I have the pleasure to present two petitions from Grimsby relating to pensioners and the plight of pensioners. Society owes a fair deal to those who brought us through the hard times. They should be rewarded in the better times, but the contrary has happened. The tie between pensions and earnings was cut in 1979, and pensioners have been left behind. Single pensioners are losing £ 11 a week and a couple are losing £17·50 a week because pensions were not uplifted.

The petitions deal with the other problem under the new social security system that those with quite pathetically small occupational pensions are losing disproportionate amounts of benefit, which makes life a continuous struggle againt debt, something that they are experiencing for the first time and with great dismay. I have a small pile of letters testifying to that.

The first petition was organised by Mrs. Dryden of Grimsby, and it states:

The Humble Petition of the residents of Great Grimsby and District showeth that we the undersigned are concerned about the misery and deprivation forced on pensioners by the alterations in the benefit system which claw back any increase in their income from small occupational pensions.

Wherefore your Petitioners pray that your honourable House relax these rules to give pensioners a fair standard of living and that pensions should also be increased to the same end.

That petition has 1,000 signatures.

The second petition states:

The Humble Petition of the undersigned Retirement Pensioners and others in Great Britain showeth that sections of the community in receipt of the state retirement pension are suffering hardship on account of the increase in the cost of living.

Wherefore your petitioners pray that the link between pensions and average earnings be restored, thus giving pensioners a standard of living sufficient to enable them to meet the full necessities of life.

That petition has 100 signatures.

It is unusual to be able to begin a debate with a statement that I believe every hon. Member will support: educating our young people to be alert to the dangers of drugs and alcohol, and to be able to resist them, is a necessary and important aspect of what our schools do today. But before addressing myself to the work schools are doing, and the way the Government are supporting them, I should like to take a moment to examine some of the reasons why good health education is so necessary.

That I can do so in no more than a few moments is because the facts speak for themselves. Here are just a few. It has been estimated that three quarters of a million people in the United Kingdom may have a serious drink problem. In 1987, there were more than 40,000 convictions for drunkenness; nearly a quarter of all road accidents in 1987 involved people whose blood alcohol level was above the legal limit; it is estimated that more than 100,000 people die each year as a result of smoking tobacco, and that between 75,000 and 150,000 people misused notifiable drugs in 1986—probably as many again were misusing other drugs—and in 1987, it was estimated that up to 10,000 injecting drug users were infected with the human immunodeficiency virus.

That information relates to people of all ages. Let us look for a moment at some facts about young people. A survey of more than 18,000 young people in 1987 indicated that around 70 per cent. of fifth-year pupils had drunk at least one alcoholic drink during the previous week. The same survey showed that around 13 per cent. of young people reported that they had been offered cannabis or other drugs during their teens.

I do not think that I need go on. That, in outline, is why we need good, effective health education, and why it is important that it should start in schools.

But first, we must be clear on one point—health education alone cannot solve the problem. Schools cannot be expected to put right the ills of society all by themselves. Schools are, after all, a part of society as a whole; they do not function in isolation. Our young people are sharp enough to spot any conflicts between what they are being taught explicitly in schools and the messages that are tacitly conveyed by the way in which we behave and the actions we condone or admire in others. I am saying clearly that the schools cannot do it all. They have a key role, but it is incumbent on all of us to support them. We are all involved—parents and communities.

My hon. Friend mentioned the role of parents. Does he have plans to instruct parents on how they may best identify youngsters who are drinking or taking drugs?

In a few moments I shall be talking about a 10-point plan, which I have put together with the help of officials and advisers from various groups. In the middle of that plan, there is a statement about getting more information to parents. I believe entirely—if I am understanding my hon. Friend correctly—that, when getting awareness of the problem to parents, we have to be very subtle and perceptive in how that is done. Getting information to parents is important and I hope that my hon. Friend will be encouraged by the fact that that is incorporated in the 10-point plan.

I make no apology for prefacing my account of what the Department, and the schools, are doing to equip children with the knowledge, skills and attitudes that they will need to lead healthy lives with a plea to parents and others in positions of influence. They have a responsibility, too. If that means exercising some self-discipline, they should remember that that is no more than they are expecting of our young people.

How can education help? Education can do a very great deal. Good, positive health education in schools can lay a firm foundation of knowledge, skills and attitudes which can help young people to lead healthier lives. I must stress that all three of those elements are crucial. Of course, young people need to know what the effects of drinking or taking drugs will be. But that is not enough. They also need the skills to enable them to act on that knowledge.

However much young people know about the way drinking or drug taking muddles their thinking and slows down their reactions, and the long-term damage that it will do, they can still find it very hard to resist a skilful sales pitch, or a free offer from someone who may pose as a "friend". They need to know how to stand up to that sort of pressure without losing face among their friends. Of course, they need, too, to see good health in a positive way, not simply as an aggregation of "thou shalt nots". If they understand that staying healthy is something to enjoy, something that can unlock doors to other enjoyable activities, they are much more likely to go for it than if it seems to be nothing more than a series of prohibitions.

So the emphasis in good health education is on the promotion of good health. Experience shows that it is very much more productive to stress activities that are beneficial and enjoyable than to issue doom-laden or scary warnings about forbidden ones. Indeed, that sort of approach in the classroom is a pretty effective way of making them that much more attractive.

That, then, put very briefly, is what schools are aiming to do in their programmes of health education. The Government have given, and continue to give, very high priority to providing support and encouragement of good-quality, effective health education.

I shall be looking in some detail at the role of the drug education co-ordinators, but I should also like to pay tribute to the many bodies throughout the country which are involved in that campaign. There are such organisations as the Life education centres, which have impressed many of us, and TACADE, which has given immense help to the co-ordinators and to those who are charged with making policy. I hope that, my having made contacts with those two organisations and, indeed, others, such as Re-Solv, they will continue to meet myself and others in the hope that we can continue with what I believe is a strongly developing consensus on the way in which we tackle the drug and alcohol abuse problem.

Those voluntary organisations are, of course, most useful, and there is an organisation funded by the Government called Alcohol Concern, which has also done enormously good work. However, is my hon. Friend aware that, at the end of July, it is still waiting to know what money it will get for this financial year?

I thank my hon. Friend for putting forward a timely reminder. I can reassure him that Alcohol Concern will have a response shortly.

I shall turn now to the drug education co-ordinators and my Department's support for in-service training. We have, since 1986, provided through the education support grant arrangements funding for local education authorities' activities in relation to education about drugs. That has enabled local education authorities to put in place drugs education co-ordinators—usually seconded teachers—whose task it is to stimulate education about drugs in their areas, to help co-ordinate activities by the various local agencies involved, and to provide advice, training and updating for teachers and youth workers. To support that last activity, the Department has also given priority to providing grant support for in-service training about drugs.

Since 1986, my Department has given grant on expenditure of more than £11·6 million under those schemes. We estimate that during that time training will have been provided for approaching 100,000 teachers, advisers and youth workers. An evaluation of the drugs education co-ordinators' work, which was undertaken for the Department by Southampton university, attests to their success in stimulating and supporting local activities and establishing effective local networks.

We are now ready to build on that success. We recognised some time ago that it is unrealistic to limit the drugs education co-ordinators' work to illicit drugs and solvents alone. I have already made it clear that effective health education has, as its starting point, the promotion of generally positive attitudes towards health. The message is the same, whether we are talking about drugs, alcohol, AIDS or whatever. What it boils down to is, "Stay healthy, stay in control."

We have therefore, decided that from next year we shall extend the coverage of both the education support grant and the LEA training grant scheme funding. In future, all aspects of health promotion activities within schools, colleges and the youth service will be eligible for grant. At the same time, we are increasing very substantially the amount of expenditure that can be supported. In 1990–91, we shall pay education support grant on £4 million of expenditure by LEAs, and a further £3 million of expenditure on in-service training can be supported by grant. That total of £7 million is fully £3·2 million higher—in cash terms—than the figure for the current year.

Will some of the funds be directed at teachers to help to wean them off their drug dependency, particularly in terms of smoking? If not, it will be difficult for them to act as role models for children in schools and to get the message across.

I would not want to create the impression that the money is simply for supporting the activities of the co-ordinators, their salaries and associated costs or simply just for training. We have stated clearly that we must give more resources for the training of teachers. I shall not barge into the area into which my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Mr. Bowis) invites me about the job of teachers as role models. I do not believe that they need any lecturing about that. We should be extremely satisfied that 99·9 per cent. of our teachers take that part of their job seriously. I assure my hon. Friend that within the £7 million there will be room for spending on materials and on other support activities undertaken by the LEAs.

As we receive the bids from the LEAs in the coming months they may well want to do more than simply have a more intensive programme for the training of teachers and support from the ESG. They may want to adopt their own policy regarding the problems in their localities and they may have their own opinions about how their local programmes should proceed. Flexibility is therefore built in. I know that that is not the main point raised by my hon. Friend, but I believe that it meets the central issue behind his question.

I pay tribute to the drug education co-ordinators. I first came in contact with them just before Christmas and I immediately decided—I hope with their positive help and contentment—to chair workshops in which, together, we could examine the database and produce policy. I hope that the co-ordinators have been encouraged by the fact that the implementers of the measures outside are involved in the policy formation process. It is important that those who implement the measures and who seek to achieve the objectives day in, day out should feel that they can come to Whitehall and say directly to a Minister what they see going on outside and what they would like to see by way of policy initiatives.

I met those co-ordinators yesterday, but, unfortunately, I was unable to chair the full meeting because I had to be in the House in the afternoon. They made a number of suggestions, including the need to update some of the curriculum material with reference to particular substances. I readily accepted that suggestion. My officials will brief me at the end of this debate on the further outcomes of that meeting and, if need be, I can report back to the House on them.

I understand that a report from the cross-curricula working party on health education will be published in the summer and will cover the matters that we are discussing. When is the report likely to be published and what is its relationship to this debate? The Minister may intend to mention that report and I apologise if that is the case.

The hon. Gentleman is anticipating, and rightly so, another major aspect of this debate, which is what we say within the overt and hidden curriculum and across those curricula covering personal and social education. I shall deal with that point in a few moments.

The work of the drug education co-ordinators with schools, and of course the work of the teachers themselves, is at the heart of our strategy on health education, but we are underpinning their activities in a number of ways—the point raised by the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes). Right at the beginning of the Education Reform Act 1988—in section 1 of chapter 1 of part I—we have made it clear that the curriculum offered by schools must fulfil two basic requirements: it must promote

"the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils"

and it must prepare those pupils

"for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of adult life".

That means that all schools must make sure that, either through the foundation subjects of the national curriculum or, if they so choose, by other means, young people are given the knowledge, attitudes and skills they will need to lead healthy lives. The importance that we attach to this was reflected in my right hon. Friend's request to the National Curriculum Council to offer advice on the place of personal and social education, including health education, in the curriculum. In due course, the NCC will offer schools guidance on this. I shall try to answer the question from the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey about the timing of that proces later.

Of course, many of the requirements relating to the foundation subjects will also contribute towards those broad objectives. For example, under the science curriculum, which all schools will start to teach this autumn, young people will learn, as appropriate for their age and level of understanding, about the effects of drugs on their bodies and their minds.

The Department has also provided information and help for the schools in relation to particular topics. The booklet, "Drug Misuse and the Young", produced in 1985 as a guide to teachers and youth workers, has proved a valuable source of information and advice and we intend to update it shortly to take account of recent developments.

The resource pack, "Your Choice for Life",—I have an example available—which incorporated a video and handbook for schools to use in teaching 14 to 16-year-olds about AIDS, was distributed to all schools with students in that age range in December 1987. Its use in schools is currently being evaluated by Bristol polytechnic for the Department. In the light of that evaluation, we shall be considering whether there is further support and help that the Department might provide to help schools get across the important messages that everyone needs to understand about HIV and AIDS.

The Department has also supported the development of curriculum materials where a need has been identified. The substantial package tabled today of curriculum materials, entitled "Drugwise", was produced by TACADE and the Health Education Authority with funding from the Department and from the Scottish Health Education Group.

The pack provides help for teachers in teaching about drugs, alcohol and other mood-altering substances. It includes learning materials, from which teachers can choose the most suitable approach for their pupils, and suggestions about tackling various issues connected with drugs; a curriculum guide to help those responsible for co-ordinating and organising curriculum content; and a training manual which can be used either in a workshop setting or by individuals. I am glad to be able to report that, since its publication at the end of 1986, more than 5,000 of these packs have been issued to secondary schools.

The Department has also taken other opportunities to raise the awareness of schools, and of young people themselves, to issues relating to drug and alcohol abuse. As an example, a conference in February, organised by the Department with the support of the Scotch Whisky Association, brought together students, parents and teachers from 29 secondary schools to examine some of the reasons for alcohol abuse by young people, and to consider what might be done to counteract it. I was very impressed by the thoughtfulness with which the young people who were there approached the topic; we took careful note of what they had to say, and we are lookinsz carefully at some of their suggestions.

So far, I have spoken generally about drug and alcohol misuse; and I have explained that we believe that the most effective line that schools can take is to approach these issues within the context of an overall programme of health education, emphasising the positive benefits of a healthy lifestyle. Drug-specific, shock-horror approaches in the classroom really do not seem to work. But I do not believe that it is possible to address this general topic at the moment without mentioning one specific drug in particular. As hon. Members may surmise, that drug is, of course, crack.

I do not need to tell this House how much of a problem crack is in the United States. We know all too well that it has spread in less than five years from being a little-used and little-known drug to one which is at the root of major problems in a substantial number of American cities. That must not happen here. We must learn all the lessons we can from the American experience and make sure, as much as we can, that it does not happen here.

The all-party committee on drug misuse has, I understand, received a copy of a paper which has become known as the "Stutman lecture". I understand that in his capacity as chairman of that all-party committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Mr. Rathbone) may wish to make a few observations on that. I emphasise that the lecture was candid and probably off the cuff. It was delivered in London in a positive and helpful frame of mind, which seems typically American in wanting to help the United Kingdom to share the American knowledge of this matter.

Bearing in mind that it is not an academic paper—it is very much about the American experience—and that it is not an official document I feel that while others outside the House are discussing the document, we in the House should at least be able to refer to some of the observations made in it. Obviously, we have to stay close to our own advisers and produce our own policies. However, if only a fraction of what Mr. Stutman has said is applicable to this country, we should at least take the document seriously, as a part of the input to our policy formation process. I do not know whether hon. Members have seen the document, but if not, under the clear caveat I have given about it, I am perfectly happy to place a copy in the Library, if hon. Members feel that advisable.

I turn now to some of the points made in the Stutman lecture of which we should be aware. Some may not have had much publicity in the context of crack, but, bearing in mind what I said earlier, that what we say and do in the classroom must be non-drug specific, we as legislators, opinion—formers and policy—makers must have a clear perception of what we are dealing with if we are to help those in the classroom in the best way possible and if we are to help the co-ordinators and the voluntary bodies and to act on the advice that they are giving us about the English approach to the American experience.

Among other things, Mr. Stutman stated:

"Crack … is a drug that affects females as much as males. In the United States of America about 80 per cent. of our heroin addicts are males and it has traditionally been that way. We are now finding in the United States that of all the crack addicts we have seen, about 50 per cent. of them are female. Now what does that mean if you live in a big city. It means very simply the following—that at least in the United States most inner cities families are matriarchal in nature— they are run by women. These are the same women who here, before, had been fairly oblivious, not touched by the heroin epidemic. They are today becoming crack addicts. And, therefore, the last vestiges of family life in the inner city, certainly in New York and in most other major cities in the United States are beginning to disappear."

Mr. Stutman then deals with child abuse and states:

"child abuse cases in New York City have gone in 1986 from 2,200 reported cases to 1988, 8,000 reported cases. It has almost gone up by 400 per cent., almost all of them are the children of cocaine-crack-using parents … in New York City all of the children who died because of battering, child abuse, where parents literally beat their kids to death … 73 per cent. were the children of cocaine-crack-using parents. It is a drug that produces violence … In a survey of 17,000 crack users in the United States the 'Cocaine Hotline' is going to point out that:—47 per cent. of those crack users had actually been involved, this is all under the influence of crack, in a physical fight: 35 per cent. had been involved in assaults with weapons, 12 per cent. had been involved in child abuse and 1 per cent. had actually been involved in murders. That is a drug that, unlike any other drug that we have ever seen, produces those kind of numbers."

There is a considerable debate in the United States and in this country about the methodology of addiction to that substance. I appreciate that the debate is intense and I offer no view of my own at this stage about who is correct. I should simply like to report the view of Mr. Stutman, who is a drug enforcement agency officer. He stated:

"of all those people who try crack three times or more, 75 per cent. will become physically addicted at the end of the third time. It is pointed out now that in most treatment centres in New York City the average crack addict is addicted within five weeks of first use."

More chillingly, the drug enforcement agency officer continues:

"Right now in the United States of America every major treatment centre will agree with the following statement and, in fact, the New York Times recently did a survey in which they talked to the head of every major treatment centre in the United States. Right now in the United States crack is considered a virtually incurable addiction. Statistically, there are no treatment centres that will show any long-term remission of any statistically significant number of crack addicts … So it is considered an incurable addiction in our country and yet it is a drug that of those people who try it three times, 75 per cent. become addicted. You don't have to be a mathematician to figure out you've a hell of a problem when you've got a drug like that."

I now come to the point about the lessons for us. Mr. Stutman states:

"The New York City Police Department has 29,000 police officers, about the same as the Metropolitan Police of London. When crack first started, they had about 600 officers working full time on drugs. The New York City Police Department now has 2,700 full time drug officers, just in New York City. Last year the New York Police Department and DEA, in New York City … made 90,000 drug arrests. Last year in New York City our office, just the Drug Enforcement Administration in New York City seized 9,000 kilos of cocaine. … Now the next question is, did all of those seizures and all of those arrests make one bit of difference, and the answer is absolutely not. There is not one single corner in New York where you can't purchase crack or cocaine. Our mistake, in New York, was very simply the following. We didn't see the problem early enough and we didn't get a jump on it."

So, with the generosity and candour that I referred to earlier, Mr. Stutman said to a British audience:

"The only thing I would ask you is the following: learn from our mistakes. We have screwed up enough times to write 10,000 books, but I would hope all of you don't have to go through the same thing that we went through. Don't be like the people in Kansas, in Texas and california who said, 'It can't happen here.' I will make a prediction and as you all know about predictions in this business, you have got to be crazy to make them. I will personally guarantee you that two years from now you will have a serious crack problem, because as the gentleman before me said, we are so saturated in the United States with cocaine, there ain't enough noses left to use the cocaine that's coming in … I repeat, the only thing I would ask you is the following, learn from our mistakes."

I hope that we will do so. I look forward to hearing the remarks of my hon. Friends, and I believe that we still have an opportunity that the New Yorkers no longer have—an opportunity that may also have been lost in other parts of the United States that felt that they would never have a problem.

I hope that this debate will join with the growing national consensus on our methods of ensuring that our young people do not go through misery.

I thank my hon. Friend for reporting so fully on first-hand experience, but his remarks perhaps do not sufficiently illuminate one important aspect. Much of America's crack problem originated in New York's black community, from the West Indies, and so on. We should acknowledge that not all communities are from the start equally vulnerable. Perhaps people in Kansas and Texas, and in other states, were lulled into the belief that crack was a problem of the inner cities only. Therefore, we must ensure that the most vulnerable of our communities are those best prepared to deal with the problem at the earliest possible moment. That will involve us all in difficult work. We must ensure that it is not thought that because the crack problem is tackled in black communities, they are the cause of it.

Earlier, I remarked that we must be cautious in interpreting and examining the American experience. Almost any generalisation is dangerous, and we should not debate the question in terms of particular sections of the community. As the Americans so openly comment, one may start with the belief that it is an inner-city problem, but in truth it rapidly affects the whole cross-section of society. I shall refer shortly to the means by which we shall stay true to our approach in the schools—the non-drug specific, stay healthy, stay in control approach. However, for the past three weeks I have been talking about the intensification of messages that we know work as the kind of defence mechanisms that our young people need.

The work already under way in our schools will provide a firm foundation for the further efforts we must make to keep crack at bay. We shall build on that foundation to ensure that schools are fully aware of the threat and are fully prepared to equip young people with the skills that they need to resist the lure of crack.

I stress that I am not advocating a different approach to crack. I am convinced that if one were to launch a specific anti-crack campaign in the classroom, one could simply be doing the pushers' job for them. Rather, we must intensify all our existing messages in the areas where young people are at risk, and ensure that schools play their part in the efforts of the community as a whole to stop crack gaining a foothold in this country.

Having briefly summarised the Government's action so far in stimulating, encouraging and supporting the development of effective drug and alcohol education in our schools, I turn to the future.

Perhaps my hon. Friend will allow me to intervene before he leaves that point. It may have been just his delivery, but I detected in his remarks an accent on the word "classroom", in relation to there not being crack-specific campaigns. I hope that he accepts that there should not be crack-specific campaigns of any sort in the classroom or elsewhere.

Yes, I do accept that. My hon. Friend was right to interpret my remarks as emphasising the work done in the classroom in particular, but when dealing with the attitudes of young people, one must bear in mind also the youth and community service—which is, in my view, a very underestimated resource. Many of our advisers and others dealing with drug policy acknowledge that one cannot reach some people through the classroom or even through the youth and community service. Those who are not visible in that way may be members of the groups most at risk. However, I entirely agree with my hon. Friend that we are talking about a non-drug specific message, whatever the nature of the young or youngish group of people involved.

There is reason for us to be proud of our achievements. Of course there will always be exceptions, and they hit the headlines. Nevertheless, the evidence suggests that the majority of young people take a sensible and responsible attitude to alcohol and drugs. In my preliminary remarks to outline the scale of the problem, I quoted figures suggesting that perhaps 13 per cent. of young people are offered illicit drugs at some time during their teens. The good news is that the majority of that 13 per cent. are able to turn down that offer. I am convinced that that encouraging fact owes greatly to the work that is now under way in our schools.

I repeat that 100,000 practitioners of one form or another have received awareness or training programmes and know more or less what they are doing. However, we must not be complacent. They need more assistance, and we must learn from new data as they arrive. But that is not a bad record for a western European country to have achieved.

Can the Minister give an assurance that data will be kept up to date? Earlier this week, in our debate on teacher shortages it was accepted by his Department that until very recently, data on that issue were lagging considerably behind. Given the frequently changing pattern of drug use and abuse, it is vital that up-to-date data are available to make social policy judgments. How can other Departments help to ensure that such information is kept as up to date as possible?

We have various sources of information. My colleagues at the Department of Health sponsor a major survey of the attitudes of school children that is undertaken through the Health Education Authority and Mr. John Balding in Exeter, covering about 17,000 young people a year. It monitors their changing attitudes on an annual basis, and therefore represents a very large and useful database for spotting trends and developments. As the hon. Gentleman rightly says, the situation can change very rapidly.

The hon. Gentleman implies that we should make available as much information as possible to the House. We all have our own sources of information, but, given that we are all united in the objective and that the only question remaining is how it can be achieved, the availability of that up-to-date database to right hon. and hon. Members is also important. I give the hon. Gentleman an undertaking that I shall do my best to ensure that it is made available.

As many hon. Members wish to contribute to the debate, I shall briefly report to the House the existence of a 10-point plan that the Department devised. I commented that we must maintain the momentum and do everything we can to equip our young people with a mature understanding of the importance of taking a responsible approach to their own health and well-being. Therefore, our future work will be just as important as the action that we have already taken. Our 10-point plan will serve as the framework for the Department's activities over the coming year.

We shall examine, with a number of interested organisations, the possibility of providing information for parents, with the aim of engaging their interest in and support for the work undertaken by schools.

We want to look closely at the effectiveness of health education, to see whether the right messages are getting across.

We shall ensure that appropriate health education messages are integrated into the national curriculum.

We shall look closely at what has happened in other countries and see what lessons we can learn from others' successes and, indeed, their failures.

We shall look into the possibility of mobilising the private sector in support of our efforts.

We shall consider means of incorporating health education issues in courses of initial teacher training.

We shall consider whether teachers need further curriculum materials.

We shall consider how to get better information on the health-related behaviour of young people.

We shall consider, with the Department of Health, whether we can define clearer messages for young people, taking account of their varying levels of risk. For example, a different approach may be necessary for those who are known already to drink alcohol to excess.

The final point is the one on which I would like to end, although I hope to catch your eye later, Mr. Deputy Speaker. We owe it to our young people to make sure that they understand both the why and the how of a positive, healthy outlook on life. We must all do everything that we can and take every opportunity to get across to young people the vital message that if they are to get the most out of life, they must stay healthy and stay in control.

I thank the Government for providing time for this important debate on an issue that clearly unites the House. We have had two education debates this week and we have sharp ideological differences on several issues. There has been substantial criticism of the way in which the Government have handled a range of problems, but, as the Minister rightly said, on this issue we have a common objective. There are limited differences between us about the means of achieving that objective, but we all want to see the problems dealt with effectively.

As the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) and the Minister have acknowledged, there are serious difficulties in collecting and interpreting statistics in this area. Some of them are raw, sharp and unpleasant, and others are more difficult to interpret.

The Minister referred to the work of Mr. John Balding of Exeter university today, anti in an Adjournment debate on 4 May. It may be worthwhile quoting his speech to show the extent of the problem. The 1987 figures, based on a survey of more than 18,000 youngsters, revealed that

"over 74 per cent. of fifth-year boys and 65 per cent. of fifth-year girls had consumed alcohol in the past week, with over 10 per cent. of the boys consuming the equivalent of more than 10 pints of beer. The same surveys revealed that up to 12 per cent. of fifth-year boys and 14 per cent. of girls had been offered cannabis or other more harmful drugs at some time during their teens."—[Official Report, 4 May 1989; Vol. 152, c. 453.]

The Minister picked up the important point that the figures show the extent to which youngsters are offered drugs, but not the substantial extent to which they have the courage and common sense to turn down the offer.

It is difficult to interpret the figures on alcohol. Last Christmas I had the rare experience of taking part in a Radio 1 programme called "Rhythm and Booze". It was a serious attempt to discuss alcohol problems among young people, but it was a classic piece of BBC misorganisation. Perhaps I should not have said that because I might never again be invited to take part in a BBC programme. The programme was to be recorded one Friday night in a night club in Manchester. We arrived about one and a half hours before the disc jockey who was to chair the discussion. One of the wonderful features of disc jockeys is that they have a Peter Pan youth which makes us all appear younger. He arrived late and the BBC provided free drinks for our young audience. By the time that the programme was recorded, I suspect that one or two people may have taken advantage of the BBC's generosity, and some of the comments were made out of bravado. The programme showed clearly some of the risks involved.

What was encouraging in the discussion and is shown in the data is that many youngsters are now more likely to drink non-alcholic drinks and to be responsible about consuming alcohol and driving. There is a difference between generations here. Youngsters are much more likely to be sensible and socially mature than many older people.

The Minister concentrated mainly on drugs. He made a powerful contribution about the American experience with crack. However, it is worth reminding ourselves that alcohol abuse counts for 10 times as many deaths among young people as drug abuse. That is not to say that one is not a problem, but simply that there is a difference of scale. Both are serious.

Before the hon. Gentleman leaves the subject of data, does he agree that one of the more alarming pieces of information revealed by the survey was that about 20 per cent. of 13-year-olds have experienced a hangover?

To go a stage further, another fact which should worry all of us who are parents and which shows us our responsibilities is that the major initial source of alcohol for youngsters is the parents. While the initial source of drugs is usually somebody whose is motivated by profit, youngsters are usually introduced to alcohol by parents, who are not maliciously motivated. That is a lesson for us all.

I shall concentrate on alcohol abuse, which illustrates a broad point about the role of schools in fighting drug and alcohol abuse. The Minister rightly said that schools are a reflection of society. We cannot expect schools to heal the problems of society, nor do we blame schools for causing them.

For many years I have been worried about the image of alcohol that is portrayed and the problems that that causes for young people. The positive image creates expectations in and temptations for young people. One has only to turn on the television or look at the newspapers to see that advertising projects a positive image of the use of alcohol and suggests certain social attributes. It often creates the impression that young men who drink are more likely to be successful with young women and that alcohol increases sexual activity. It is suggested that people need to drink to score and achieve. That damaging and dangerous image tempts many youngsters to drink alcohol.

The working group on young people and alcohol has said that advertising is undoubtedly influential in shaping attitudes, and made serious recommendations about the need to change the images and restrict the breadth of advertising.

A report in The Guardian at the end of last year showed that young people can recognise alcohol advertising at an early age. They know the brands, and can identify with the images that are created. All that creates potential difficulties.

We are told that the Brewers Society does not consider the extent of alcohol advertising a serious problem, viewing advertising as being aimed at product differentiation rather than at increasing overall alcohol consumption. In its evidence to the working group, the society said:

"there is no evidence that alcohol advertising increases the consumption of alcohol".

As an outsider in the advertising world, I regard that statement with scepticism and with some contempt. If the brewers are prepared to spend so much on advertising, they must want to sell more of their product and hence increase consumption. At some stage the House and the Government must recognise the need to control alcohol advertising, as it is clear that the voluntary code for brewers and advertisers does not work. The harmful images remain the same.

This may be going off at a tangent, but, having spent most of my working life in advertising, I feel that I cannot let what the hon. Gentleman has said go unchallenged. The statement that he quoted is absolutely correct. Alcohol consumption cannot be tied to the amount of advertising, for advertising is not tuned to increased consumption: it is a battle between the brands. That is true of almost any well-branded, well-established market. It is just as true of alcohol as it is of cigarettes, cars and cereals.

I hear what the hon. Gentleman says. May I put an alternative hypothesis to him? I appreciate his interest in such issues, and I am not making a personal criticism. Is it not possible, however, that alcohol advertising, while it may not increase the level of consumption, makes it difficult to lower that level, as it runs counter to the other messages to which the Minister has referred—the "keep healthy" messages? I think that it would be better for our television screens to show that well-known young international athletes, for instance, do not use alcohol as part of the preparation for their feats, for obvious reasons. If some of the time used by the brewers to sell their products were used to get that message across, the positive image of health would be much more effective.

This is, I think, an important part of our debate. I speak as the son and grandson of a brewer, but also as a former youth worker. Does the hon. Gentleman accept that there is a problem with the simple analysis that alcohol advertising is a battle of the brands? The reality is that it produces a greater cumulative effect which marks up alcohol as desirable. The amount of investment in alcohol consumption is in no way comparable.

The Government's legislation on broadcasting poses the danger that we shall have a much freer market next year, with more and more competition on radio and television as well as in the press. None of the competitors will want to make their products less socially desirable. There is no guarantee that the Government—for it will have to be the Government—will put up equal amounts to transmit the alternative message, which the hon. Gentleman and others may regard as the most effective solution. Unless that alternative message is broadcast—that people do not need to drink or smoke to be healthy—the competition is not fair and advertising is harmful rather than beneficial.

The hon. Gentleman has made a good point. I, too, have a confession: my parents were pub landlords, so I have seen the business from the other side of the counter. I will not say that my almost first-hand experience turned me against alcohol, but it confirmed my view that the images presented by the brewers are positive and are deeply ingrained in the minds of young people, who retain them throughout adolescence and into adult life.

Living in a public house, I saw young people who had been badly affected by alcohol. The images that they in turn create are not very positive, and in their more sober moments they would not necessarily wish to convey them to their peers. The hon. Gentleman is right. I do not decry for a moment the £7 million that the Minister has said will be made available in education support grant for 1990 and 1991, but the difference between the scale of expenditure on alcohol advertising and the amount spent on health promotion is such that it is hard to get the positive, healthy images across. I hope that the Minister will talk to the brewers and the advertisers about the persuasive impact of advertising.

General promotion of health images is the responsibility of my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Health. Let me assure the hon. Gentleman, however, that the Under-Secretary of State for Health and I talk regularly about the need to ensure that any programmes that the Department launches in the future will be dovetailed with the health education programmes for schools. We shall aim for consistency in advertising directed at both the general public and the classroom.

I welcome what the Minister has said, and hope that he will refer to his colleagues some of the comments made today about alcohol advertising. I have laboured the point somewhat to show that the role of society in general is crucial to the way in which schools perform their task of education.

I welcome the Minister's comments about involving the drug education co-ordinators in policy making. Perhaps that involves a broader principle that Ministers could apply in other contexts. Without wishing to make any criticism, I nevertheless consider it essential that those with first-hand knowledge are brought into the policy-making process, and I was glad that the Minister mentioned that.

There is always an opportunity for Oppositions to say that they would like more money to be spent, but I think that it would be foolish and premature to say that in response to the news that £7 million is to be spent in 1990–91. There is a danger of money being wasted because we do not yet fully understand the scale and the nature of the problems, and how best to tackle them. I see the £7 million, and the previous expenditure, very much as a pump-priming mechanism, and I have no doubt that the Government will make more money available if research and experience show directly that it is needed. I am sure that the Minister will not hesitate to give that commitment.

There is also a danger, if we talk about substantial amounts of money being spent, that we shall become alarmist about the statistic and the problems. I think that the Minister stressed that it would be foolish and counterproductive to be alarmist. There are serious problems that have to be tackled, but if one tackles them in an alarmist fashion it becomes difficult to define the targets and to deal effectively with them. The Government's approach has so far allowed a cool appraisal of the difficulties.

The Minister emphasised that to tackle the problem we must not use the shock horror approach and images that were used in the early days. We must use images that present a positive message about health and say no to certain forms of temptation. I think that that is the correct approach.

I was pleased that the Minister said that there would not be a specific anti-crack campaign in schools or more broadly but that the message is to be about the ability to say no, and promoting a positive, healthy image. Health education has to get that message across to young people.

From our experience, as the Minister quite rightly said, we know that the alarmist message is likely to attract youngsters towards particular drugs and practices rather than to deter them. There is always a great temptation to go for an alarmist message. It seems to be a quick way to frighten people off, but it does not work. It is better to have a slow, sure process which will have long-lasting effects. That is the best method and the one that the Minister underlined in his speech.

The Minister also said that we have to give young people hope for the future. Defining hope is always difficult. It does not always depend on material things, although housing in the inner cities and the availability of leisure facilities and of decent employment and education are clearly material. One thinks about young people who are homeless and sleeping rough in our inner cities. The Government's policies must be directed towards such matters. They are extremely relevant when dealing with the problems of drug and alcohol abuse, although the Minister did not mention them. We have to create hope and the expectation that life has something worthwhile to offer young people. Then drugs and alcohol are less of a temptation.

The problem is not always material. Drug and alcohol abuse are not limited to one class or to one income bracket. We need to offer hope in personal terms. We must create a positive image. It would have been helpful to the debate if the Minister had talked about some of these broader issues because they have a bearing upon the way in which society helps young people to achieve their full potential and to develop.

The Minister referred to the development of personal and social education, to the role of sthe drug education co-ordinators and to the impact on the national curriculum. He is right to remind us that the Education Reform Act 1988 imposes certain duties and defines the national curriculum, but he must know that there is concern among drug education co-ordinators, in schools and at local authority level, that the development of the national curriculum will squeeze out the important work that has started in these areas. That is not an argument against the national curriculum, but I think that there must be a balance that allows personal and social education work and the work of the drug education co-ordinators to develop as part of the curriculum in schools.

In his response to the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes), the Minister referred to the working party. He said that later in the debate he would update us on its timetable. I emphasise to the Minister that we are dealing with important cross-curricula themes, and it is crucial that they are not lost from the national curriculum. There is no reason why that should happen. All we need from Ministers is a commitment to ensure that cross-curricula themes do not disappear from the timetable. If that happens, the money that has been spent on them so far will have been wasted. The Minister will understand our fears about this.

In the Southampton university report on the work of the drug eduation co-ordinators, the theory is expressed that, because of falling rolls, competition may force heads to drop drug education programmes as they may be perceived to be an admission that the school has a drug problem. I hope that the developments in the Education Reform Act 1988, some of which we opposed, do not work in that way. It is important that the Minister should stress that the work of the drug education co-ordinators and the broader work of personal and social education should be an activity in all schools and that it is not an indication of a drug problem but shows that the school wants to present its youngsters with a positive health image. That is a natural part of the curriculum for any school.

There are one or two more items that should have been on the agenda and in the Minister's opening speech. I was disappointed that he made no reference to tobacco and cigarette smoking. All the evidence shows that that is still a significant cause of death, of poor health and of people being unable to perform physically and mentally to their full capacity. Perhaps the Minister will comment on that later, but I hope that the work of the drug education units and that personal and social education in schools will place some emphasis on the detrimental effect of tobacco. We know that tobacco is an addictive drug and its cost to the National Health Service and to many thousands of people throughout the country. I hope that the Minister will make some reference to that in his winding-up speech.

The Minister did not refer—I am not surprised—to a problem that is beginning to develop and may well be an opportunity for alcohol abuse and drug peddling and trafficking. In the Adjournment debate on 4 May, when the Minister replied to the hon. Member for Norwich, North (Mr. Thompson), there was a reference to the development of amusement and gaming arcades. I have held the view for some time—there is evidence to support it—that the proliferation of arcades in inner cities has enticed many youngsters into truancy, drinking and drug taking. It does not happen to all youngsters, but it happens to a percentage of them. The Home Office has dismissed the evidence. I think that the case that has been presented in a fairly systematic way by several newspapers and brought together by other researchers shows that there is a real problem and a risk associated with arcades.

Not those that are properly run.

There is a problem, and I will come back to it later. It is unfair to allow Government Whips to open their mouths. Usually they have a much more sophisticated job which involves the use of silence and pressure. Perhaps the intellectual demands are such that it becomes difficult to open one's mouth after such a long period of silence.

Local authorities do not necessarily have the ability to stop the proliferation of gaming and amusement arcades. The regulations in terms of licensing are such that local authorities have little power and their planning controls are limited. It is possible that a local authority, with a wide range of community support, will feel that additional gaming and amusement arcades are not necessary, but it would have little or no power to stop their development.

The hon. Member for Staffordshire, South-East (Mr. Lightbown) said that there is no difficulty if such places are well managed. The industry has said that it would support self-management and self-regulation. I find that unconvincing in practice. The evidence shows that even if there is a code of self-management and self-regulation and the management says that youngsters under the age of 16 will not be admitted, one can usually find such youngsters in virtually all the large amusement arcades.

The House has a clear responsibility not to leave control to the industry. We have not left the control of alcohol, drugs or betting to their respective industries. We must protect our young people. If we do not, they will be exposed to truancy, alcohol and drugs. That may involve only a small number of young people but their lives are being wasted.

I realise that other hon. Members wish to participate in the debate, so I shall conclude. It is important to recognise the scale of the problem. We should not over-estimate it, but we must not become complacent. If we understand the scale of the problem, we can have a cool analysis that will lead towards effective action. We share a common concern and objective to reduce the level of alcohol and drug abuse and to reduce the dependence on tobacco.

The Minister talked about the evil of crack. It would be a foolish person in the House or any other part of the community who did not recognise the problems and the evil they create. We have to stop youngsters wasting their lives and opportunities because of drugs and alcohol. The Government have started to deal with the problem and we will give them our support, as these issues transcend party politics and go deep into the lives and well-being of individuals. From time to time we shall encourage the Government to do more, but so far the approach is right and the expenditure is in the right direction.

The message of a healthy positive image is one that we support and the Government have got it right. On this occasion I can tell the Minister that we wish the Government well and hope that they are successful. That success is one in which our society will share.

I understand that there is a private notice question at 11 o'clock and that I shall have to sit down then and resume my speech afterwards.

It is good that there is a degree of unanimity between both sides of the House on this problem. It is a worrying problem and all hon. Members agree that there is a desperate need for action. Statistics have been quoted by my hon. Friend the Minister and by the hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Fatchett). I find it worrying to read a survey that suggests that 70 per cent. of 15 and 16-year-olds have at least one alcoholic drink every week. On 20 June 1989 The Guardian stated that one person in two starts on alcohol before the age of 18. Another survey said that one in seven 15 and 16-year-olds has been offered cannabis or another drug at some time. In 1986 a survey showed that one in 10 secondary school children smoked regularly and another showed that one in 20 smoked occasionally.

I have to admit that when I was at school I also smoked because it was regarded as rather daring. Some other people in the class smoked and I smoked along with them as I wanted to be one of the boys. It shows how old I am that in those days one could buy five Woodbine cigarettes for two old pence. Having invested that money we sat in an air raid shelter and puffed away contentedly feeling grown up and sophisticated. However, when I was in the sixth form I was caught smoking by my mother. She said that if I wanted to smoke, I should do so in the house and not sneak round corners. At that time I made 20 cigarettes last for a full week. Because I persevered I gradually increased my intake until I was smoking 20 cigarettes a day. However, I have good news for my hon. Friend the Minister. In 1978 I saw the warning signals and stopped smoking. The withdrawal symptoms were hard to endure and one of the terrible consequences of giving up smoking was that I piled on weight. Instead of having a cigarette I started to eat all sorts of things which may not have done much for my figure but at least I had stopped using nicotine, which must have improved my health.

It is important that in our schools there should be an emphasis on the maintenance of good health promotion. The curriculum can be used to emphasise the dangers of drug use. I am glad that my hon. Friend the Minister has beside him the great package which contains the valuable "Drugwise" curriculum guide. The pack contains certain drug themes that could be used in the curriculum. It is suggested that in English lessons pupils should be asked to read and comprehend various pieces of information on organisations concerned with tobacco, drug and alcohol misuse. They would then be asked to write an appeal letter saying which of the organisations should be the beneficiary of fund-raising events and why. That would satisfy the requirements of an English lesson in terms of comprehension and writing and it would provide information about the help available for drug users. By the pupils' choice of organisation, questions whould be raised about attitudes to drug users.

The same theme could be applied to a history lesson. Pupils could discuss drug use in times of stress and lives and conditions in the trenches during the two world wars. In geography lessons pupils could learn of the way in which drugs affect the economy and of the international trade in legal and illegal drugs. For some Third world countries exports of plant-derived drugs to the West are one of the main ways of generating foreign exchange. Similarly, the West exports alcohol and cigarettes to Third world countries. By using those themes teachers could provide interesting lessons and put across the message of how important it is that children at school do not get hooked on drugs.

I realise the importance of the drugs education co-ordinators referred to by my hon. Friend the Minister. I am glad to say that they are now to be found in every English local education authority. I agree with my hon. Friend that they are doing an excellent job in persuading young people to reject drugs. There is a clear relationship between drugs, alcohol and AIDS and that can be used in a co-ordinated health education programme.

As the hon. Member for Leeds, Central said, my hon. Friend the Minister announced in an Adjournment debate on 4 May a £7 million programme for the years 1990–91. A total of £4 million will be used to support a new broadened remit for drugs education co-ordinators who will be responsible for giving information and advice to schools on alcoholism, AIDS and drugs. The other £3 million will go to the local education authority training grants scheme to fund in-service training of teachers. It will cover the same key areas of health education. I am glad that my hon. Friend the Minister talked about further expansion along those lines. I believe that that is a positive step in the right direction. It is all praiseworthy work and I pay tribute to it, but we could do a little more.

For the past four years I have campaigned for the money confiscated from drug barons to be given over entirely to the fight against drugs. When I raised the subject in an Adjournment debate a few months ago, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Mr. Rathbone) supported me in that aim. He is one of the most knowledgeable people in the House on the issue. My suggestion is carried out with great effect in the United States. Surely it is justice that the money that has been made from that foul trade should be used in the fight against it. If we confiscate the funds——

(by private notice): To ask the Secretary of State for the Environment if he will make a statement on the operational problems in the water industry which have left 500,000 homes in south and south-east London without water; and what steps his Department is taking to avert the impending crisis.

This is an operational matter for Thames Water. We have been in touch with Thames Water which is doing all it can to maintain and restore water supplies and to improve the provision of emergency supplies to those who have been cut off. Priority is being given to hospitals and to other special cases.

Is the Minister aware that the direct cause of the problem appears to be the infestation of the Hampton plant in Middlesex, which affects seven London boroughs, Dartford and Sevenoaks—a quarter of the capital's water supply? The infestation of larvae has been common in previous years and could have been dealt with by adequate research and development and investment, but this year Thames Water has reduced research and development by 10 per cent., and it reduced infrastructure investment in the previous full financial year by 25 per cent. Is she aware that people are concerned that after privatisation the consequence of cutting costs and cutting investment will put at risk the water supply in times of crisis? Can she explain why, on every occasion when the temperature goes up, the ability to supply water goes down?

Why is it that cumulatively, over the years, we have left our water supply industry in such a bad state that it cannot deliver the goods? Will the hon. Lady tell the House what on earth is the argument for her and her right hon. and hon. Friends planning to sell off the water industry so that in future, when such problems arise, affecting huge numbers of people, nobody will be accountable in the House to answer questions at times of extreme urgency in the capital city?

As the hon. Gentleman is aware, we have had a period of very hot weather and very high demand. He referred to the difficulties at the Hampton treatment works where remedial maintenance work is taking place. The larvae concerned are quite unacceptable, although they are not in themselves a health hazard.

The hon. Gentleman referred to the vital importance of investing in the water industry. In the particular circumstances in south-east London, I shall not labour the point that under the last Labour Government investment was cut by 30 per cent., and under this Government investment has increased by 50 per cent. The key point is that under privatisation all the water companies will have to draw up long-term investment plans. They will be free to raise capital and borrow appropriately to ensure that, properly and rightly, they can meet customers' demands.

Is it not astonishing that Thames Water did not launch a public relations campaign two or three days ago, when it was clear that the crisis was looming, to tell the inhabitants of south-east London that it was critically important to save every bit of water that they could? Is it not astonishing that Thames Water did not inform my local council about the problem until almost midday yesterday, when it must have known 48 hours before that the crisis was looming?

It is important for consumers to act with restraint. A hosepipe ban will be imposed from midnight tonight. We hope that people will take all possible action in the meantime. Thames Water has set up an emergency response centre on 833 6564. Twenty people are manning the service, and consumers who are worried would be well advised to ring the service. Thames Water is taking a great deal of action and is bringing in static tanks, bowsers and stand pipies. Of course, the situation is serious for those concerned and Thames Water is considering what further steps to take.

We know that the Secretary of State is very doctrinal, but will the Under-Secretary remind him that the diet of worms was a meeting, not a drink? Will she please divert money intended to be spent by Thames Water on floating Thames shares on the watery stock exchange at very great cost to providing a better supply of water in London? Will she confirm that after privatisation there will be no accountability to Members of Parliament if such problems recur?

The key point is that, under the privatised arrangements, water companies will be required to have long-term investment plans. Thames Water is already investing heavily in the London ring main. That is well advanced and will lead to a long-term improvement in such difficulties.

Does my hon. Friend agree that the people of London want water, not political posturing from the Opposition? Does she further agree that something is lacking in the publicity and information being given out by Thames Water? For some time there has been a great deal of confusion in London about where people should be holding back and not using hoses and so on. Is the problem likely to spread to other areas, particularly in south London?

I understand that the difficulties may well be largely resolved by the end of the weekend, although some may extend into next week. I am advised that consumers throughout London are required to act with restraint, although the hosepipe ban will apply specifically to south-east London. I shall certainly pass on my hon. Friend's remarks about the need for greater clarification in the information that is provided to customers generally, but I remind him that the emergency response centre, which is well manned, can give immediate advice to anybody with a query.

Does the Minister accept that what she has said this morning is of no comfort whatsoever to my constituents, who are absolutely fed up with the fact that they have been drinking below-standard water for some time and that there have been pollution incidents which, frankly, are extremely worrying? This is the last straw for people who live in a somewhat inadequate environment.

Will the hon. Lady answer the question about accountability, and will she acknowledge that the events of the past few days have made a farce of the £30 million advertising campaign by the water companies on the merits of their system?

I would not seek to deny that all those years of under-investment by the Opposition have long-term consequences. Inevitably, when water is in public ownership, it is one of the easiest places to cut back on investment in times of difficulty. Privatisation will ensure that there are proper plans for long-term investment in the water industry. That is the crucial point.

However, I would not seek to minimise the difficulty for people in the hon. Lady's constituency, and in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Minister for Roads and Traffic, the hon. Member for Eltham (Mr. Bottomley). I make it clear that Thames Water is taking all steps possible to ensure that supplies are brought in by tanker, static tanks, bowsers and stand pipes. The hon. Lady will be reassured to know that hospitals are being given priority.

I share with my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Mr. Jessel) what is becoming the dubious privilege of having treatment work's in our constituencies that supply much of London's water: he has the Hampton works, and I have the Ashford works. Will my hon. Friend confirm that larvae's enthusiasm for breeding has everything to do with the hot weather and nothing to do with the Water Act 1989? Will she confirm that, far from doing what Opposition Members suggest, the Water Act 1989 will require the implementation of higher standards and more investment in the future?

My hon. Friend is right. The key point about the privatisation of the water industry is that in future it will be independently and effectively regulated and information will be made widely available to the public. The difficulty at the Hampton treatment works is unacceptable, but it is not a health risk. It is important to reassure people about that, following the alarmist fears that have been expressed about larvae. Action is being taken and I understand that remedial and maintenance work will be completed before long.

Is the Minister aware that the problem has spread to north London? At nine o'clock this morning, numerous instances in the Sudbury hill area of my constituency were reported to me by telephone and in person of the supply being cut off.

Is the Minister aware that the reason why Thames Water is in such a state of complete confusion, without contingency plans or the means to set the minds of the public at rest, is that its senior management and management have spent all their time recently preparing for privatisation? They have been so busy ordering helicopters, executive jets and all the other paraphernalia of big-business management that they have forgotten the consumer. Is the Minister satisfied that those people are fit to manage a privatised industry? The consumers of London think differently. Will she call in the chairman of Thames Water and give him a dressing-down about his failure to meet the water needs of London? Does she recognise the enormous harm and damage being done to communities affected by this disastrous situation?

If the present situation is so bad, why cannot the Labour party understand why we are so anxious to change? We are quite convinced that the future regime will make substantial improvements. The water industry will be free to invest and will be required to make long-term investment plans. It will improve investment, regulation and the availability of information. Those are the crucial advantages of privatisation.

May I invite my hon. Friend to send a message of comfort to those who fear for the future? While not being complacent, may I say that most of my constituents have had no problems with their water supply or its condition because they are supplied by Rickmansworth water company, which has always been a private——

Order. The private notice question is about Thames Water and south London.

I represent a small part of Sudbury and must express my concern about possible damage to its supply from Thames Water. Perhaps the supply will be better when it is run in the same way as Rickmansworth water company.

My hon. Friend is right to remind the House of the long-standing existence of many private water companies. About 25 per cent. of the water supplied in this country is supplied by private statutory water companies. Although my hon. Friend's constituents have not been affected so far, I remind him and others that in one hour a hosepipe uses the same amount of water as a family of four uses in a week. With this hot weather, many people would be well advised to be cautious about their use of water. The current difficulties are long standing; in times of high demand and hot weather, difficulties of supply are not unprecedented. I recognise that the problem is quite worrying for hon. Members' constituents in south London. Thames Water is taking all possible steps to remedy it at the earliest possible opportunity.

Is the Minister aware that the water supply in some parts of London is so polluted that it can be chewed rather than drunk? I am surprised that the Secretary of State has not told Thames Water to charge for the extra rations that are being delivered.

Will the Minister explain why, when we have a heavy downpour in London, the sewers break, but that when we have a bit of sun we have a drought on our hands? Is that not an indictment of the Government's 10 years of under-investment in the water industry in London and the rest of the country? Would it not be better if Thames Water diverted the money that it is wasting on its ridiculous advertising campaign on behalf of the Tory party to the infrastructure of the industry, which is what the people of London want and deserve?

Only the hon. Gentleman, with his quaint attitude to figures, could regard an increase of 50 per cent. in investment as a cut. We have an answer to the problem—the Water Act 1989.

rose——

I shall call the two hon. Members who have been rising to speak, the Front-Bench spokesman for the Labour party and the Minister. I remind hon. Members that we are discussing a problem in south London, not a general matter.

Has not the Labour party completely missed the point about Thames Water, the present difficulties and the Water Act 1989? Under the Water Act, because standards of service matter, there will be a consumers' charter. The consumer will be offered a discount on his bill every time the water companies fail in their responsibility to connect services to the consumer. That will give the water companies every incentive to get their act together and provide the consumer with a comprehensive service. Far from the Water Act and privatisation making matters more difficult, it will be very much to the advantage of the consumer if it is implemented as quickly as possible.

My hon. Friend puts it far more effectively than I can.

Will the Minister answer the question asked by my hon. Friend the Member for Southwark and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) and the hon. Member for Norwood (Mr. Fraser), which she has so far avoided? Will she confirm that, once the water industry is in private hands, Ministers will not be accountable to hon. Members when a crisis such as this arises? Will she confirm that the Government are running away from accountability?

Ministers will not be responsible for the day-to-day management of the water industry. Rightly and properly, that will be a matter for the water companies. Local authorities will have power to check on drinking water quality. A drinking water inspectorate will be created, the findings of which will be publicly available. We think that that is the proper and most appropriate way of supplying water.

Does the Minister realise that the only consolation in her statement for water consumers in south London is that it was not made by the Secretary of State? Does she recognise that the problems facing consumers in south London stem from an operational failure by the management of Thames Water? Whatever she says, it is clear from the information that she has provided that Thames Water's management has failed the consumers of south London. How in future can those consumers have any confidence in water when it is privatised because it will have exactly the same management and there will be no accountability to the House? Ministers will be unable to answer about problems such as those that consumers are facing in south London this morning.

The Minister tried to obfuscate about investment figures, but the reality is that Thames Water has had a lower level of investment over the past few years. Consumers in south London are now suffering as a result of that lack of investment. Surely there is no confidence in the management of Thames Water or the stewardship of Ministers. Water consumers in south London and the rest of the country have made it abundantly clear that privatisation will only make the problems worse.

On the contrary, it is clear that the difficulties have occurred while the water supply is in the public sector. The long-term investment plan and the ability to raise money independently are fundamental to the proposals in the Water Act 1989. We believe strongly that the consumer will benefit greatly from having a separate provision of water services and water regulation.

I regret that Opposition Members must exploit the present very hot weather and high demand in addition to acknowledged maintenance and remedial difficulties at Hampton to make petty party political points. It is clear that the consumers in south-east London are most affected. They need to know that an emergency line is available and that Thames Water is doing all it can to restore supplies and to provide interim supplies. We are confident that moving the water industry into the private sector will be for the long-term benefit of the users of water. That move will ensure high standards, long-term investment and regular supplies.

I have to notify the House, in accordance with the Royal Assent Act 1967, that the Queen has signified Her Royal Assent to the following Acts:

• Parking Act 1989
• Control of Smoke Pollution Act 1989
• Common Land (Rectification of Registers) Act 1989
• International Parliamentary Organisations (Registration) Act 1989
• Licensing (Amendment) Act 1989
• Antarctic Minerals Act 1989
• Road Traffic (Driver Licensing and Information Systems) Act 1989
• Transport (Scotland) Act 1989
• Social Security Act 1989
• London Docklands Railway (Beckton) Act 1989

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Environment, my hon. Friend the Member for Surrey, South-West (Mrs. Bottomley) in replying to the private notice question said that she felt very sorry for the people who had been cut off. I know exactly how they must feel. I was almost at the end of my speech. If the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) had not interrupted the hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Fatchett) on the pretext of making an intervention, when he actually made quite a long speech, I would have been finished by 11 am. Then I discovered that the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey had tabled the private notice question, so he will understand why I am not particularly keen on him this morning.

Before I was interrupted, I was referring to the fact that in America money that is confiscated from drug barons is used in the fight against drugs. Why can we not follow the same line in this country? I have raised the question on many occasions, although I am not sure how much success I have had. However, I promise to persevere. If that can be done in the United States of America, why can it not be done here?

Last year the United States Drug Enforcement Agency urged the Metropolitan police in this country to apply for £32·5 million of drug assets that had been seized with the help of the Metropolitan police's special task force which had been investigating the Brink's-Mat bullion robbery. However, the United States authorities ruled against us. They said that there was no mutual assistance agreement with Britain. My right hon. Friend the Home Secretary took prompt action at the time and agreement has now been reached. Did that £32·5 million go straight to the Treasury or was it used in the fight against drugs?

Earlier this year two drug barons went to prison and assets worth £4,300,000 were seized. If that money could be used in the fight against drugs—as I believe it should be—we could do a great deal to provide extra resources to bring home to school children the folly of drug taking. Drug education is a vital programme. All hon. Members would agree that any young person who succumbs to the drug pusher is on a very slippery slope. It is essential that we back the teachers in their fight against the evils of drug and alcohol abuse. I am very glad that there is such agreement between hon. Members on both sides of the House on this very important issue today.

Alcohol and drug misuse are major social problems which place a massive burden on the Health Service and cause accidents, ill health and death. They are also major contributors to problems of law and order, family breakdown and industrial inefficiency.

If we are considering education in connection with those problems we must consider alcohol and drug abuse as separate problems. There has been little research into the effects of alcohol education, but what research there has been suggests that, although education programmes may have had some success in increasing knowledge about alcohol and harmful drinking, there is little evidence that education has altered attitudes or behaviour. That does not mean that we should not continue a programme of alcohol education in schools.

It is necessary to cause young people to reflect on their attitudes towards drink. We should maintain a long-term campaign as part of the usual broad school curriculum. We should use English lessons to show the effects of drink on people's lives as described in novels. We should use health lessons to show the damage that alcohol does to the body. We should use modern studies to show alcohol's influence on the costs to industry, on advertising, the break-up of families, drink-related crime and violence. I strongly believe that we should use films of drunks to show how stupidly they behave and how foolish they look to other people. We should also target different messages in clear and simple language pointing out that it is not necessary to drink excessively to have fun.

We would be naive to expect too great short-term results from alcohol education in schools. The young are always adventurous and they experiment and seize on any oportunity to try something new and to imitate adults. The image that is often presented to young people by television and through their everyday living is that it is grown-up to drink.

Adults are part of children's education. Their image of society reflects strongly what they are taught in schools. If adults cannot maintain a higher standard of responsible drinking, the children's attitude will be that it is another case of, "Do as I say, not as I do." That message will be completely rejected.

I will not deal at length with other issues such as the need to educate adults and I will not explore too far the devastation caused by people drinking or the need to increase the price of drink. Some people believe that it is necessary to label bottles with units per measure so that people understand what they are drinking. There are also issues related to the lack of Government money for education. For example, according to the figures that I have seen, there was a tax yield of £200 a second from alcohol, but only 10p of that was spent on alcohol education.

I want to enter a plea for more and better facilities for 16 and 18-year-olds. That age group is most at risk from excessive and irresponsible drinking. If we provide more facilities for them, we would be better able to keep them out of pubs.

Some time ago I visited part of my constituency and met some young girls sitting on the pavement so I sat down with them. During our conversation I asked them why they were sitting there and they told me that they had nothing better to do. I said, "Yes, but why are you sitting here?" I was told that if they sat there the policeman would come and move them along. They would go to the other end of the village and sit by the health centre and remain there until the policeman came and moved them again. I said, "But you have a very good centre for young people in the village." They said, "We are over 16. We do not want to associate with kid's stuff. We want somewhere of our own." I said, "What would you like?" They said, " All we want is somewhere to go where we can talk to people and where we are not interfered with, pushed around or told to do this, that or the other. We want a place where we can just talk among ourselves, have some coffee or soft drinks, listen to music and just be on our own." I went to the youth centre and asked whether such a place could be provided. It agreed to look into the problem.

A month later, I went to another part of my constituency and met a gang of boys standing outside a shop which had an off-licence. They had been buying some drinks. Those boys had often caused a nuisance to the local people living nearby. I asked the boys why there were there. Their reply was the same: "We have nowhere else to go." I said, "Do you go into pubs?" they replied, "Oh, yes, but we are under 18 and have been thrown out of every pub in the area." I said, "What do you want?" They said, "We want somewhere to be on our own, a coffee bar, where we can talk with our friends in the warm and where no one will interfere with us." I asked the county authorities whether such a place could be provided under a new scheme that was being set up in my constituency. They replied, "We are making ample provision. There are football grounds and trampolining and flower arranging" and other such things. I thought that there was no way that I could see those lads arranging flowers. They consider themselves young adults, but we do not treat them as such. When we do not treat them in that way, we cause them to go into pubs, cause trouble and drink irresponsibly. I make a strong plea that we consider young people as young adults, not people to he slotted into categories in youth centres.

I turn to the difficulty of educating young people against the problem of drug abuse. Alcohol is a bigger problem than drugs because it is more easily acceptable and accessible. Education against drugs needs to strike a fine balance between warning and exciting young people's curiosity. It needs to consider what kinds of drugs are available in each part of the country. It is not possible to carry out a blanket campaign on drugs, as can be done with alcohol, because different parts of the country have different problems with different drugs.

A shock-horror campaign in the schools could turn away from drugs young people who were unlikely to have experimented with them anyway, but it could excite the interest of those young people who are most at risk and who have already experimented with drugs—those who, as they would say, "mess around" with drugs or solvents once or twice a month but do not see it as a problem. It is something they do out of curiosity and a sense of adventure.

Like many other people, I think that the answer must be a low-key approach, presenting facts, answering questions and saying, "This is what it does. This is how it affects your health and your family." Perhaps that could he done through an educational film that does not preach, by getting young people to talk about it as they watch and consider the problems for themselves in a quiet, responsible way—education by accepting, by saying, "Yes, drugs exist", but also by pointing out reasonably and calmly the dangers and destructive nature of drugs.

The evidence of the national anti-heroin campaign shows that it was unsuccessful in that the people on the posters looked so horrible that young people said, "My friends do not look like that", and could not relate to the warning. I am told that the posters have become collectors' items for young people. There is a need for young people to have someone in their school to whom they can talk, who would help without preaching and tell them about the local drug line and the national needle schemes, such as the one that we run in north Staffordshire. The health authorities there have pinpointed six pharmacies where a pack of five needles, syringes and three condoms can be given out together with advice leaflets. The object is to prevent infection and prevent the spread of AIDS. The youngsters are not asked to give their names but are issued a number on a card and are urged to return all the needles to the chemist for replacement. The campaign costs £15,000 a year—money that is exceedingly well spent. There is no evidence to show that making syringes and needles freely available increases drug use.

The "no names, no questions asked" policy ensures that the idea works because people feel free to make the exchange in safety. A logo in a chemist's window identifies where the scheme operates and prevents young people hanging around outside pharmacies afraid of being picked up by the police. The scheme will provide vital information on how many people use drugs while encouraging them to ring the druglink line for help and advice.

Above all, young people on drugs need help, and so do their families. I have heard of a family with five children one of whom started taking drugs about five years ago. He started with glue sniffing, went on to petrol sniffing and is now on lighter fuel. A few years ago, when glue sniffing was at its height, I went into a major store in my constituency and discovered a large display of glue and I also found a small shop that was selling glue and plastic bags to go with it. That was very irresponsible.

We as adults have much to answer for. The youngster who started in that way has caused his family great heartache. He is the quietest of the five children and is a very nice lad, but he gets a terrible urge to sniff those products. He takes money, buys lighter fuel, goes out into a field, where he will sleep rough for a number of days to be away from his family, and then returns to his home looking devastated. His mother is at her wits' end. She does not know how she can help him. If more young people realised what can happen so easily as a result of starting to sniff glue, fewer young people would be encouraged to experiment just once or twice a month.

There should be a national evaluation scheme that considers reports from all education agencies. We should devote much more time, effort and money to the well-being of our children. We should educate them in school for life, for the problems that they will face in the outside grown-up world and for the temptations that will face them. Above all, we should give them the strength of character and the knowledge to make the right choices.

I welcome the debate. I do not believe that any other hon. Members have as yet said so specifically. This debate on an extremely important subject is taking place in Government time. No subject bearing on any aspect of life is more important than the prevention of alcohol and drug misuse.

I commend the hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Fatchett) on his support for the Government's activities and on his commendable restraint in not falling into the trap, into which we all fall from time to time, of asking indiscriminately for more Government cash. The hon. Gentleman made an important point when he said that alcohol misuse might now be less threatening among the young. I hope that he is right, but I feel from personal observation—which is not like a statistical base—that he may be over-optimistic.

It is certainly true that smoking is growing among the young. If we have a few contemporaries in for a few drinks or dinner at our home, there is hardly a stub in an ash tray, but if we have young people in for drinks and dinner, there is not an ash tray that is not chock-a-block.

Among the young, there is also the growing threat of drug misuse, which seems to be growing every day.

I hope that I am not being over-optimistic. I realise that the figures are short term and may be contradicted as time goes on, but there is some evidence of an increase in the consumption of non-alcoholic drinks and good evidence that young people do not feel that it is wrong to consume non-alcoholic drinks in pubs. That is positive. On the down side—and the hon. Gentleman may refer to this later—there is a practice building up, in contradistinction, that young people go out to consume a great amount of beer and get drunk, and they may also get drunk on odd combinations of drink. That is worrying.

We are in accord on that. The consumption of non-alcoholic drinks is, thank goodness, so often tied to a better appreciation of the dangers of mixing any sort of drinking with driving.

The scale of the threat of the problem of drug misuse cannot be over-emphasised. My hon. Friend the Minister referred to the speech given recently by a member of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency at a meeting of the Association of Chief Police Oficers and he extracted some worrying comments and statistics from that speech. I want to refer to it, too, and make two additional comments to illustrate the extent of the threat from that horrible new cocaine derivative, crack. The Drug Enforcement Agency officer said that in the past three and a half years, crack has grown from a drug which was virtually unheard of to the main drug of abuse in the largest cities of the United States. However, it is not confined to the large cities, but affects all kinds of people—black, white, Hispanic, rich and poor. It has moved out of the ghetto and now affects suburban America. Those are the characteristics of the drug which could so easily be found here.

My hon. Friend the Minister quoted part of the speech and it was interesting that he stopped his quotation after making the emphatic point about the threat from cocaine. However, I want to pick up the speech from the end of my hon. Friend's quotation. He ended at the point where the officer said:

"Our mistake, in New York, was very simply the following. We didn't see the problem early enough and we didn't get a jump on it."

The officer went on:

"That leads to a very reasonable example of the difference between two cities near New York, Washington DC and Boston Massachusetts, they are both equal distance from New York, 200 miles, they both have large inner city populations, they both have big cocaine users. Three years ago, the Mayor of Boston came to my office. He said "I'm worried about crack." We talked about it, we went up, we trained their police officers, he increased the size of his drug unit, he set up task forces from which information came from the street to the top immediately. They did away with parochialism, they started drug education in school systems and they started community education across the city and today Boston has a very minor crack problem. They have a problem sure, but a very minor one. At the same time we talked to the people in Washington DC and there the answer was—`Don't bother us…we can't worry about this crack stuff.'"

We see illustrated vividly how if one takes steps and appreciates the threat early enough, one can intervene in the growth of the use that awful drug. That is a message we must take to heart. Another point to note from that short extract is that of all the actions that the officer identified in Boston, he did not mention any propaganda campaign. The city did not make a self-satisfied, self-gratifying public example of what it was doing. It was precise and targeted its efforts, and tackled the drug menace in that way.

However, we are not talking only about the problems of crack, although drug pushers who traditionally dealt only in marijuana are switching to coke and crack and, of course are still pushing heroin. There was an example in Wembley only yesterday. The drug ecstasy is a home-produced drug. The drugs squad raided a flat in Wembley and found a factory in the kitchen which had created 10,000 pills worth £300,000. In the Manchester Evening News earlier this week, there was a report of a young girl of 16 who died after taking ecstasy. The same threat comes from amphetamines, which have not been mentioned in the debate so far. There is not only a growing threat from crack, but an existing threat of hard drugs such as heroin, ecstasy and amphetamines.

The hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mrs. Golding) was the first in this debate to mention glue and the sniffing of solvents. I was talking to a nursery school teacher only last week and she explained that she had noticed that a half-dozen or so children in her nursery class had great blisters on their noses. She talked to the children and obtained their co-operation so that she could go home with them and talk to their parents. Believe it or not, not only could she not get co-operation from the parents, but she could not get them to admit that their children were sniffing glue. She was faced with the visible evidence of what was going on and, she went on to explain, it was peculiar to find half a dozen children in a nursery class zonked out because they had been sniffing glue. In 1987, the latest year for which we have statistics, 111 children died from solvent-related abuse. It is a widespread problem.

Drug abuse is an international problem. The last time we discussed the problem, I drew the House's attention to one aspect of its internationality, which is the job being done in the Council of Europe and in particular, through the Pompidou Group of Ministers. I remind the House and the Minister that the Social, Health and Family Affairs committee of the Council of Europe, of which I am pleased to be a member, requested the Committee of Ministers on 4 October 1988:

"to step up co-operation in prevention efforts between the Council of Europe, WHO and the European Community, in the framework of pilot projects aimed at health education in schools and the community, while keeping the Assembly duly informed on the progress of these projects".

The Committee of Ministers adopted its reaction to the report in December 1988 and reported back to the Assembly on 3 April 1989. It said:

"The Committee of Ministers wishes to inform the Assembly … that an interim evaluation report has been established on the education for health pilot projects aimed at preventing dependence, which will continue in 1989. The interim report, which is very positive, shows that the model education for health project prepared by the European Health Committee … in 1984 is workable and is welcomed by schools and local authorities."

The Committee is to be informed of the Assembly's interest in these projects and in the follow-up to them. I hope that, in drawing up his 10-point plan as an extension of what is already happening in this country the Minister has drawn on whatever wisdom there may be in that report from the Council of Europe.

Although drug and alcohol misuse are international problems, local activity is needed to come to grips with them. I propose to outline the way in which my local county council has tackled the problem. I shall do so with pride and because, having studied the matter extensively, I believe that its approach provides a good example of how to go about things in the right way. It may, therefore, help other hon. Members in discussing their own worries with their county councils.

In 1985, the East Sussex drugs advisory council was founded. It brought together representatives of health, education, social services, the Churches, the police and key voluntary agencies, and it provided a forum for the agreement on the education principles that should be adopted. That was an immensely important step.

The three principles are as follows:

"(i) substance abuse education should not stand alone but form an integral part of personal, social and health educational programmes"—

that was a thread that ran through the speeches made by my hon. Friend the Minister and the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme—

"(ii) long-term effectiveness can only come from an encouragement—through this and other educational processes—of self-esteem, respect for self and others, responsible decision making;

(iii)educational programmes must therefore be frank and factual, recognising the counter pressures in society and individuals"

Following the establishment of the ESDAC, in 1986 East Sussex was one of the first authorities to seek and obtain education support grant assistance for the post of a drugs education co-ordinator. It is always invidious to mention individuals by name when it is so much a group effort, but I must mention Jan Masters, who has been our drugs education co-ordinator for a considerable time and has done the most marvellous job. I am sure that in his meeting with drugs education co-ordinators, my hon. Friend the Minister will have been struck by her character and leadership, as all those in East Sussex have been struck by her qualities.

Following that appointment, the county council agreed a year later to appoint an advisory teacher to work in primary schools, and a third person to work in further education and youth matters. The three staff have worked closely together as a team and have delivered extensive programmes of in-service education for teachers across the whole education spectrum. The programmes have been followed up in schools and colleges by the advisory teacher.

The team has recognised that training programmes and methods need to be tailored to individual schools and colleges, but the consistent message remains that successful personal, social, health and substance abuse education can cross traditional subject boundaries and can enhance the quality of subject teaching. That highlights the need to continue to encourage the crossing of traditional subject boundaries. Some 120 primary schools in the county have enthusiastically revised their teaching programmes on health to incorporate consideration of substance abuse, and the demand from teachers to take part in training workshops cannot even be met. Those schools represent approximately 50 per cent. of primary schools in the county and I believe that that compares pretty well with performance elsewhere in the country.

A development that was welcomed by many secondary schools was the introduction into the early years of the secondary curriculum of the skills for adolescents programme of personal education with an emphasis on self-esteem and responsible decision-making. Every secondary school has taken part, with the financial assistance of Lions Club International—an extremely good example of the valuable interest of the voluntary sector in such activities.

All the county's further education colleges have now established health education programmes and are moving steadily towards making health education, including substance abuse education, part of the curriculum of every student. The team has welcomed its inevitable involvement in personal, social and health education generally rather than attempting to deal with substance abuse in isolation. Concern over AIDS and its links with drugs and the place of alcohol in irresponsible behaviour have also been included. Everyone wholeheartedly welcomes the emphasis that is now being given to personal, social and health education in the planning of the national curriculum.

It is interesting to note—I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister will be aware of it—that education has contributed to, as well as benefited from, the function. As one might expect, there was a key educational input into the development of the unique multidisciplinary training package on drugs. More than 300 East Sussex people—youth workers, GPs, nurses, social workers, teachers, probation officers, solicitors, midwives, police officers and many others—have already undertaken the two-day course. The education service has been able to integrate its approach to substance abuse to include alcohol. The pump-priming in relation to drugs, especially in health education, has been invaluable and a parallel agency is now being established to deal with alcohol. There has been wide support from the probation service, the police, the health authority and the county, borough and district councils, although the participants cannot bring the pump-priming spur to joint activity that was available when ESDAC was first set up. The need for new impetus in the training of teachers is ever-present. That is why I was delighted to hear the Minister's announcement of his 10-point plan and of the additional funds that are to be made available.

In my remarks about ESDAC I mentioned some voluntary organisations. I must also mention two other groups of people who have made a contribution. The first is the wine and spirits business. I am sure that I am not alone in having received earlier this week an announcement from International Distillers and Vintners Ltd. of a major initiative by British drink companies to promote the concept of responsible drinking and to help to prevent alcohol misuse. That sounds like a worthwhile initiative. A formal body is to be set up this autumn. Dr. John Rae a former headmaster of Westminster school, has been appointed its director and is taking up his position later this year. The aim of the new body will be:

"to work closely with the Government, local authorities, the police, and voluntary bodies to research the complex reasons behind alcohol abuse and to advise on practical measures to encourage sensible and responsible drinking."

That is a worthwhile enterprise. The letter continues:

"As a precursor to the formal launch of the new body, we are also announcing a special training initiative for pub licensees and their staff aimed at helping them prevent irresponsible and inappropriate drinking and the problems associated with it, such as rowdy and violent behaviour, under age drinking and drink driving."

That is a worthy initiative and a good illustration of how an industry can make a contribution.

Is the pharmaceutical industry making a suitable contribution? It is an open-ended question, and I do not know the answer. If it is making a contribution, I should like to know more about it. If it is not, perhaps this debate will be a spur to it to do so.

Other organisations such as the Churches are playing a part and are co-operating in organising and operating drug advisory services through boards of social responsibility. I refer to the Jewish Social Workers Association and the Jewish and Christian youth movements. There is a special responsibility to instil traditional values in parents and children in such a way that young people do not feel alienated from society and seek satisfaction in the misuse of legal drugs such as alcohol or illegal drugs across the spectrum from crack to solvents. The Churches are playing a welcome part.

When hon. Members last applied themselves to the subject of drug abuse, I mentioned Life education centres. For the interest of hon. Members, the first Life education centre was established in Australia in 1979. They have more recently come to this country. Life education centres are operating throughout the small area of the Isle of Man, extensively in Essex, and in pilot projects elsewhere in the country. Life education centres offer preventive drug abuse programmes for children from the ages of five to 15. Life education is essentially prevention, not intervention. It is intended to complement existing health educaton in schools. The programme is aimed to educate children in the positive aspects of being alive. Effective drug education cannot be left until adolescence, as children's attitudes are formed long before then.

The programmes relate to all forms of drugs, legal and illegal, and provide children with an awareness of themselves through getting to know the incredible function of the human body, particularly how and why its delicate equilibrium is affected by substances and can quickly be put completely off the rails by them. Life education is a positive approach. Life education centres and others have found that horror tactics are unsuccessful and counterproductive. The Life education philosophy focuses on creating a sensitivity to values and behavour, which leads to an understanding and appreciation of human life. The programmes develop children's decision-making skills, build self-esteem, assist with values clarification, and develop a variety of skills necessary to the promotion of health education and the prevention of drug abuse.

Life education centres provide a progressively graded series of programmes for children from five to 15. Each programme deals with a different theme, the idea being that a trip to the Life education centre is an integral part of each school year, and the programmes work together as a structured series following a child's mental and social development. Life education involves pupils, teachers and parents in a positive approach to drug education at primary and secondary level. Most important and, perhaps, reassuringly for everybody is that the programmes are continually professionally evaluated, and each evaluation has shown exciting and positive results. The evaluations are available for hon. Members who are interested to see them. I will ask the Library staff whether they will store information on Life education centres so that hon. Members can use them as a point of reference.

As my hon. Friend the Minister appreciates, Life education centres can make a dramatic contribution to drug education programmes in this country and most particularly to the carefully targeted programmes that the Government are now planning to meet and counter the threat of crack.

I commend the Government's commitment to the fight against drug misuse, production and trafficking, and their efforts in encouraging prevention and improving treatment. I also commend the Minister's vigorous contribution to that fight in the important battlefield of the health education of our young. I welcome his 10-point plan and the extra moneys that he has announced today. I hope that he will take back to the interdepartmental ministerial meetings that he will attend—I believe that there is to be another meeting next week—the comments that have been made in this debate and the importance that the House attaches to education. Unless we win the battle and reduce and, eventually, eliminate demand for illicit drugs, the fabric of our society, our values, our relationships and even our freedoms will remain at risk. That is the true importance of the debate.

My comments will directly follow those of the hon. Member for Lewes (Mr. Rathbone). I will talk mainly about crack and other illicit drugs, drawing heavily upon the experience of the Home Affairs Select Committee which recently visited Washington and El Paso to see the American experience, and highlighting the threat that we face.

There is no doubt that the battle against drugs can be won only through education. I am sure that the hon. Member for Thanet, North (Mr. Gale) will also refer to this matter. Our visit to the Mexican border vividly illustrated to us what is happening in America. A strange tourist attraction is to see illegal immigrants crossing the border. It is an admission that there can be no containment. The Americans and the Mexicans have come to an informal agreement that a certain number of holes will be left in the border fence. If the Americans continue to seal the fence where the wire cutters have been, the maintenance costs would become too great. Whatever was in the illegal immigrants' lunch boxes was nothing compared with the container lorry loads parked just across the border. There is no mechanism for adequately checking what is in the containers.

The problem in America was illustrated to us also by the head of the United States coast guard which, to my amazement, is the twelfth largest navy in the world. We were told, "All we have is two four-hour planes. When those planes come down, the illicit planes fly in or drop boats. There is nothing that we can do. All we are about is containment-plus. We cannot stop the supply." Nothing adequate can be done in countries such as Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Colombia. People talk about getting rid of the coca plant, but there are considerable problems in doing that. Many drug-growing areas are not under the control of Governments. We are talking about valleys the size of Wales producing coca.

There are enormous environmental problems about a herbicide war on the coca plant. Some economies learnt to depend on illicit drugs, and one simply cannot abolish those economies by diktat of the CIA. One must face up to the fact also that, even if the will is there, the law enforcement agencies do not have the techniques to get rid of the product of the coca plant. We saw a body which was trying to train the Colombians and the Peruvians in a criminal justice system. One section of the course was entitled "Creating alternatives to confession". There is no tradition of collecting evidence to bring people to trial.

In the United States a huge amount of the steam has gone out of supply-side solutions. The Americans, especially the police forces, are saying that the answer is not to have more police, but must be in demand reduction. They know that they are losing the battle. No matter what they do, the potential is there for the people controlling drugs to ensure that as much of a drug gets into the country as is demanded. We are deluding ourselves if we think that the situation is any different in this country. If the decision is made by those controlling the drugs that this country will receive drugs, this country will receive them. That can be stopped only if our people are educated enough and sensible enough in the widest sense not to create a demand and a price for the drugs.

The extent of the horror of the situation in the United States has been referred to by other hon. Members. The statistic that most appalled me was the fact that in the United States last year 375,000 babies were born addicted to drugs. It was difficult to get people to be specific about what that meant, but it basically meant that 375,000 children that year were born with long-term physical and mental defects. The cost of that to the state, apart from the humanitarian issues, is colossal.

One can go to children's wards in hospitals in the United States, as the Select Committee did, and can find a whole ward that is full of children who have been born to drug-addicted parents and who have serious drug problems from birth.

Absolutely, because the horrifying significance of crack is the extent to which a small majority of the users are women. While they are addicted to crack, as they will probably continue to be, there is no way in which they can look after their babies. So there is the phenomenon of what they call boarder babies—those who will have to be maintained by the state or private agencies for the foreseeable future.

There are changing attitudes in the United States about how to deal with that enormous problem. One of the major changes is that they used to be much softer on the user as against the pusher of drugs. The emphasis is now changing, because they are saying that the user is the motor of the system; the user is the one who creates the demand. Also, the ludicrous idea that drug-taking is a victimless crime has been abandoned. What one did with one's own body was a matter of civil liberties and one should not, for the sake of civil liberties, intervene in that. It is certainly not a victimless crime, and I shall return to that subject later.

All over the United States we were warned that a second front was to be opened up in Europe, because of the soft entry points into Europe, such as through Spain, Italy and Holland. The sums of money that can be used to promote the market are astronomical. United States customs officers talked in terms of literally hundreds of millions of dollars being moved around in Britain. We must defend our physical borders as well as possible, however many drugs the traffickers want-not just crack, but other drugs.

A striking menu of drugs is now available. One should not forget that other events are occurring. The conflicting events of peace in Afghanistan and war in Burma have increased the amount of opium being produced in the world. We should not, therefore, get obsessed with crack.

It is a long haul from the coca-producing valleys in the central American republics to the Clyde. Is it not the case that, while all forms of drug abuse are serious, crack is not a serious problem in our constituencies and that a much more serious problem is that of alcohol abuse?

I am sure that my hon. Friend will make that point at greater length later. I am not denying that an infinitely greater problem than crack in the areas that we both represent is alcohol abuse. One reason for my concern is that we are coping so appallingly at present with our current addictions that the last thing that we want is another major addiction in this country. We are rightly being warned to bear in mind that the capacity for crack to get into the country is almost limitless. We will not be able to stop it if there is a demand for it.

Of course, the problem is that drugs, such as alcohol, tobacco and especially cannabis, are gateway drugs. When people use mood-altering drugs of any kind, their receptiveness to other drugs is much greater. It is relatively rare for drug takers to be non-smokers or non-drinkers. There are boundaries there that have been broken down in terms of mood alteration, of which we should be aware.

I should mention our response to those people who become addicted. Here I would want to break the cross-party friendliness, which has so far characterised t he debate, because I believe that the Government are in danger of going down the wrong road in terms of their emphasis on punishment within the community. Reference has been made to the sheer difficulty of dealing with people who are addicted, whether it be to crack, to cocaine, or to alcohol. However, it is absolutely certain that the answer is not punishment. All research has shown that punishment for users is counter-productive. It intensifies their lack of self-esteem and even their self-woe.

One of the few encouraging signs in Washington was the second Genesis project, which has survived now for 20 years. We saw there some element of success in its work, which was essentially on the basis of trying to help people to realise that they were not victims of the world—they were not people who simply had things happen to them—and to help them to become favourable change agents. It helps them to realise that their lives and their actions can be worthwhile. We are not even at first base in the provision of such facilities. If the emphasis in our criminal justice system is simply on punishment, we are deluding ourselves if we think that that will deal with the victims of drugs.

Because of the failure of the supply-side mechanisms, we need to put the emphasis on education in the widest sense. It is not good enough for the Government to lock themselves into bureaucratic departmental categories when they say that they are doing something in the schools. Many of our schools, particularly large secondary schools, are not part of communities. The catchment areas for such schools are large and students go home to a completely different area. We must ensure that our education work continues in those areas rather than just in the schools.

As other hon. Members have said, education must not only be directed at particular drugs in our society, but must recognise that our society is drug-ridden. Many people are dependent upon sleeping pills, amphetamines and other means to obtain the illusion of contented life. Those drugs, as well as the more dramatic drugs, are part of the same phenomenon.

We must face up to the illusion that drug-taking is a victimless crime. The user, or abuser, through his demand for the drug, is the motor and the cause of a drug trafficking system. The demand for drugs acts as a stimulant for organised crime on a scale that we simply cannot comprehend. The Select Committee on Home Affairs is extremely worried about the extent to which drug money has got into the orthodox banking system and has not been stopped.

The cost of enforcing the drug laws is considerable. The link between drugs and AIDS is becoming ever more clear. We have already heard about the cost of the health care of children born addicted to drugs. There is evidence to suggest that when drugs get into a community child abuse escalates. We must appreciate the scale of the problem, and we must appreciate that the attitude of the user is the cause of that problem. If people are taking drugs, we must avoid simple punitive measures, and we must encourage methods by which they can recover.

Much more emphasis must be put on long-term, community development work. I have no doubt that the areas in which drugs become entrenched are those where the people feel rootless and do not feel accountable for each other's actions. My hon Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mrs. Golding) has already referred to ineffective youth work. She spoke of the basic demand to provide simple accommodation where young people could rest and meet rather than being treated as nuisances and asked to move on. In recent years there has been far too little emphasis on the need for good community development and good youth work. In Strathclyde areas have managed to pull themselves up by their boot straps because of such community work. The work was not described as "anti-drug"; to highlight the issue in such a way is often counter-productive. A byproduct of stimulating the tenants' organisations, good youth work and ensuring that support is given to single parents is that the people in those areas feel valued and involved rather than distanced from mainstream life. Those areas, therefore, have been able to defend themselves against the incursion of drugs.

I accept that the work done in schools is valued and valuable, but I appeal to the Minister to stress the importance of long-term, intensive community development work in his dealings with the interdepartmental unit on drugs, chaired, I believe, by the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department. Such work should not be headlined as "anti-drug". It should be about accepting that many of our communities and their people have become rootless. In such areas people feel that they do not have a contribution to make.

In Washington one appreciated that for many of the young blacks the choice was between working for $3 an hour as a burger boy or becoming a small-scale pusher. The material rewards of such work dwarf what is available in the orthodox system. In too many areas of Britain it is difficult to convince young people that there is an orthodox, legal, licit way to obtain satisfaction from life. They do not believe that because of their poor living conditions and lack of job opportunities. We must, therefore, put the emphasis not just on school-based work, but on community-based work. I hope that the Minister will take that on board.

I listened with great interest to the speech of the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington), but I will not follow him in his study of the American scene.

The hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Fatchett), who opened for the Opposition, spoke about tobacco—the one area of drugs that has been missed out of this debate and the one on which I wish to dwell. I agree with the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie that that drug abuse should not result in punishment. Often tobacco is not spoken of as a drug and all too often health education separates drugs and alcohol from smoking. Smoking should be considered part of the mainstream of drugs, because only then shall we take the problem seriously.

In some ways, the English language does not help. A discussion of drugs may be promising as some drug prescriptions can do one good. The drugs that we are talking about in this debate—and certainly tobacco—are not prescriptions to do anyone any good. Perhaps we need some new form of English to cover tobacco and such drugs.

Reference has been made to young people who get into trouble. We often refer to young offenders in terms of drink-related and drug-related offences. When talking to and meeting young offenders I have found it interesting to discover how many of them also smoke. I wonder whether there is a connection that we have not yet identified. perhaps a symptom of their cries for assistance is their becoming dependent on the tobacco drug. Perhaps if we notice that connection earlier, we may be able to help them to overcome their problems and thus avoid a life of crime. I do not know the statistics on that—perhaps my hon. Friend the Minister does—but from my observations at least, I believe that there is a connection.

I must confess that I am a reformed smoker. My hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale (Sir F. Montgomery) confessed to having given up smoking, but to be eating more as an alternative. I have to confess, as many of my family and former colleagues will bear witness to, that I went through a much more painful process—to their discomfort as well as to my own. I went on a diet at the same time as giving up smoking, on the theory that the pain of one took away the pain of the other. The smoking bit worked because I have not taken up smoking again, but I cannot say that the three stones that I dropped have stayed off. However, that is perhaps a matter for another day.

My children played a part in my giving up smoking. They put pressure on me because they did not like it. Perhaps their involvement in the process of giving up was beneficial to them in some way because none of them has shown any sign of taking up smoking.

I do not raise this issue to gain any plaudits for having given up; I raise it because I want to look back to see why I took it up in the first place. One looks first to one's family and then to one's peers at school, and so on. One of my early family memories is of presenting my grandfather with some spills for his pipe. I can also remember watching my father smoking his pipe and seeing strings of tobacco leaves drying in the garage. My mother also smoked, although she, too, gave up. One took up smoking at school because other people did so. It seemed an adult thing to do. It was an emulation of what seemed smart, chic and stylish. So often, that is why people start to smoke.

We must begin by looking at the toddler, who picks up a packet of cigarettes. When the toddler gets a little older and progresses from playing with the packet, he or she will often take the cigarettes out of the packet and crush a fistful. A little bit older still, and the young infant might put one in his mouth because he has seen adults do it. I am concerned about role models, hence my intervention earlier. Role models are important in children's lives and we must ask parents and teachers to set an example.

My hon. Friends will be pleased to know that I am not seeking to pillory adult smokers. They have free choice and smoking is their decision, provided that they are genuinely adult smokers. Perhaps we could persuade them to stop their habit through tax and other means. However, I am not concerned about that today. I am concerned about young people, young minds and young habit formers, for whom we in this House have a responsibility. We are in loco parentis in terms of education and in helping young people to avoid taking up wrong habits.

We have heard many statistics and I shall provide one or two more. Half the adults who smoke started before the age of 16; only 10 per cent. started after the age of 21. I very much welcome the Minister's statement about what he is doing about drugs. I welcome what the Government are doing to discourage smoking. I also welcome the law that, in theory at least, forbids the sale of tobacco products to those under 16. I hope that the House will forgive me if the only figures from the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys that I have are for 1986. I do not know whether we have any later figures, but we should. Those figures show some encouragement in the numbers of young people smoking. Up to 1986, there was clearly a marked fall in the number of boys smoking cigarettes, decreasing from 13 per cent. in England and Wales, to 7 per cent. However among girls the figure was not anything like as good, decreasing only from 13 per cent. to 12 per cent. Nevertheless, those figures are encouraging and there is an encouraging rise in the proportion of pupils in all the countries of the United Kingdom who have never smoked at all. That is good news. Many of those who smoke once never do so again because they feel ill the first time. Being made ill is also a factor in stopping young people from smoking.

Statistics show that where while only 82 per cent. of girls in their first year at secondary school have never smoked, that figure has fallen to only 29 per cent. by the time they leave. Although that is an improvement on the past, there is still a steady decline in the health of our schoolchildren and an increase in the number who are taking up smoking. The worst news is that 23 per cent. of schoolchildren aged under 16 smoke 10 cigarettes a day. That means that 880 million cigarettes a day are being smoked by children aged 11 to 15, at a cost of £66 million, which those children somehow find to pay for their habit. As those aged below 16 cannot legally purchase tobacco, it is incredible that 89 per cent. of young smokers obtain their cigarettes from shops, and 19 per cent. obtain cigarettes from vending machines outside shops.

We need to remind ourselves of the reasons for interfering in people's freedom of choice from an early age. We do so for the sake of our children's futures and their health. We want children leaving school to look forward to a healthy, enjoyable and active life, and not to one of ill health. That is what we shall condemn them to if we do not get it right when they are still at school. We want to encourage children to leave school without the burden of the cost to themselves and to their families of being hooked on tobacco, particularly as many of them can ill afford the luxury of smoking.

We must consider also the cost to the economy of working days lost as a result of smoking-related diseases, which is a burden on smokers and non-smokers alike. There is also the cost to those of us who must pay it, of £500 million per year required for health-related care, part of which must be borne in future by young people when they leave school and start contributing to the cost of the Health Service. We must be aware also of the cost to our environment and of the importance of ensuring the cleanliness of the air that our children breathe in school and everywhere else. Our children should learn not only the old adage, "Your freedom ends where my nose begins", but, "Your exhalation of secondhand smoke ends when my nostrils start to twitch."

I do not know the latest statistics for deaths from drags, but those for deaths from smoke-related diseases show that 35,000 people per year die from lung cancer and that 11,000 of them are aged below 65. It is known also that 100,000 people die per year from smoking-related diseases. That is equal to 300 people dying every day—the equivalent of half the membership of the House. That is the size of the problem.

We must encourage the good health message, as we do in respect of drink driving. The good news is that young people are better than their adult relatives at not drinking and driving, which has come about from young people's fear of driving with alcohol in their blood. We must emphasise that fear and deter children from smoking, as well as educating them about it.

My hon. Friend the Minister referred to the national curriculum, which will play a major part in health education. Many teachers would like to set an example, but they, too, need help to kick the habit. Not only are the teaching and non-teaching professions setting the wrong example to young minds, but they are polluting the air that young children breathe, causing all the problems associated with passive smoking. Teacher unions, teacher trainers and schools education services must be brought in to tackle the problem.

I know that my hon. Friend the Minister is interested in youth affairs. In addition to schools, youth services outside schools must be involved. As a president of the British Youth Council, I believe that the youth movement and youth organisations must also play a part in backing my hon. Friend the Minister in his campaign for a healthier society.

Education can go so far, but my hon. Friend must seek the support of his right hon. and hon. Friends on tobacco advertising. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Mr. Rathbone) intervened in the comments of the hon. Member for Leeds, Central on advertising. My hon. Friend said that most advertising aimed to make people switch brands. That may be true for adult smokers but it is not true for non-smokers who are often young people. They are not brand switchers, but they can be influenced to take up smoking by advertising.

We must consider carefully where we permit tobacco to be advertised. It should not be permitted in areas frequented by young people, such as sports and arts venues, on public transport, in newspapers or on shop fronts. We must also be careful about allowing tobacco companies to sponsor sports events and other activities.

My hon. Friend the Minister should talk to his right hon. and hon. Friends about the price of tobacco. We should take tobacco out of the retail prices index so that keeping down the price of tobacco is not part of the Government's counter-inflation policies. I believe that that would be acceptable to hon. Members on both sides of the House.

There is evidence to suggest that a 1 per cent. increase in the price of tobacco leads to a reduction of about 1 per cent. in consumption. That may not last, but if it is a national impact, the impact on the young person's purse or wallet will be much greater. If my hon. Friend wants to help young people not to take up smoking he should price tobacco out of their range. He will then be supporting the Government's education policy in schools and in the youth world, which I support. My message to him is to keep at it and to keep on at the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

My hon. Friend the Minister made a valuable point when he said that schools had a leading, perhaps a central, part to play in educating future adults against drug taking, smoking and alcohol abuse. I have 23 years' experience of schools, including 12 as deputy headmaster of a boys' comprehensive at King's Cross and seven at a mixed school of 2,200 on the Bellingham estate in south-east London, and I know that it is amazingly difficult to do what hon. Members have suggested today. Everyone says that such matters as road safety and the dangers of drugs should be taught in schools, but many problems are involved.

Any school that does its job knows that every lesson is, in a sense, a lesson in English, as so much depends on the way in which the teacher presents the information and on the pupils' ability to respond. In another sense, every lesson could be regarded as a lesson in health education, in that everything that a teacher says or does can imply an awareness of the problem of drugs, particularly crack. When the teacher sees an opportunity to put across such information, it should be possible. I think that, in the long term, that will be more effective than what could be seen as a rather heavy health education programme.

Fundamental to all education, and particularly to the future of society and that of any individual within it, must be the ability to exercise self-control. Present and future self-discipline will provide the best possible protection against serious excesses of the kind that we have been discussing. How can schools achieve that for children? Teachers can influence children through good, sound personal relationships, and also through good counselling; they should be able to pick up any difficulties relating to drugs or anything else which children may be experiencing, and do something about them at an early stage.

Basic to human nature is the fact that—as Shakespeare pointed out—forbidden fruit tastes the sweetest. As my hon. Friend the Minister pointed out, to tell children that something is to be shunned is to inspire a great interest. That approach must therefore be relaxed, but it must be done subtly.

Nothing is achieved without money, and part of the problem is the amount that schoolchildren have at present. According to a YMCA survey of 400 London children—quite an efficient survey, covering four or five typical schools—teenage boys have more money to spend than girls, but girls go to the pub much more often. Teenage boys receive an average of £10·25 a week in pocket money, while girls receive an average of £8·61. That is quite a lot of money; many pensioners cannot regard such sums as pocket money to be spent on extras and luxuries. For children of 17 or 18, the average sum is £16·66—and clearly they will start looking for ways of spending such an amount.

The same survey showed that, by the age of 15, more than half the 400 pupils had been to a pub, but girls are more regular pub drinkers. Three quarters of sixth-form girls go to a pub once a week, usually with an older male, and 54 per cent. of the sixth-form boys go to a pub at least once a week.

The survey shows that children start drinking early. It is the main way that many of them spend their money. They like going to the pub. They feel adult. They see other people drink and they want to join in. Gradually, some move on to heavier drinking, with serious results, and some become hard drinkers at an early age.

I shall mention some other facts discovered by the survey, as they are central to our debate. Girls, who tended not to be interested in pool or snooker, suddenly listed it as one of their main hobbies after the age of 15. However, I do not think that pool and snooker are always their central interests. Often, strong drink is available in pool and snooker clubs, and that may be what draws some girls into them. On the other hand, many girls go there quite innocently to look for a partner, and that is reasonable and normal.

The survey also found that 60 per cent. of young people go out on Friday night, compared with 82 per cent. on Saturday night. Boys listed sports as their favourite activity but girls listed dance classes as tops. Girls preferred to go to discos once a month, rather than once a week. Young people said they were more likely to go to mum than dad with a problem, but that they would turn to their father if they had trouble with money.

I spoke of the need to improve counselling in schools, but we tend to forget the central role of parents, particularly of mothers, in counselling children. Children go to their mums when they are in difficulty. That underlines the importance of backing up parents in their difficult task of bringing up children.

I thank the hon. Member for recounting to us the findings of this very interesting survey. Were the respondents asked whether they preferred to visit cafes rather than pubs? In the west of Scotland there has recently been a proliferation in the number of cafes and many young people prefer to visit them instead of our rather grim pubs.

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for that informative point. There are not many cafes of the kind he describes in London, and those that exist are not as much fun or as comfortable. They do not have the same atmosphere as pubs. I understand why this survey applies mainly to pubs because that is where children most like to go.

When children go to their dads for cash, fathers have a responsibility to talk over with them what they will spend it on. They have to do that without being too heavy or they will lose their influence. A reasonable and proper control over children's pocket money must have a tremendous effect on how they spend it. When young children get into drugs such as crack a lot of money is involved. Therefore, it behoves parents in particular to keep a close eye on how much money school children are spending, and where it is going, but they need to be as subtle as they can.

The survey showed that 30 per cent. of youngsters under 14 attended places of worship. That figure dropped to only 10 per cent. after the age of 14. That underlines the failure of Churches—I am not castigating them, as they have a difficult task—to hold and secure a Christian, moral or religious education among young people.

I mentioned the need for young people to be taught self-discipline. That can be done by teachers and parents, and above all religious and moral education can play an important part. It is imperative that, as a nation, we do something about religious education in Britain. Six years ago, the Religious Education Council revealed that in 66 per cent. of all primary schools religious education is confused and teachers do not know what they are seeking to teach. The same report pointed out that there is no religious or moral education whatever for three quarters of our children after the age of 14. We are throwing children into a dangerous vacuum with all the drugs and drink about. It is an extremely serious problem and we would do everyone a favour if we tackled the basic way in which children and adults think about their lives and what they seek to do in living them.

Youth clubs are not generally attractive to the young. They are simply not interested in playing ping-pong in a hall. Youth clubs have never had less influence. The survey discovered that 88 per cent. of sixth-form girls are likely to confide in a friend outside school or a youth club, or perhaps in their mum or dad. However, only 32 per cent. of boys are likely to do so. It is much more difficult to secure the deep confidence of boys than girls.

The effect of alcohol in schools can be extremely serious. I have seen girls at the age of 13 or 14 going off to pubs and coming back to schools. The effect of heavy drinking, much more on girls than on boys, has been to get them fighting viciously between themselves. I have seen nasty, horrid fisticuffs and scratching—really beastly behaviour. If the House has any doubt about the effects of alcohol on young people—we know that it affects many people, but we are discussing young people—it is clear in Iceland where there is a serious alcohol problem among eight, nine, 10 and 11-year olds who are often rolling round the streets drunk or fighting as early as 8 or 9 o'clock at night. That country has been worried about it for some time.

How should we influence pupils? We should do so through personal relationships between parents and children, teachers and children and others interested in them. Sport is a particular way in which to influence children. Teachers working and training school teams have an unparalleled opportunity to get to know children. Tragically, teachers' strikes over recent years have meant that fewer teachers take teams out for matches. That valuable influence has been lost, and has led to pupils being less fit. Any doctor knows that the child who starts to look for drugs is not the healthy, fit child but the unfit and seedy child, who does not experience the physical and mental restlessness of physical fitness.

If physical education is not taught in schools, children become less competitive. We are all competitive, particularly as children. If children do not have healthy bodies, they do not have healthy minds.

If I may make a political point, the Bristol headmistress who banned the egg-and-spoon race two or three years ago to please her Socialist masters because it induced undue competitiveness in children did those children a grave disservice. That stupidity has been repeated throughout the country. Competitive team games have been eliminated in many schools run by Labour-controlled authorities. Cricket is thought to be too middle class and competitive and has been eliminated in many schools. In some places, only one in eight primary schools teach cricket to boys, and sometimes to girls. That is one reason why, in future, we shall not win Test matches. We are losing what cricket and other team games bring to children's development of self-control and working in a controlled but competitive environment, which is fundamental to their saying no to drugs and alcohol.

The hon. Gentleman is speaking of the discouragement of sporting activities. Will he state plainly whether he means schools in London or England, because his remarks bear no resemblance to what happens in Scottish schools?

I do not speak for Scotland. I can only speak from my experience of teaching in London for 23 years, but my remarks are true in other parts of the country.

If we do not do something to restore physical education and the teaching of games in schools, teachers will lose an opportunity to influence pupils for the good. Teachers should be paid extra for taking teams out on a Saturday morning. If they give up their time on a Saturday, it is only right that they should be paid for doing so. When I was a professional, I took children out every Saturday morning, but I was never paid for it. I was delighted to do so because I received such feedback from the pupils.

Health education in schools is in a mess. Too often, in the sixth form it is a subject alternative to an A-level. In the sixth form, health education covers everything from contraception to healthy child rearing. Like English language or English literature, health education should be part of the curriculum.

I support what the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mrs. Golding) said in her admirable speech. Glue sniffing is a very serious problem and we must not ignore it when we consider the whole issue of drug abuse. In some schools 20 per cent. of children sniff glue, with children as young as five involved. I met a 19-year-old young man in prison the other day. His mind has been completely blown as a result of sniffing glue. One person every day dies as a result of sniffing glue. Sometimes people take their own lives, but often they die unintentionally from the effects of glue sniffing. We must be aware of the size of the problem and we must do more than we have been doing so far.

I listened very carefully to the hon. Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway). He referred to sporting problems, but we have different problems with sporting activities in Scotland as was witnessed plainly in the reactions to the transfer recently of Mo Johnston to Glasgow Rangers instead of to Glasgow Celtic.

The hon. Member for Ealing, North also referred to the Churches. I am not sure that his comments would hold up in relation to Scotland. In my constituency, the Catholic Church, The Church of Scotland and the Presbyterian Church still have large attendances at their masses and services. Their youth clubs are also well attended.

However, I agree with the hon. Member for Ealing, North that there is an urgent need for teachers and others concerned with education to be aware of the serious problems associated with drug and alcohol misuse and abuse. I was interested in what the hon. Member for Battersea (Mr. Bowis) said about that most pernicious form of drug taking—cigarette smoking.

In my constituency we have problems of drug and alcohol abuse, but the latter is by far the more serious. In Greenock we have a drug line funded by the urban aid programme. In addition to her other duties, Annette Webb, the drug line worker, works closely with teachers in local schools. Part of her work is to educate children about drug and alcohol abuse, but she is also involved in training teachers. I listened very closely to the hon. Member for Ealing, North because I know that he has vast experience in that regard. Just as with problems of child abuse, teachers are in the front line and it is essential that they are briefed and educated in the need to detect signs of drug and alcohol misuse. Similarly, they need to be aware of some of the signs of child abuse and other forms of abuse.

Youngsters must receive guidance and encouragement and I would include necessary guidance about the dangers of cigarette smoking in addition to other forms of drug misuse. I am relieved to be able to say that crack is not a very serious problem in the west of Scotland at the moment. Many youngsters in some of the more impoverished districts of Glasgow are addicted to or misusing opiates rather than crack or heroin.

Alcohol abuse is a very serious problem in Inverclyde. We have a much higher incidence of alcohol-related crime there than in any other comparable area in Strathclyde. I know that this is a matter of considerable concern to Sheriff Sir Stephen Young and Sheriff Irvine Smith and to Chief Superintendent George Douglas, divisional commander of X division of the Strathclyde police and his officers and all those who are worried about alcohol abuse and its relationship to crime. A particularly worrying form of this crime is that which involves domestic violence and robbery with violence. In terms of alcohol-related criminal acts, a local legal dignitary recently said:

"Glasgow is a paradise compared with Inverclyde".

I suspect that he was indulging in a touch of hyperbole, but his comment signifies the worries created by drug abuse.

The Inverclyde council on alcoholism plays an important educational and training role, in addition to the admirable work performed elewhere by its director and members. Much of that work takes place in local schools and colleges. We need a designated place in Inverclyde to assist not only youngsters but all those who suffer from alcohol abuse and misuse. I sincerely hope that the Scottish Office will respond sensibly and favourably to the application for financial support to set up such a designated place. It is desperately needed.

Similarly, the Scottish Office must give all the support possible to the expansion of the drug line service and the work of the Inverclyde council of alcoholism, especially in relation to its work in colleges and schools. I have argued before in the House that alcohol abuse in the west of Scotland and, I suspect, elsewhere in the United Kingdom is a much greater problem than drug abuse and misuse. It is essential that the Government, especially the Scottish Office, show much closer regard for the need to tackle the problems attendant upon alcohol abuse and misuse in addition to drug abuse and misuse.

We are discussing the future of our children, which means that we are discussing the future of our nation, and we are discussing matters of life and death—three dreadful clichés in a row, and all of them true. Most of us are parents and, in that context, are also members of the public. I hope that I speak for every Back Bencher when I say how grateful I am as a parent for the attitude taken by my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary of State and the hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Fatchett), for the level of agreement that has been reached and for the tremendous non-partisan approach that they have taken to a subject which matters a great deal to all of us.

The Home Affairs Select Committee, to which the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie (Mr. Worthington) referred and of which he is a member, as I am, is working on a report on drug trafficking and related serious crime. On Thursday next week, we shall publish an interim report on the crack menace that faces the United States and Europe. My hon. Friend the Member for Westminster, North (Mr. Wheeler), the Committee's Chairman, will at that time make a series of what I hope will be found to be extremely helpful recommendations. I do not propose to pre-empt those, so I will not refer to them.

The ministerial steering group, chaired by my hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for the Home Department and of which my hon. Friend the Minister here today is a member, will be meeting on Wednesday. I know that my hon. Friend the Member for Westminster, North will allow me therefore, to draw on some of the experiences that I, in common with others on the Select Committee on Home Affairs, had when we were conducting part of our drug inquiry in America.

That means, inevitably, that I will refer to the crack menace, as others have done today. We went first to Washington DC and we were well briefed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Agency. As part of our inquiry, we were invited to take part in a drugs bust. We went out with the Drug Enforcement Agency into an area where drug sellers were known to be operating and we watched three arrests take place. We rode in the police cars and we saw armed policemen and women leap from the cars and arrest some fairly socially inadequate people at the bottom of the pile.

The youngest of them, thrown into the back of the police car with his hands handcuffed behind his back, was 12 years old. He already had two adults working for him. He was one of those who now give the drug away free in schools in the certain knowledge that after one, two or definitely three smokes, they will have yet another customer. While this young man was selling his wares on the streets of an uptown ghetto, two miles away in a hospital, a 14-year-old girl was giving birth to her first child. That child was addicted to cocaine at birth and was one of the 375,000 such babies born in America last year. Not only was that child an addict at birth, like the other 375,000; he was also brain damaged. The effect of drug taking generally, and cocaine and crack in particular, on a pregnant woman is to cause contractions which strangle the foetus in the womb and choke the air supply to the unborn child. That is one illustration of the scale of the problem we face.

Crack is so dangerous because it is effective instantly. It takes roughly 10 seconds for the effects of the drug to travel from the mouth to the brain. The effects are often instantly irreversible. Unlike other drugs, crack dries out the brain cells that produce certain essential substances for the body. Once destroyed, those cells cannot be replaced and the person is semi-dependent on some form of additional stimulus for as long as he may be able to carry on living. The drug is incredibly cheap; in America it sells at about $5 a shot.

The hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mrs. Golding) referred to a child's curiosity and sense of adventure. I know that she was not promoting that sense of adventure in this context and I would not wish to suggest that she was. However, anyone who believes that it is possible to have a sense of adventure or curiosity about crack is living in a dangerous world. However great one's sense of adventure and curiosity, one does not try crack once because once is once too often. The Americans are now having to mount a dramatic campaign on television because the drug has travelled from the ghettos into white, middle-class America. Suddenly, it is no longer a problem that "won't happen here"; it is a problem that the Americans have to live with day by day.

From Washington, the members of the Select Committee travelled to El Paso, on the border between Mexico and Texas. As the hon. Member for Clydebank and Milngavie said, we watched the illegal immigrants walking across the Rio Grande. Not only that, we stopped our police car, got out, spoke to them and photographed them. They froze—like ostriches with their heads in the sand—and waited until the police car had driven away before carrying on their journey across the border taking with them whatever drugs they had. They literally sprinted to work in the United States, and they commute in that fashion daily.

The amount of drugs that the illegal immigrants carry is tiny compared with the quantities coming in by the container-load across the border, by light aircraft across the border from Mexico and in small craft from the West Indies.

For the most part, the drugs are grown in the Andes, the mountains of Peru and Bolivia. The valleys in which they are grown are out of Government control and the prospect of reducing the size of the crops is virtually nil. The drugs travel to Colombia where the coca plant is purified into pure cocaine, which is then smuggled into north America. We were told somewhat cynically by a member of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency that the crop is part of the economy of Peru and Bolivia and that the Colombians

"have the best police force that money can buy."

The United States market for the drug appears to be virtually saturated and the Colombian drug dealers are therefore turning their attention seriously towards Europe. They are looking for routes, via the West Indies, into Spain and Italy, and inevitably, therefore, into the United Kingdom. We are told that they are ruthless and determined and that they

"make the Mafia look like choirboys."

A favourite technique for dealing with traitors is to murder their wife or child first as a warning to others before finally murdering them.

The belief has been expressed that it could not happen here. My hon. Friend the Minister told us earlier of marijuana on offer to schoolchildren. I have personal experience of children in my constituency leaving school during the lunch hour and travelling to a known drug pedlar's house to buy their daily drugs.

In Kent, we face the problems that any frontier county faces. We have a number of ports and we know that drugs come through them fairly regularly. In recent months, we have also discovered a number of amphetamine factories. It would be wrong to believe that the only threat comes from imported drugs. From the drug addict's point of view, we make some perfectly acceptable substances at home. The Kent police have done a tremendous job in recent months—and I pay tribute to them—in finding and busting amphetamine factories, but they believe, and I believe, that it is still only the tip of the iceberg. Add to that the other problems about which we have heard—solvent abuse, the abuse of adhesives and so on—and one realises that school children are under real threat.

My hon. Friends the Members for Battersea (Mr. Bowis) and for Lewes (Mr. Rathbone) referred to the increasing threat that is posed by cigarette smoking. It is through cigarettes that both marijuana and crack are consumed. Again, we were told in America that the reason for the startling growth in female addiction is because, in the past, young ladies in particular, found it unacceptable to inject heroin. Because they already smoke, they find it easy to smoke substances other than tobacco.

I have a known and declared interest in a brewing company. I make that absolutely clear as a preface to what I am about to say about alcohol abuse. I am also a trained counsellor. I trained with ACCEPT in dealing with alcohol-related problems. In what time I have at home, I deal on a day-by-day basis with some of the problems that affect alcoholics. I have had personal experience of having to search hedgerows, lavatory cisterns and the stuffing of chairs to find concealed alcohol. I am aware of the problems that have been referred to, and I would not wish to make light of them.

The House should pay tribute to the responsible attitude that is being taken by major brewing companies and to the contribution that is being made by the Brewers Society to the provision of education packs and advertising to try to ensure that people, particularly young people, use and do not abuse alcohol. There is no mileage and no brownie points for brewers, landlords or tenants in creating social problems. They continue to invest heavily in seeking to ensure that public houses are more sociable and more family-orientated places and that a good supply of non-alcoholic beers and wines are available. It is not a matter for my hon. Friend the Minister today—he might like to take it to his meeting on Wednesday—but landlords could help to control under-age drinking, especially by schoolchildren, if, at least on a voluntary basis, we introduced a national identity card. Such a card would be of more national value—I include north of the border of course—than a football identity card.

I shall add one solution to the problems that we have been discussing. I hope that you will not rule me out of order, Mr. Deputy Speaker, for mentioning quasi-religious cults. They, too, have a pervasive influence in and through schools, and some of them are drug-regulated. My noble Friend Lord Rodney, the chairman of the all-party group on cults, has a file of misery that has been caused by, and because of, young people becoming involved in organisations and matters that they do not understand until it is too late. There is an overall solution to those problems.

I was particularly pleased to hear my hon. Friend the Minister announce the increased funding that he intends to make available. I hope that my county of Kent will take advantage of that funding and note the lessons that we have learnt from my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes, as it appears that Sussex has taken a lead in the matter. The solution cannot be an over-dramatic, knee-jerk, television campaign reaction.

Every hon. Member who has spoken appears to agree that a shock-horror campaign would be much more likely to stimulate demand than to begin to solve the problem. The solution must be through a sustained long-term campaign of education through schools, youth clubs and every other available organisation. I ask my hon. Friend to pay attention to the work that is now being done by the Schools Outreach organisation in some schools and also by ACET, the AIDS care education and training organisation. I am not suggesting that either of those bodies is necessarily a suitable avenue for the funding that has been made available, but I believe that it is essential that we provide ourselves not only with a network of drug or health education co-ordinators, but with a network of trained counsellors serving literally every secondary school and, through them, every primary school in the country. That will cost money, and it will cost more money.

It was explained to us in America that, if the epidemic that it faces were to take hold here, so much of the money that is currently being spent on the National Health Service would have to be diverted into the treatment of drug-related illnesses that arguments about the future of the Health Service would become academic.

I welcome the Minister's programme and the funding that he has won for what I hope and believe will only be the start of a sustained programme. In an ideal world, much of the work and education about which we have been talking would be carried out by parents and by families. However, we do not live in an ideal world. We in the House must deal with the real world, which knows that far too many children have parents and families who do not provide the support that they need and, therefore, the only support will be through the institutions that they attend, and, for most, those institutions will be their schools.

I hope that we will be able to deliver a threefold message to young people—first, every action has a reaction and a consequence; secondly, to take any drug once is once too many; and, thirdly—I believe that this is the message that will most appeal to the young—the moment one becomes involved in drug taking, one is allowing someone else to tell one what to do. Young people do not like to be told what to do, so the message must be, "You decide what you are going to do; you stay in control."

Like others, I welcome the debate. Some clear messages are being repeated by hon. Members on both sides of the House, which will allow the debate to fulfil two of the three functions that the Minister made plain are the functions of the Government and of hon. Members when we address such issues. The Minister made clear that our three functions are as legislators, opinion formers and policy makers. On this occasion we are not legislating, but we are seeking to develop policy and to form opinion. The debate is welcome because it helps to set those two objectives. It may be that legislation will follow later, but it does not appear at present that specific pieces of legislation are planned or necessarily contemplated.

I am happy to say that I believe that the implication of the key message, which the Minister, on advice, announced in the debate in May of "stay healthy, stay in control", is the right one. I want to divide what I say into a recapitulation of how urgent it is for us to address the subject, the justification for the approach that we have adopted and to ask a few questions about the Minister's responsibilities and the way in which education will address the specific agenda about how to deal with alcohol and drug abuse.

The statistics—we can all quote many—are frightening for two reasons and the personal experience of hon. Members justifies the concern. The hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Fatchett) said that educating people about alcohol, and in particular about drugs starts with advertising. I intervened to make a similar point. Evidence shows that, at the age of six, two out of five children can identify at least one alcoholic drink. By the age of 10, they are familiar with the names of many alcoholic drinks. It is after that age that they begin to drink. Between the ages of 10 and 14, only 2 per cent. of children have not tasted alcohol. By that age the vast majority of boys and girls will have begun to drink, often regularly. According to the Strathclyde university survey, the majority of boys and nearly the majority of girls will have had illegal drinks in pubs by the age of 14. By the age of 15 twice as many boys as girls will have begun to drink. It is generally accepted that girls are more addicted to tobacco than boys and that boys are more addicted to alcohol. By that age, drunkenness is also experienced by many children, normally outside the home. By the age of 16 only 12 per cent. of young people will not have tasted alcohol.

The important thing to recognise in the statistics is the underlying trend, which shows that the age at which people begin to smoke and to drink is becoming younger. Although alcoholic consumption is at its heaviest in mid-teenage boys, the amount drunk by younger boys on a regular basis is increasing.

The latest figures from the official survey on young drinkers' trends shows that 37·5 per cent. of 11 and 12-year-old boys have some alcohol on one day of the week. The percentage rises as the boys get nearer the age of 16.

In April this year, at the Assistant Masters and Mistresses Association conference in Torquay, there was a debate on young drinking. Many experts gave evidence to show the horrendous consequences in the school room of such drinking. A teacher from Borehamwood said that there was plenty of evidence to show that teenagers were now drinking alcohol to the detriment of their health, and he asked:

"How do you cope with 1l-year-olds who have experimented with alcohol at home over lunch?"

Another teacher said that children were often absent or, if they were present, they were befuddled by drink.

There is an inter-relationship between drink, drugs and worse. Young people who later become involved in drug abuse have often earlier drunk alcohol. Often early drinking of alcohol increases early sexual activity and early sexual activity means casual sex, unwanted pregnancies and sometimes AIDS. Alcohol can lead to the severe harm of children.

In some cases the problem is horrendous. I was a youth worker before I came to this House. In our youth club in south London there were 14 and 15-year-old boys who would drink 15 pints a night regularly. At the end of such drinking they would not even be on the floor. One cannot drink 15 pints a night unless one has had a drinking habit for a considerable time. When that becomes acceptable behaviour for 15-year-olds, something is clearly wrong.

I agree with many hon. Members that education, especially of schoolchildren, is the single most important thing that we need to do to reduce drug abuse. Education gives young people and children the wherewithal to make their own decisions about drugs instead of simply following the strictures of others. We all know that the strictures of others appear as irrational to young children. If one says to a youngster, "Just say no to drugs", the obvious question will be, "Why?" Once a naturally inquisitive child asks why, that child will want to explore for himself why he has been told that he cannot do this or that. As my other hon. Members have said, being told not to do something is often the best excuse for trying it out at the first available opportunity. I guess that many of us did exactly that in our own youth. Therefore, one simply cannot say things like that.

Later, and separately, in the education process, one can indeed say no, but at the beginning one must do something else. One has to persuade children that they should not abuse drugs. I agree with the hon. Member for Lewes (Mr. Rathbone) that one does so by showing young people as clearly, factually, and accurately as possible the physiological, physical and mental effects of drugs on people—or possibly all three.

If, from the beginning at their time at school, children are taught that they are unique and special and that the health of their minds and bodies is essential to ensure that anything and everything that they do in their lives will happen as it should and that their bodies will be affected by taking in any drug, they will begin to understand the effect of the substances that become abused. They can then begin to understand visually, not only what not to d o to their bodies, but what they should do. Education about the foods that they should or should not eat and about the things that they should or should not drink is part and parcel of the same teaching which explains how fat leads to heart disease, how alcohol affects the bloodstream and brain, and the meaning of advertising agents' slogans such as, "Heroin screws you up".

I endorse entirely the comment of the hon. Member for Lewes that one of the most effective methods of doing that is the one pioneered in Australia by Rev. Ted Noffs, and which is now well-recognised in this country and is receiving funding. We know that the Prince of Wales has given his support to it and that certain parts of the country have endorsed it. The Life Education Programme is clearly effective in communicating those simple messages. The human body is presented visually to young people. Responses to certain addictions and intakes are described and the young people are allowed to see for themselves the effects of drug or alcohol abuse. In Australia the project has been successful with the most lost and hopeless of cases. Indeed, it started in Sydney and in other areas where the problem was at its worst.

I hope that such projects can be supported and endorsed here. The Minister was satisfied that it had been extremely helpful in formulating Government policy and that it had received their support. However, that type of project needs to be continually upheld as the way in which one should educate from an early age. Children should he allowed to know the reasons for their choice. We should underscore their ability to make such choices against the pressures of their peer group and of their friends, or sometimes of those who are not their friends, but who are seeking to make money out of the deal.

One of the political arguments revolves around whether such topics should be the subject of compulsory education and how they should pass into the national curriculum. The general argument is that personal, social and health education is being considered by the inter-curricula working group, on whose timetable I trust the Minister will comment briefly when he winds up, which will recommend how such education can be embodied in a cross-core of foundation subjects, particularly science.

There is considerable discontent and uncertainty about whether the division of such teaching among several subjects is a responsible approach. We know of the existence of the drug education co-ordinators, who will be funded until next year, but there are doubts as to whether the provision for the teaching of separate subjects is the right way forward. Is the Minister and his advisers in a position to allow their working party, and the Department to allow itself, to consider whether there may be grounds for co-ordinated teaching rather than separating it under different departmental heads? There are strong arguments for putting such education together and for ensuring that every school provides it.

The Minister announced his Department's 10-point plan and the money available on 10 May—not today, as some of his hon. Friends seem to think. Concern has been expressed as to the extent to which private sector organisations with an interest in certain topics should become involved in schools promotions. Point five of the plan concerns the greater involvement of the private sector in the sponsorship of drugs and alcohol abuse programmes. It is right to ask whether the Scotch Whisky Association is being totally selfless when it seeks to become involved in the education of young people and to support the drug and alcohol abuse programme when the association's ultimate key objective, not surprisingly, is to promote whisky sales in this country and abroad. I choose that association as but one example.

A matter of common concern not covered by the 10-point plan but which has been mentioned in the debate is solvent abuse. I am aware that Ministers both in the Department of Health and in the Department of Education and Science share that concern and are responding to it. I am not critical of them, but I hope that they will continue to flag up that many youngsters abuse solvents. It is more difficult to control sales outlets of solvents than it is to control those who are selling alcohol or prescribed drugs, because solvents are generally available without restriction in many ordinary shops.

The former Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Derbyshire, South (Mrs. Currie), brought to that Department a high profile on health provision. I have no idea of her likely fate in the coming days, but I am concerned that whoever is in post at the Department of Health and at the Department of Education and Science should develop policy together, as they have done in the past, and give an extremely high profile to the argument that health promotion and education is the way to counter drug and alcohol abuse—best starting with the young.

The postscript is this. Health and Education Ministers and their officials must persuade their colleagues in other Departments to play the same game. As long as massive amounts of money are spent on tobacco and alcohol advertising—and there are no Government warnings required for the latter, although there are for the former—and as long as there is no general ban on such advertising, the Government's health education programme will compete with market pressures that make it difficult for any health campaigns to succeed. The Treasury must be persuaded that bad things should be taxed more than they have been. The Department of Trade and Industry and the Home Office, for example, which deal with broadcasting, the media, and the private corporate sector, must be taken on board. It is not sufficient for the Department of Health and the DES to argue for health promotion if other Departments do not assist them.

I welcome what the Minister has said and the action that he has taken. I am pleased that the Government have given us the opportunity to have this debate. We are all agreed that we must promote good health and encourage young people, as the Minister put it, to "Stay healthy, stay in control." I hope that that message will be twice as loud in the year ahead.

I am grateful to have the leave of the House to respond to the many powerful points made during the debate. It is almost customary for Ministers to begin their reply with the words "We have had an interesting and informative debate." Those words would not properly describe this debate because—I choose my words advisedly—it has been remarkable and possibly historic.

We began by agreeing on our objectives. I listened carefully to every contribution. I set out in the hope that there would be broad agreement about our tactical position and I believe that we have agreed on the tactics to fulfil our objectives. The House has endorsed the framework of the 10-point plan. There is all-party agreement that the plan is the correct way to bring about a reduction in demand and to take forward the education programmes in our schools, youth services and community services.

I speak about consensus carefully because some hon. Members raised their fears about alcohol companies being involved in marketing campaigns against abuse, and I shall take that into consideration. Some hon. Members rightly emphasised the problems of alcohol and of smoking. Few of the matters that they raised could not be accommodated in the framework of the 10-point plan.

I warmly thank the hon. Member for Leeds, Central (Mr. Fatchett) for his comments. Incidentally, I, too, was involved in the "Rhythm and Booze" campaign. My experience was slightly different from his. I found it a powerful combination of broadcasting and "narrow-casting". The responses to the broadcasts were dealt with on a one-to-one basis, using workshops and phone-ins where individual inquiries could be dealt with. I commend that effective methodology which has also been used in other programmes.

Some hon. Members raised the question of money. The £7 million now available is, to use a jargon of the City, highly leveraged. It can buy the awareness of hundreds of thousands of people, if it is used correctly. We shall be training the trainers, they will be training more trainers and trained people will be going into the classrooms. Already some 100,000 are aware of part, if not all, of the story. We have more than 400,000 teachers and tens of thousands of youth workers. I believe that we can get the message to nearly everyone if we spend the money appropriately, and bring in the organisations—some of them voluntary—that have been mentioned today.

The hon. Member for Leeds, Central rightly said that we should distinguish between campaigning with a capital C—which can occasionally be counter-productive—and delivering the message in a localised, personalised, specific, sophisticated and subtle way. The necessary judgments and assessments must be made by the workers in the community: if we laid down what they should be saying and in what circumstances, it could not work.

I am delighted that the House has endorsed the umbrella message—many others underlie it—which can be expressed as, "Stay healthy, stay in control." Having analysed all the comments made to me over the past few months, I squeezed the message into as few words as possible.

The hon. Member for Leeds, Central hoped that personal and social education, and health education generally, would not be squeezed out of the curriculum by the coming reforms, and others have expressed the same hope. The hon. Gentleman will know that the science curriculum already contains health messages: we accept the idea of cross-curricular messages.

My hon. Friend the Member for Ealing, North (Mr. Greenway) made some telling points about the hidden curriculum. A certain ethos will emerge from any lesson: that hidden curriculum is part of teachers' daily professional lives. We need not tell teachers that they should be serious about health education; all that they need are the necessary skills and materials. Many are already delivering the necessary messages in different ways, and my hon. Friend is right to commend their professionalism in that regard.

Let me reassure the hon. Member for Leeds, West and my hon. Friend the Member for Battersea (Mr. Bowis) that nicotine and tobacco are very much part of the work of the drug education co-ordinators. In the not-too-distant future, they are to become known as health education co-ordinators. About three months ago I broadened their remit to include AIDS, alcohol, tobacco and solvent abuse. After all, a chain of activities can start with an experiment with soft drugs at a party and then—in a small proportion of cases—proceed to hard drugs and intravenous injection, and thence to AIDS. I wanted to reflect the interrelationship of a variety of health and substance abuse problems.

The change of title will be helpful. Will the Minister tell us two things? For how long is that funding guaranteed? Originally, it was until 1990. Will it be seci.red beyond that? Secondly, is thought being given to the fact that, as prevention of drug and alcohol abuse is not a part of the national curriculum, its importance may be reduced in the eyes of pupils? We may need to put it back into the curriculum to give it that importance.

There is no danger of the importance of this message not being put across in schools, and that is what matters. How formally we include it in the curriculum is less important than commitment to it, and we are close to getting an agreement that the message must be got through. It can be got across within existing subjects, such as science, that are formally written into the curriculum. There could be separate lessons, but I am not entirely sure that that is the best way, although that already happens in personal and social education. There is room outside the core curriculum if schools want to use that time, but I think that this combination of options will give the teaching profession the flexibility it requires and, more important, the tools to get the message across. I have here on the Table a box of information on drug abuse such as is available to teachers.

This is not a crash programme, but a long, drawn-out operation. It is almost an underground, continuous guerrilla war as opposed to a frontal war. For that reason, I have secured funding for three years, starting in 1990. That is my signal to the co-ordinators that they are in a long-term effort. I hope that that has encouraged them to think that there is no danger of their contracts being terminated by local education authorities after one year. I am now telling local education authorities that we are giving support for three years. Funding will obviously be reviewed on a rolling basis, but our signal to the world at large is, "This is not a short-term campaign"—it is much more than that.

I go along with the notion that the issue should be discussed on a cross-curricula basis. that is the most positive and effective way in which to deal with it. If the issues are taken separately, there is a danger of glamorising them and of the message not getting across.

I was not objecting to the cross-curricula approach. I wanted to make sure that it was embedded in the development of the national curriculum. That is important and is the most effective way of dealing with the problems.

There is no difference between us on that.

My hon. Friend the Member for Altrincham and Sale (Sir F. Montgomery) was not able to stay for the winding-up speech for reasons I entirely understand, so I record my intention to write to him about the confiscation of drug barons' money. I am sure that my colleagues at the Home Office will be advised of his comments. Drug pushers and drug barons are vermin, in the strict meaning of the word. They are the lowest of the low. I do not think that anyone in the country would stand in the way of a Government who came down heavily on those people and used the panoply of measures available to the state and to this Chamber to deal with them. Certainly no teacher would disagree with that statement.

The hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Mrs. Golding) is absolutely right that alcohol is a greater danger as a substance of abuse, by a factor of 10 to 1. During the past few years, we have all looked at the problem of what was dubbed the lager lout and the yob mentality. I agree with the hon. Lady—I, too, am worried about the way in which excessive drinking seems to exacerbate the yob mentality. The statistics on convictions for drunkenness are frightening. In 1987, more than 35,000 people were convicted of aggravated drunkenness, which essentially means being drunk and disorderly, and 6,500 were convicted of drunkenness. In addition some 40,000 people were much the worse for drink and received cautions. That comes to over 80,000 cases of public intoxication. What sort of example does that set our young people? Schools try, through personal and social education to inculcate into young people important values about respect for others and responsibility for one's own actions. They are not helped by that sort of behaviour from so-called adults or media coverage of such behaviour. Schools cannot do it all. I agree with the hon. Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme that we need localised campaigns and a personal approach with experts on the spot. They should be given the freedom to pursue the problems with the appropriate backing from the Government.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (Mr. Rathbone) made a broad variety of perceptive points. As he is the chairman of the all-party group, we would expect no less from him. He has helped many of us by bringing forward ideas for the future.

Now that we have had this debate and have agreed on our objectives and the tactics to be used, we are legitimately entitled to take the initiative in Europe. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewes mentioned various European bodies with which we can deal. In terms of demand reduction we have a number of ideas that we could fruitfully share with our European colleagues through the European Commission and the Council of Ministers. I am happy to initiate that process by making our paperwork available to the European network and inviting fellow Ministers within the European Community who are dealing with similar programmes to send their policy documents back to me. My hon. Friend has hit on an important point. If he is looking for a powerful response to what he said, I can tell him that I will take that initiative. Let us hope that it bears fruit.

I pay tribute yet again to the drug education co-ordinators who are soon to be known as health education co-ordinators. I should also like to pay tribute to the Life education centres. They have impressed many hon. Members and I welcomed the words of my hon. Friend the Member for Lewes about the work of those centres. I met representatives from the organisation recently and I am sure that they have an important part to play in promoting healthy attitudes among young people. I know that they work closely with schools and the drug education co-ordinators. They have been successful in persuading the private sector to devote resources to their work. Local education authorities will, if they choose, be able to spend part of the £7 million that they will be receiving next year to make use of the centres in their schools.

I shall look carefully at the comments made by my hon. Friend the Member for Thanet, North (Mr. Gale) about Schools Outreach and ACET. His account of his experiences in the United States was fascinating and terrifying. We should be constructively terrified—if that is the correct use of the term—about what could happen under worse circumstances if we do nothing. We should use that constructive tension in the House and in Whitehall to positive good effect. I detect the correct atmosphere in which to release that tension in positive, helpful and perceptive policies.

The hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey (Mr. Hughes) also endorsed the Life education centres. I hope that I have satisfied him on the question of the curriculum. I shall write to him about the timetable. He kept asking me about that and all I can say is that it will be dealt with as soon as possible.

I thank all hon. Members for their observations. The use of the word "historic" may in this case not be an exaggeration.

I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

I listened with interest to the previous debate, and I am grateful to the Under-Secretary of State for the Environment who has arrived hot-foot from her Department. There is no greater contrast between the issues in the previous debate, which dealt with the agonies caused to humankind, and the subject we are about to debate—wildlife and nature conservation in Great Britain. It is the first time that the hon. Lady has had the opportunity to debate the matter in the House and to put forward the Government's view, so I am grateful for the opportunity of the debate, albeit it late on a Friday afternoon.

It offers us the chance to take stock of wildlife conservation in Britain and to examine the impact of a sustained period of Conservative government on Britain's record. It is a matter of great public issue, and the huge membership of organisations such as the National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds shows the extent to which people's interest is easily translated into positive commitment.

As someone with a lifelong interest in the natural world and the natural history of these islands, I had become used to the bipartisan approach which characterised British policy on wildlife conservation in the pre-Thatcher era. While personally I would always put more emphasis on wildlife conservation, that would not have signified a political difference between our respective parties.

I regret that the battle to protect the fraction of remaining wildlife habitat is a cause for political differences between the Government and the Opposition. The Government have signalled their departure from the historical bipartisanship, and in administering their new treatment the patient will also be the victim. The economic dogma that has been forced on so many other parts of British life is now threatening even what remains of our indigenous wildlife. Natural history is a particularly sensitive guinea pig, for damage inflicted on ecosystems often can never be rectified.

I shall say a few words about why the issue is important. We could legitimately talk about the right of species other than homo sapiens to continued existence on this planet, and I am sure that the Minister would have a valid contribution to that debate. However, a more accessible case for nature conservation involves the benefit that homo sapiens can derive from nature. I am delighted that my own Member of Parliament, the hon. Member for Battersea, (Mr. Bowis), is here, listening intently, but in case I sound like a Thatcherite I should make it clear that I mean the benefit derived from observation rather than exploitation of the natural world.

The value of a varied and rich natural environment is impossible to quantify, but anyone who has walked the moors above Llanbrynmair, watched bearded reedlings on the Norfolk Broads or seen a peregrine stoop on to its prey will have experienced the value and delight of the natural world. It enriches and humbles those who observe it, and, as with any asset, its value increases with scarcity. We have reached a point where the remaining natural habitat in most of Britain is, by virtue of that scarcity, worthy of protection in all but the most exceptional cases.

I shall not feel able to explain the actions of my generation to those yet to come if we do not cease the onslaught we have unleashed on most species and habitats in this country. The importance of the study of nature rests not only with its inherent interest but with the effect that an understanding of nature can have on the tolerance and maturity of young people. That study requires the raw material to be widely available.

I should like to put on record particular victims of that onslaught that have been denied protection by the Government. This will necessarily be highly selective because the litany of important sites and habitats that have been destroyed with the connivance, or at least through the inaction, of the Government would more than fill the time available in this debate.

An obvious place to start is the Flow country of Caithness and Sutherland. No one with an interest in conservation in Britain can be unfamiliar with the battles between conservationists and accountants over this area. On what side have the Government come down in that test case? A recent report by the Highland regional council on the potential for further afforestation of the Flow country reached conclusions entirely at odds with the Government's specialist advisory agency, the Nature Conservancy Council. The Secretary of State for Scotland acknowledged that divergence of view when responding to the Highland regional council's report by saying,

"It is proper to record that the proposed strategy does not totally remove the potential for conflict between conservation and forestry."

That was the understatement of the year. The report of the Highland regional council recommends further planting of 40,000 hectares, much of which is on land of incomparable value for landscape and wildlife purposes. The Nature Conservancy Council wants no further planting. In this thorny dispute, the Government acted by accepting the Highland regional council's recommendation that

"consultation with the NCC should in future take place only where tree planting is proposed on existing or potential SSSIs."

In other words, landscape of the value of Caithness and Sutherland, with its aesthetic beauty and value as a wildlife habitat, is to be denied any protection unless it has been categorised as a site of special scientific interest.

The Government reacted to that potential for conflict, which they recognised, by capitulating to the commercial forestry interests and overruling the concerns of their conservation advisers. The result will be afforestation approval such as that announced on 19 January, under which a further 1,400 acres will be planted, and the most recent announcement on 12 July that another 800 acres will be destroyed for ever.

Another highly sensitive area is what little remains of Dorset heathland, which is home to the marsh gentian, smooth snake, sand lizard, hobby and Dartford warbler. A little over 20 years ago, 100,000 acres of that wildlife-rich habitat remained. Today, 14,000 acres of scattered fragments remain. That total will be further reduced by the Department of the Environment's recent decision on the crucial planning decision at Canford heath. The inadequate measures under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 mean that what is left, even after the Secretary of State's depradations, is being devalued by deliberate mismanagement.

A further site of major importance is the lowland raised peat bog on the Shropshire-Clwyd border. The majority of that area is under threat from peat extraction. Fens, whixall and bettesfield mosses support the large heath butterfly, raft spider and bog bush cricket. But because of planning consent for exploitation of the vital feature of this area, it may not support those or any other important species for very long.

In my native Wales, the Cardiff bay barrage threatens the vital feeding grounds of thousands of wading birds, in a site of special scientific interest unique for its accessibility for the general public—all because developers desire a view over water, however polluted, rather than the rich estuarine mud that is so valuable to wildlife.

Other important sites threatened by the inadequate protection offered by the Government are Oxleas wood in Greenwich, the Cambrian mountains, mid-Kent's area of outstanding natural beauty and West Mersea meadow in Essex. Species as well as sites are under pressure. In the Somerset levels, snipe populations have declined by 68 per cent. over the past 10 years. Nationally, hen harriers are down to 450 breeding pairs; the corncrake population has declined to 750 calling birds; stone curlews have declined from 1,000 pairs in the 1930s to 160 pairs today. In respect of all those species, Britain has national and international responsibilities.

It is against this background that we must view the direction in which the Government have signalled they intend to go. That is not a background of maintaining the status quo or even of a gradual decline. It involves a wholesale onslaught unleashed at a time when there is less than ever to protect.

It is most unfortunate that I am obliged to refer to the record of the present Secretary of State for the Environment. The right hon. Gentleman has recently been referred to by distinguished observers as "an ecological hooligan" whose record is "nothing short of a disaster". Those references are unnecessarily restrained. The appointment of this environmental Genghis Khan to oversee the management of our remaining natural assets was a kick in the teeth to all who care about the environment and those with an interest in the countryside and wildlife in particular.

The natural world can breath a sigh of relief that the staggering double standards of the originator of the NIMBY syndrome are to be directed elsewhere in the very near future. However, we will still have the legacy of his period in office to contend with. I fear that we must consider the steps that the Government have taken to combat the threats that I outlined earlier.

As well as directly damaging the environment, the Government have a long record of opposing initiatives that would protect it. The most obvious cases are their opposition to the flora, fauna and habitats directive and their minimalist interpretation of the environmental impact assessment directive. The Government have altered the planning regulations and they scuppered the Hedgerows Bill which was introduced by my hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth (Mr. Hardy).

In a recent parliamentary answer, the Minister said that the draft directive on flora, fauna and habitat was unacceptable to all EC member states. However, she did not say that Britain was uniquely hostile to that conservation measure at all the meetings in which it was discussed. To hide behind the minor reservations of others is deliberately misleading. Why does not the Minister have the courage to say that she ordered Britain's total opposition, and explain why? Why did Britain scupper that directive?

The environmental impact assessment directive is a similar case. Britain was not successful in denying all member states European action to safeguard the environment in relation to that directive. However, the interpretation of the directive at home has been as mean-spirited as it is legally possible for it to be.

Inaction has also spelt doom for thousands of miles of British hedgerows. The Government estimate that 500 miles of hedgerows are lost per year. Authoritative independent estimates put the loss at 4,000 miles per annum—an increase from a loss of 2,900 miles a few years ago. According to the World Wide Fund for Nature, planning decisions

"have all too often given procedence to the developers' interests over environmental considerations even when sites of national or international importance are involved."

Perhaps it is appropriate that I should conclude my remarks by referring to the Nature Conservancy Council, the fragmentation of which is the Secretary of State's valedictory two-fingered gesture to the conservation movement in Britain. A word that is frequently used when discussing that piece of vandalism is "capitulation". It refers to the well-known hostility of vested and landed interests and of certain individuals and organisations representing them to the Nature Conservancy Council. They disliked the council because it prevented them from doing what they wanted to do—to damage the environment. Those voices were particularly heard in Scotland, and the Secretary of State has capitulated to them, making the NCC a victim of its own success, as one of its senior employees put it yesterday.

By breaking up the one body which could take the national overview of particular conservation issues, the Government are damaging the cause of conservation in two main ways. It is well known that in certain environmental battles local interests have frequently been in the anti-conservationist corner. In holding the ring, the NCC, as a national body, was able to assess the significance of the environmental sacrifices from a national or international perspective. For instance, a particular wildlife habitat may be very little valued by those who live nearby, but be of enormous national significance and attract naturalists from far afield because of its importance as a reserve for an internationally threatened rare species. In such cases, a national organisation can weigh the local and national interest. A regional structure cannot do that. That is why the NCC is being fragmented.

A regional organisation is also unable to speak for the whole country, both in the kind of international forums and conventions which are increasingly important in wildlife conservation, and to the Government at home. Clearly, the Government do not want to hear what the Nature Conservancy Council has to say. Their ears have been closed for the past few years, but just because they are determined not to listen does not mean that there are not others who are glad of Britain's voice in international gatherings. That will now be extinguished.

According to its chairman, who was not consulted on its dismemberment, the Nature Conservancy Council decision makes little sense in respect of wildlife—presumably, one of the NCC's main concerns—in national, international or economic terms. He has pointed out:

"wildlife issues are no respecter of geographical or political boundaries and I am greatly concerned that complete separation will undermine the scientific capability of the NCC and prevent effective policy advice being provided to the Government."

The Government do not care. The director general of the Nature Conservancy Council has complained:

"This reorganisation throws the baby out with the bathwater".

I can only echo the words of both men.

I hope that the proposal to privatise national nature reserves will be dropped at the same time as the madman who conceived it. A more naked piece of partisan dogma is hard to imagine. On top of a 5 per cent. cut in the NCC's budget this year, which has prevented it from buying several reserves of outstanding value, it has been ordered to prepare for sale 62 of the jewels in this country's wildlife crown, four of them imminently. Can the Minister give a commitment that this madcap idea will be ditched, or is it the intention to starve the NCC of funds, dismember it and force it to sell its priceless reserves, in line with the Government's doctrinaire approach to so many valuable public assets?

This is an opportunity for the Minister to tell the House and the country what the Government intend. I hope that she will take it in answering these questions frankly, honestly and fully and that she will give us more warning as a country than she and the Secretary of State for the Environment gave the chairman of the Nature Conservancy Council of his organisation's fate. I am afraid that I can only suspect the worst. I have become used to that in observing the Government's record on conservation, wildlife and the natural world.

I welcome the opportunity to respond to the debate initiated by the hon. Member for Caerphilly (Mr. Davies). As he said modestly in his opening remarks, he has had a long-standing interest in our country's natural habitat. We are privileged to live in a country with such splendid flora and fauna. I endorse his remarks about the importance of that natural heritage to our young people. Many people do excellent work in opening the eyes of youngsters and in explaining and demonstrating all that is around us in the natural environment. We live in a country in which about 30 per cent. of our countryside is designated in one way or another—as an area of outstanding natural beauty, as a site of special scientific interest, as part of one of our splendid 10 national parks or as part of the green belt, which has doubled since the Conservative party came to power.

Before talking more generally about some of the issues raised by the hon. Gentleman, I should like to respond to his point about the Nature Conservancy Council. This is an opportune moment to explain some of the thinking on this matter and perhaps to reassure the hon. Gentleman and others who may have misunderstood the purpose behind the proposals.

Many of the hon. Gentleman's points reflect the remarkable increase in public interest and involvement in environmental issues. This is illustrated by the growth in the membership of voluntary bodies right across the spectrum, from Greenpeace to the National Trust. The Government welcome these developments, which are channelling so much energy into improving the environment. They are increasingly being complemented by the greening of our major industries, and the new emphasis on conservation in agriculture.

The Government are also intervening firmly and decisively on the side of conservation—contrary to the hon. Gentleman's remarks. It is worth recalling briefly how radically the legislative framework, and the role of bodies like the Nature Conservancy Council, have changed over the past two decades. The watershed was the Wildlife and Countryside Act passed in 1981. The Act created a protected network of habitats sites of special scientific interest—designated by the NCC which now cover 7 per cent. of the land surface of Great Britain. It protects most species of wild birds, and over 200 other animals and plants, again with the active involvement and expertise of the NCC. It introduced marine nature reserves, widened the definition of national nature reserves and accelerated the trend towards management agreements with farmers and landowners to protect many of our key sites. The Countryside Commission for England and Wales, too, was given important new responsibilities by the Act, as well as a separate status as a grant-in-aid body.

The Government have enabled——

The Government have enabled both the NCC and the Countryside Commission to implement the provisions by substantially increasing their resources. Taken together, the grants for the two organisations now total £62·28 million, compared with £13·4 million in 1979–80, a rise in real terms of 134 per cent. That shows clearly the Government's commitment to our natural habitat.

The NCC, in particular, has been transformed by its expanded duties and resources. When the council was established in 1949 covering the whole of Great Britain, it was designed to be a small body, compared primarily with research. It had relatively few staff or executive responsibilities. In 1960, it had only about 200 staff spread across the whole of Great Britain. It would not have made sense then to establish separate bodies, or even under the Nature Conservancy Act 1973 which divided the NCC from the Natural Environment Research Council.

Today, the NCC has grown more than fivefold, and has more than 1,100 staff. More important still, many of those staff have to carry out their duties—designating and monitoring SSSIs, negotiating management agreements and co-operating with other bodies, both statutory and voluntary—in areas of the country that have very different circumstances and needs. These are not simply academic or scientific tasks. SSSIs for example, can affect the livelihood both of individual owners and of the community of which they are part. Great sensitivity is required in applying such designations in a way that will obtain grassroots support, whether from farmers, foresters or conservationists. The Government firmly believe that it is only through the voluntary support of the whole community that successful conservation can be achieved. The right way to proceed is to work with the grain of those who live and work in the countryside and not to try to antagonise or alienate them unduly.

The NCC has grappled with the problems brought by its expanded role and it has many achievements to its name, not least the establishment of the current SSSI network. I have visited the NCC in Peterborough and I have been most impressed with much of the excellent and high quality work it is undertaking. However, its three-tier structure is inevitably over-centralised and remote from those areas where the nature conservation effort takes place on the ground. Our proposals to create separate agencies in England, Scotland and Wales will remove one of the tiers and establish much clearer lines of accountability and responsibility. This in turn should improve the efficiency and sensitivity with which conservation functions are carried out and provide better opportunities to carry forward the cause of conservation in ways that command the support of the whole community.

I feel sure that the House will also agree that it is an anachronism for the Department of the Environment to be responsible for the appointment and funding of the NCC in Scotland and Wales. The Secretaries of State for those countries already exercise many responsibilities for conservation, including several new ones, such as the declaration of marine nature reserves and the making of nature conservation orders, bestowed on them by the 1981 Act.

It is only logical that they should be able to exercise those powers in partnership with agencies specifically attuned to the needs of Scotland and Wales. After all, that is how we organise other aspects of Government work involving the delegation of executive responsibilities to separate statutory bodies, such as the conservation of the built heritage. English Heritage does its job extremely effectively in England and separate, equally competent professional bodies offer similar advice and undertake a similar task in Wales and Scotland. I do not think that the hon. Member for Caerphilly or anyone else should regard the new arrangements for nature conservancy with suspicion or mistrust.

As my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland and my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Wales have already made plain, they look forward to the opportunity to take a clearer responsibility for the conservation of those countries' precious and unique natural heritage. And it is not just the Secretaries of State. I note that the Western Mail carried a leader responding to the announcement that the Government proposed to merge the Nature Conservancy Council and the Countryside Commission in Wales, and welcoming the fact that the decisions would not be placed fairly and squarely with the Secretary of State for Wales, to be ma de on the basis of advice given to him.

I should emphasise that the new bodies will have a similar constitution to those of the existing NCC and the Countryside Commission—that is to say, they will be separate grant-in-aid bodies with specific statutory functions. They will not, of course, be voluntary bodies like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds or Friends of the Earth. But they will not be Government Departments either, and they will be expected to carry out their work under the supervision of their own chairmen and boards.

In Scotland and Wales, our proposals are also designed to secure integrated agencies, covering both wildlife and landscape conservation as well as informal recreation and access to the countryside. In adopting this approach in Scotland and Wales but not in England, we have taken account of several factors. First, there is a much higher density of population in England, and consequently even greater pressure on land from many legitimate but often conflicting interests. The hon. Gentleman referred to some. It therefore makes sense to retain separate bodies—one to protect wildlife for its own sake, and the other to cover landscape, recreation and access issues.

Secondly, a much higher proportion of the land area of both Scotland and Wales is composed of natural, or semi-natural habitat, much of it already covered by formal designations and more appropriate to a strategic approach embracing all relevant interests. As the consultation document published by my right hon. and learned Friend the Secretary of State for Scotland points out, there is a complex interaction between flora, fauna, scenery and human activity. In both Scotland and Wales this can best be covered by single agencies providing a one-door service to Government, farmers, conservationists and the wider public.

Mention has been made in respect of the Nature Conservancy Council and others of the need to preserve the scientific base of the NCC. Only yesterday I met representatives of Wildlife Link, an association of well-regarded organisations of high standard operating in the field, and one of their main concerns was the maintenance of the scientific base of the NCC.

The Government fully accept that the work of the three successor bodies must be underpinned by rigorous science, using the data and expertise that the council has built up over the past 40 years. We shall, therefore, ensure that provision is made for the Government to maintain a Great Britain overview an that each body has access to adequate scientific advice on a Great Britain basis where this is desirable.

We are ready to discuss how best this might be done. Options include in-house provisions or actions by outside bodies such as universities and research councils, arrangements for the pooling of data and expertise among the agencies and the use of common protocols and data protection techniques. It is important to recognise however that the science base is only one aspect of the NCC's activities and now takes proportionately less of its resources following the increase in the council's executive responsibilities, especially those for SSSIs. The NEC is not a research council and already commissions the majority of its original scientific work from other bodies such as the Natural Environment Research Council and universities.

It is perfectly proper for the Government to take account of matters other than the interests of the science directorate of the NCC in deciding the appropriate organisational model for the functions of nature conservation in this country. We are confident that the concerns expressed by the chairman of the NCC, to whom I pay tribute for his distinguished contribution over the years, and others can be readily accommodated within the organisational arrangements that we intend to make. We believe that, when stripped of emotion and political hyperbole, these concerns boil down to a fairly narrow compass which, although important in themselves, do not undermine the Government's case for the reorganisation of these bodies.

It is certainly not a concern about costs and the formulation of policy at national and international level. On costs, the Government would wholly reject any suggestion that the real motive of the proposals is somehow to cut spending on conservation. Our aim is to improve the delivery of conservation services in all three countries, while maintaining the scientific integrity that underpins many of the NCC's activities. We will also take account of short-term costs, such as those incurred by staff relocation, in deciding what level of resources to recommend to the House in the next public expenditure White Paper.

On national and international policy, there seems to be a widespread but mistaken belief that, because wildlife crosses political boundaries, the machinery of Government must do likewise. It is of greater importance to ensure that the agencies are effectively protecting wildlife at grassroots level in local communities and in co-operation with voluntary bodies such as the country trusts. When advice is needed at the national and international level, we shall make arrangements to ensure that the new agencies are able to provide it, and that the Government are able to act on it, whether in Brussels or in the various international wildlife conventions to which the United Kingdom is party, whether the Ramsar or Berne conventions. It is important to remember that the Government, not individual Departments, decide whether to ratify international conventions and agreements on behalf of the entire United Kingdom. Consistency will also be maintained between the criteria used for designating sites of national or international importance in each of the three countries.

It is understandable that the Great Britain headquarters of the NCC finds it difficult at the moment to accept that there is a better way to organise the council's work. However, there is clearly a strong current of favourable opinion in Scotland and Wales. In Scotland, it was noticeable that the chairman of the Scottish Wildlife Trust Ltd. and the convener of the Scottish Landowners Federation wrote in considered and positive terms to The Scotsman last week. The chairman of the trust believes that the measures

"could turn out to be the most effective and imaginative in our generation".

The Government intend to prove him right.

The hon. Gentleman referred also to concern about habitat damage and other issues.

An Adjournment debate is an opportunity to pursue a matter, but I will be brief. Does the Minister understand that the Government's direct refusal to consult with the bodies that are involved—the Nature Conservancy Council, the Countryside Commission, regional interests, or Wildlife Link and the constituent parts of that body—was bound to cause a great deal of anger and suspicion? There is precious little use in her complimenting individuals when she withheld from the opportunity for prior consultation. If she values them, why on earth did she not consult them before she took the decision?

I recognise that there is some merit in merging the NCC and the Countryside Commission in Scotland and Wales, but there are two major concerns. The Minister has not spelt out how she intends to ensure that national and international value is given to parochial arguments. For example, in the case of SSSIs in Cardiff bay, how can we ensure that the international perspective is maintained? Will she please make it clear that, when Britain speaks in international forums, there will be a unified voice and that we will not have a fragmented approach to matters of international importance?

I am pleased to respond to the hon. Gentleman's remarks. For some time, there have been discussions with the NCC about the right way of proceeding and the appropriate form that its structure should take. It is also the case that my noble Friend the Minister for Housing, Environment and Countryside, has written to Wildlife Link in response to correspondence, making it clear that concerns and views about the way to proceed would be welcomed.

The decision has been taken about the structure. Many of the hon. Gentleman's points are concerned with the manner in which the work will be undertaken and the importance of conserving an ability to speak on behalf of the United Kingdom as a whole. It is clear that on many occasions, when the United Kingdom Government must take a view, they are working with a co-ordinated view between Departments. We do not anticipate that that will cause difficulties, but I will ensure that the hon. Gentleman's concerns are properly taken into account when we finalise the arrangements. Discussions are going on with those who work at the NCC and elsewhere about the most appropriate way to respond.

The hon. Gentleman referred to habitat damage. It is important that our system of SSSIs, which is now approaching 5,500, and the other designations in the countryside, are given value. I would like to do justice in longer detail to many of the cases to which the hon. Gentleman referred, but I am not sure that that would be welcome now. I shall write to him about them in more detail, as I will on birds and the situation in Scotland.

The hon. Gentleman has misunderstood the Government's position on the habitat directive. Everything that I have said today makes it abundantly clear that we take great pride in the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981. We believe that we have introduced a model for the preservation of wildlife and species of natural habitats. It is an example that many others could well follow. He will appreciate that we are not convinced that the mechanisms being promoted by the Commission were the most appropriate way of ensuring that our excellent record in this country would be matched by others. We are hopeful that progress will be made and we have made it clear that we welcome discussions on the subject.

I hope that I can reassure the hon. Gentleman that we have every confidence that the Nature Conservancy Council will continue, albeit in its new form, to give its high-standing and reputable advice to the Government. We are strongly committed to preserving, protecting and enhancing our natural heritage. I welcome the opportunity offered by the hon. Gentleman to put that absolutely clearly.