I would like to make my point first, so that the hon. Gentleman can understand it in its fullness.
It is this Government who have been going and listening to the legalisers. I suspect that the European Commission is making an attempt over time to pull together these strands, backed by several senior police officers in this country, so that they can evaporate the problem of drugs and say that crime will reduce, because if we legalise lots of things and do not criminalise others, we will not need to spend as much money on policing, because crime will be falling all the time. What is happening with this Government—it is why the Minister has encouraged this proposal from the EU and now wishes to demolish it—is an attempt to block legal highs being made into illegal highs so that crime does not go up, because they are not providing the police in areas like mine that are disproportionately impacted by the current legal highs.
I carried out my own public inquiry in Worksop town hall this January into the question of legal highs, asking the young people, the police, the health service and others what was going on. It was interesting to find out that it was not only young people who were taking these substances. It was also middle-aged people, although not perhaps elderly people. It was the people who participate in what the Government call the night-time economy and what I would call pubs with late licences. People are tanking up at home on cheap alcohol then going out to the pubs and nightclubs and taking these substances. The owners of the pubs and clubs complained to my inquiry that their biggest problem was that people were taking cheap pills and other highs instead of buying alcohol.
By the way, allowing pubs to have late licences was the worst error of the last Labour Government. My biggest error in this place was not to speak out and try to alter that policy as it was going through because applying a city solution to areas like mine was totally inappropriate. One pub in my area is open till 5 in the morning, but nobody is drinking beer or spirits; they are allegedly—according to all the information I have—taking all sorts of substances that the Government will not deem illegal because they do not want the police to arrest people, though the police are not there anyway, because the Government have cut their numbers; and
there are not even any police cells left in my area to put people in, and the police community support officers are about to take over neighbourhood policing. But nobody is being arrested for using legal highs in the pubs, and of course they are not because the highs are legal. This is part of Home Office policy.