Police Reform and Social Responsibility Bill

My Lords, I support the amendment too, but I do not wish to repeat what has already been said in considerable detail about the effects of alcohol on the National Health Service, social services, prisons, police and the general population. I was chairman of the alcohol education centre many years ago at the Maudsley Hospital in south-east London. The problem of alcohol has not changed in its results since the 1970s; however, because of its increased availability in terms of price and outlets, it is now a much greater problem, and we see it on our streets. What I like about Amendment 242 in particular, as well as the other amendments, is that such a scheme can be piloted and evaluated. There have been many attempts to deal with the street problem of alcohol and of other aspects such as drugs, and the experiments do not always work. Evaluation and piloting are, in my judgment, a good idea. I know that the noble Viscount, Lord Astor, is right about the drugs problem. We should not ignore that, but alcohol is different in one very important respect. It is a very powerful drug—as powerful as many others—but it is socially accepted and expected. That means that people use it without drugs; some use it with drugs but a large number of people use it without drugs and to excess. My noble friends Lord Brooke and Lady Hayter made the point that it is a question of resources. That is the sort of thing we should build up over a period of time and why I have directed my remarks primarily to Amendment 242. When we see young people on television who are drunk in the street, you know that everyone sitting in front of their television sets is saying, ““What do their parents think? What do those kids look like?””. At times like that I make myself think back to how I behaved in my adolescence. I would not like to go into this in too much detail, but—and this is relevant to what the noble Viscount said—I am afraid it is recognised that it is not just a mark of masculinity for men but for women too it is a mark of femininity, in a rather unusual way. That troubles me considerably, because although we all sit in front of our televisions and ask what their parents will say, the reality is that in many cases the parents will not say anything. That, in a sense, is the problem. If a kid comes home drunk, one would like to think that most parents will wait until they recover but the next day, or in the future, will talk long and hard to that young person about the impact of alcohol. That often does not happen. Some parents do it, which is great; that is good parenting. However, a large number do not know what to do. It does not necessarily mean that they are bad parents, but they do not know how to deal with it. Adolescence is probably the most difficult period of parenting for both parents and adolescents alike. It is a challenge beyond belief at times and it is difficult for many parents to know what to do. Then there is the more extreme side, where the parenting is of very poor quality or virtually non-existent. In which case, you have to ask who is helping that young person to understand what is happening to them. One of the reasons I like this amendment is the piloting, the evaluating and, as my two noble friends said, the ability to lock it into other support systems. There is a very simple analogy here with speeding, believe it or not. The previous Government introduced a system whereby, below a certain speed—if you were exceeding the speed limit but were not much above it—you could be referred to a speed awareness course instead of having points put on your licence and being fined. You simply went on the speed awareness course and, rather as implied by Amendments 242 and 243, had to pay the cost of that course, which was similar to the fine itself. The interesting thing is that many people who go on those courses are unaware that speed kills, particularly in urban areas, and is responsible for the deaths and severe injury of many young children. People may have gathered by now that I did such a course. I was doing 36 miles per hour in a 30 miles per hour area at 3 am, taking my kids to the airport. I could not blame my kids entirely, although I felt like doing so at the time. It was a very good course and I recommend it for people generally. Its relevance in relation to alcohol is that some of the young people I have referred to will be unaware of the damage they are doing to their bodies in the long term—to the liver, the heart, the brain and other organs. Most of us who have gone through parenting will have explained this at times. It is not just a matter of making jokes about taking your liver to the dry cleaner. There is a bit more to it than that. It is about explaining what is happening to them and why they need to reduce their drinking. As always with adolescents, one learning experience is never—or very rarely—enough. You have to go through several learning experiences. I spread mine out over quite a few years when I was in that age group. If we can help young people to understand the damage that they are doing, that will be profoundly important. I make one other point in this respect. We have learnt over the years something that we did not know in the 1970s. Some people are profoundly predisposed to becoming alcoholics and find it incredibly difficult to give up, precisely because alcohol is such a hard drug. In many ways it is more difficult to give up a drug such as alcohol, if you are totally dependent on it, than it is to give up heroin. There are parallels in that area. There is also a parallel with giving up smoking. Some people can give up smoking fairly easily. Others, because of their brain’s predisposition to accept the drug nicotine, find it much harder. Precisely the same applies to alcohol. Therefore, one of the things that could happen if we did this well over a period would be the building up of expertise in recognising those people early. If you recognise a person who has a predisposition to becoming addicted to alcohol fairly early in their career, your chances of getting them off it are much better than they would be otherwise. It is very difficult to get a person who has become a dependent alcoholic off alcohol in anything like a reasonable time, and very often you will fail.