Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Bill

My Lords, the problems of drugs in this country are always in the news. The arguments about whether they should be legal, illegal or somewhere in between are a constant source of debate among talking heads—quite rightly too, as it is a very serious problem and issue. By comparison, the issues of alcoholism and too much consumption of alcohol have always taken, certainly in recent times, very much a second place in discussion. Of course, if we read our local newspapers, we will see one such case after another—often they are minor, but sometimes they are very serious, which I shall talk about in a moment. We hear of X being found drunk and disorderly at the very bottom end of it, or of criminal damage or damage to a person. Every week countless cases are there to be recorded by any enterprising journalist who goes along to the local magistrates’ court. It is a wonder that, over many years, we have allowed this imbalance to grow—as the noble Lord, Lord Carlile, emphasised—in our discussion of drugs and alcohol. Alcohol when misused is a drug. There is no question or doubt about that. We have heard some extraordinarily impressive speeches in a very impressive debate. From the opposition Front Bench we welcome the amendment and will support it all the way. I can be brief, as I know that people are waiting for other business to begin, but the facts are truly terrifying. There are 1.2 million alcohol-related violent incidents a year, including about half of all violent crimes. There are 360,000 incidents of domestic violence, a third of which are linked to alcohol misuse. There are all those arrests for drunkenness and disorder. The noble Lord, Lord Carlile, talked about medium and serious crime. There are 530 drink-driving deaths—what a waste that is. There is also the appalling statistic that 58 per cent of rapists reported drinking, no doubt to excess, beforehand. They are horrifying figures for a civilised society and more needs to be done. We are living in a time of austerity—it does not matter whose fault it is for these purposes—when more people are unemployed and people are probably poorer than they were. The figures for relationship breakdown are not exactly encouraging. Those are all factors that have been associated in the past with heavy drinking. We cannot be careless about the issue now. The cost each year is absolutely huge—£8 billion to £13 billion a year, as estimated by the Home Office in 2010. We have heard about the National Health Service and the ridiculous amount of money that it has to spend on people who constantly get drunk and then get hurt. Of course I claim that the previous Government did useful and good things in this field, and no doubt the Government before that one did too, but that is no argument in itself. We have to do more and we have to take slight risks. We have to do more than we would otherwise think of doing. It is not a matter for some bureaucracy to decide that we can move forward on this step but not that one. This suggestion has been well discussed by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, and her supporters, and I pay special tribute to the noble Baroness, Lady Newlove, who speaks with such effect on all these matters. The argument has been so one-sided that is very hard to see any argument at all against the Government supporting, at least in principle, what has been suggested. I hope that they will support the amendment. We certainly support it—it would be a crying shame not to. It is, after all, a pilot that is being proposed. It is not a dramatic implementation across the country all in one go. A pilot has been proposed and I cannot think of one argument against adopting it.