review of the Effectiveness of Treatment of Alcohol Problems just published by the National Treatment Agency. Clearly it knows a lot about how this works. If that review has taken the trouble to look at the problem and to comment on the effectiveness of treatment, surely that should be fed into the system and we should not have PCTs or local authorities going off and doing their own thing in a manner that is not consistent with an overall strategy. Let us leave this for the moment and come back to it on Report when we have had a chance to study the Minister’s letter. Meanwhile, I beg leave to withdraw the amendment. Amendment, by leave, withdrawn. [Amendment No. 20 not moved.]