Welfare Reform Bill

I will not speak to all these amendments. Indeed, my noble friend Lady Meacher has covered them all with such skill, competence and depth that there is not much more to be added. However, I would like to say one or two words to the Committee about the context in which the amendments are being conditioned. Winston Churchill once said in the House—on 20 July 1910, to be precise—that the way in which it treats its crime and criminals is the true test of the civilisation of any country. I am not sure that this approach to drug users is a very civilised one. It is much more in line with the very unfortunate term used by the previous Prime Minister, who declared war on drugs immediately before he declared war on terrorism. The word "war" is totally inappropriate to both those subjects. If you approach this with a war mind, you start turning your head to punitive measures, as opposed to what I understood the purpose of this Bill to be all about. Again, in that context, it has always concerned me—again, I hope noble Lords will forgive me if I go back to prisons—that one of the curious things about this country is that no one knows the cost of imprisonment. The country knows how much money is given by the Treasury to the Ministry of Justice and by the Ministry of Justice to individual prisons, but it does not know how much it would cost to do all the things that it says it wants to do with and for every prisoner. The same is absolutely true of probation. The country does not know how much it would cost to do all that it says it wants to do with and for the 250,000 who are under probation supervision. The other day, it was exposed that one young, barely trained probation officer has to look after 127 people. In preparing for the Bill, the Probation Service has briefed people on its fear that a drug user who is denied benefits will turn to crime as his only way of surviving. Is that a sensible way ahead? I have to ask, in the context of all that is proposed in the Bill, whether people have worked out how much it will cost to do all the things that the Government say they want to do. I do not deny that some of those things are very good and sensible, and all that, but have the Government costed that? Have they also costed the impact on the other organisations that are involved and made certain that everything is there? Are there enough drug treatment counsellors around the country for all these people to go to? The strict answer is no, they are not there, which is one reason why a lot of people are not going to treatment. You would hope that a prisoner who had been introduced to drug treatment in prison would be picked up by a drug treatment person the moment they left prison and would carry on from the moment they left off so that they do not lose what they have started. That does not happen. People are not there; there are not enough of them. It is therefore illogical to launch something that requires a support agency without making certain that all the support mechanisms are there. I am very interested in what my noble friend said about the United Nations at last recognising that this is an illness. Of course criminal activities are associated with it, but they are perpetrated by the criminals who are making illegal money out of making the drugs available. The result of their activities is that people become ill. The illness is exactly the same as that of gambling and so on, which must be treated properly otherwise the whole experience will get worse. I go back to my great concern that we are approaching the whole drug scene in the spirit of declaring war. The orchestrators of the war are newspapers such as the Daily Mirror, which encourage punitive approaches. The punitive approach is a dangerous and wrong way of dealing with this and is totally out of kilter with the aim of the Bill.