Chamber and committees

I appreciate the point that time is of the essence. Again, as members will appreciate, it will not help matters if I step into other people’s duties and terrain. Nevertheless, your point is well made. These services work. They are not the only solution, but they work, and I have seen them for myself.

The core aim of the national mission is to get people into the treatment that is right for them. Although I have—I hope—conveyed my conviction in and around abstinence-based intervention and traditional residential rehabilitation, I also stress that we need to be absolutely fearless about harm reduction, because lives depend on it.

I know that some aspects of harm reduction will feel counterintuitive to many people, but we have to do what works, follow the evidence and do what we can to reach people where they are, so that we can build relationships and begin the journey to connect them with other services. Safer drug consumption is part of that. It is about saying that we care and we want people to live, survive and thrive.

The reason why we have a national mission is to join the dots, so that drug policy does not sit in isolation. Ms Webber asks a fair question about what early intervention looks like in relation to drug policy, our work with families, work with communities and work with housing and homelessness. That all needs to be absolutely aligned. The purpose of the cross-government action plan is to align the whole breadth of actions and the huge investment that is being made—despite what are trying times across government—in a better way and to work better together to achieve better outcomes.

Regarding our support to alcohol and drug partnerships, it is clear that they should not be working in isolation. They need to be very much connected, and the work that they do must be central to children’s services plans and broader community planning.

All public authorities have a fairer Scotland duty. I know that because I introduced it a number of years back, as Mr Cole-Hamilton might remember. In every strategic decision, we need to think about how the decisions that we make here and now have an impact on child poverty and on reducing poverty and inequality. Our work with ADPs is driven by the fact that the work that they have done has often been separate from other work done by IJBs or community planning partnerships—but it has to be front and centre.

Gosh! How to answer that succinctly? I will do my best, convener.

My focus in this job has always been, first and foremost, on what I can do; therefore, my endeavours are focused on the powers and resources that are at my disposal. I am a pragmatist at heart, and I want to crack on and do things now. However, I do not ignore the implications of powers that exist elsewhere. I am not looking to enter into a constitutional debate here and now but, of course, the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 has implications for what we can and cannot do. In my view, it impairs some of our approaches to harm reduction—or certainly makes the journey towards improving such interventions harder.

The issue of decriminalisation, or drug law reform, is complex. I would frame the issue as drug law reform more generally. Decriminalisation means different things in different countries, but in terms of going back to principles and the basics, the question is what is gonnae work—what is gonnae make folk safer, if not safe. I am very clear that we cannot punish people out of addiction.

We published a paper last March or May that looked at international responses to drug law reform. The international evidence that we have looked at shows, in very broad terms—I am summarising, convener—that the public health approach has been more effective at reducing harm. Some people have fears around drug law reform more broadly and often worry about increasing drug use, but the evidence does not appear to show that that happens.

In my view, we need to have a review of drug law across the UK, but I think that it is fair to say that the UK Government is not inclined to do that. I will meet the new minister at the beginning of December—that is a frequent discussion point.

Despite some well-documented differences of opinion with Kit Malthouse, who was the first UK Government minister I met in relation to this job, we nonetheless had a lot of engagement. The quick succession of ministers in recent times that has coincided with recent changes of Prime Ministers means that two ministers were in office for such a short period of time that, although I wrote to them welcoming them to their role and raising all the issues that I wished to discuss with them, time did not permit us to actually meet them.

There is some agreement between us and the UK Government on issues such as leadership, investing in the reform of services and the importance of treatment. We have some agreement in and around the need to legislate for the regulation of pill presses, which is very important for tackling the illicit marketing of benzodiazepines. We will see where we get to with Home Office applications in and around drug checking. We are at a completely different place on safe drug consumption facilities, but I will see where the new minister—a gentleman called Chris Philp—is on that.

Uppermost in my mind just now is the UK Government’s white paper on “swift” and “tough” consequences. That approach is misguided. I think that it will potentially cause more harm and that it is based on an outmoded punitive approach, and I continue to seek urgent clarity as to whether and how it would apply to Scotland. The Home Office white paper states that tier 1 and tier 3 interventions could potentially apply to Scotland and Northern Ireland, and I would have grievous concerns about that. I am conscious that I have written to the committee about that, too.

As you will appreciate in the context of those 20 recommendations and 139 actions, the task force was an iterative process; other recommendations came out earlier. Through the information that I have given to the committee, I hope that I have demonstrated that progress is already under way. We did not sit back and wait for the final recommendations of the task force. I gave a very warm welcome to the challenge, and to the criticism—to be frank—that the final report contained for the Government.

Given all those actions, we have a lot to work through, but I will endeavour to demonstrate an overwhelmingly positive response at the turn of the year, when we come back to the Parliament with the cross-Government action plan and the stigma action plan.

On whether we will implement every recommendation in the precise way that is envisaged in the report, you will appreciate that it is the role of organisations and people who make recommendations to make those recommendations, and it is for Government to work out how they might be delivered.

First, I offer my condolences to the family of Mr Cole-Hamilton’s constituent. Any death is a tragedy. We all feel that, and the death of young people is always particularly sore.

That points to the need for drug-checking facilities. I have discussed the matter fairly extensively with the United Kingdom Government and UK ministers such as the Minister for Crime, Policing and Fire. Mr Cole-Hamilton may have a slightly different understanding of the position in England. In my engagement with UK ministers, they have been really resistant to drug-checking facilities at festivals. I am aware of one licence having recently been made available to support festivals on a short-term basis.

It is fair to say that we do not have enough drug-checking facilities at those types of events across the UK. Drug-checking facilities require a Home Office licence. For years, a postal service has operated in Wales whereby people can get substances tested.

The important thing about drug-checking facilities is how they are layered with other methods of harm reduction. I am very much in favour of extending drug-checking facilities. Across the UK, we are not doing enough of that . In Scotland, there is work on three projects, and research is going on at the same time that those projects are being developed. One of those projects is nearing a position at which it will be able to make a licence application to the Home Office. The projects are geographically specific.

We will, of course, engage with all colleagues, including the Lord Advocate, on whether different approaches are required, based on experience and such tragedies.

Absolutely. We have tried to take a belt-and-braces approach. The new funds that are available to stakeholders and third sector organisations include a specific children and families fund, which is managed by the Corra Foundation, to which services and third sector organisations can apply for direct Scottish Government funding. Direct-funding opportunities have been very popular. I also point out that, before Christmas, we published our whole-family approach framework, which came with a funding package for ADPs.

Again, all the evidence from home and abroad indicates that we need to support families not just as a whole but as individuals, whether they be children or parents. We know that for every person with a drug or alcohol problem there is an impact on 11 other people. Supporting families and, where possible, keeping them together, is therefore crucial. The involvement of the family in an individual’s treatment needs to be considered as an appropriate option and choice for that individual. This is about services working with the family as a whole, which some do very well, as well as being about serving individuals’ needs.

Last year, we announced our national family residential service, which will support up to 20 families at any one time. Of course, that is part of our work to keep the Promise. I will not go into detail, unless I am pressed, but I will say that the Promise is highly germane to the work that I am doing.

We also need better standards of service and more bespoke services for women, because there has been a gap in that respect. Although it is mostly men who lose their lives, the number of women who are losing their lives is rising at a disproportionate rate.

I have discussed that matter with the new leadership of the task force and the task force membership more broadly, and I am confident that it will produce its vital recommendations by the summer. The Government is actively supporting the task force’s work with, for example, a team of civil servants who support it with secretariat tasks and so on.

It has always been the case that we will need to look after the legacy of the task force’s work. Some tests of change will not be completed, but they would not have been completed by the end of this year, which was the original timescale in the task force’s recommendations. Arrangements will therefore have to be made, and we will do that in consultation with the task force and others to ensure that we continue to learn from the evidence as it emerges.

I have made it clear that I am committed to evidence-based policy, but I am also clear that we cannot wait for evidence to be complete, because that will never be the case. We have to take what we know, implement it and be prepared to adapt and change as we move forward.

I very much concur with the view that it is for the Government and this country’s institutions to implement changes, and it is imperative for our democracy that we are guided and scrutinised by the Parliament and parliamentary committees.

Notwithstanding that, there is a role for external organisations and experts in various fields, in particular people in the lived and living experience community, academics and people who provide services on the ground.

The terms of the task force’s remit changed when I came into this post. The task force had been in operation for 18 months when I became the Minister for Drugs Policy, and, at that time, I was very clear that two things were missing or needed to be corrected. Drugs policy should not be seen in isolation and must be connected with every other Government portfolio. Drugs policy needs to be joined at the hip with justice, housing, homelessness, mental health, primary care, education, prevention, poverty and inequality policies, and that is a far bigger job than that of the task force.

I was aware from my early engagement with stakeholders and various party spokespersons and MSPs that there was concern about how the Government was performing in relation to tackling drug deaths and that there were concerns in and around the task force. My view was that the Government had outsourced its responsibilities and that I would not do that. I wanted to support the evidence-led work of the task force. My view was that any criticism of the task force should rest, rightly, with the Government and not the task force, which comprises individuals and citizens who give their time and talents to work with the Government. Therefore, there was a refocusing of the role and remit of the task force.

It is, of course, not for a Government minister to indicate to committees how they should proceed with their business. I will say that I very much embrace scrutiny; although it is not always comfortable, it is absolutely necessary, and I assure you that it always leads to better outcomes.

I welcome the joined-up approach that is being taken by the three parliamentary committees that are involved today, because it reflects the work that we are embarking on in the Government to ensure that drugs policy is joined at the hip with other crucial public policy areas and is not seen in isolation. We are trying to get our services to take that joined-up approach in communities.

There is a role for parliamentary scrutiny of the Government on the Drug Deaths Taskforce, the residential rehabilitation group, how we implement MAT standards and the national implementation group, and I am sure that people will be interested in the new national collaborative, too. The national mission is bigger than any one group. There is a lot to scrutinise and a lot to engage with.