Housing and Regeneration Bill

I am grateful to the noble Earl, Lord Listowel, and I will confess my ignorance and say that I am not sure how to pronounce his name; I am sure that he is used to answering to both. He made a kind reference to my former constituency. Because of the nature of the people to whom he is referring, very few of them would have turned up in a surgery of mine, because they would not have known enough to do so. I have no difficulty at all in recognising what he is saying, because one had a great deal to do with the various charities, in a generic way, that were coping with these things, notably in the West End. I remember—I freely acknowledge that for obvious reasons this is not directly within the terms of the amendment—one of the last constituency cases that I took on before I retired from the House of Commons in 2001. It was someone who had just come out of prison, where he had been for drugs offences, who appeared genuinely penitent that he had ever been seduced into the drugs industry. He laid out the circumstances in which he found himself in terms of what was available to people who came out of prison. I could see that recidivism was likely to occur pretty rapidly unless someone provided some help. I took down the case in considerable detail and sent it to Sir David Ramsbotham, as he was then. I asked, ““Dear David, is this typical?””. He replied, ““I fear it is very typical indeed””. The issue is obviously not germane to the amendment, but the generic case is a major problem for all of us.