Last week, now lost in the fast-moving world of 24-hour news and Covid revisited, the Government produced a new 10-year drugs strategy which earned it genuine praise from all sides. I welcomed it in the House of Commons as a thoughtful piece of work and it is.
It contains an ambition to reduce overall drug use towards a historic 30-year low and contains commitments across government to break drug supply chains while simultaneously reducing the demand for drugs by getting people suffering from addiction into treatment, and deterring recreational drug use.
The plan is to stop the cycle of crime driven by addiction, keeping violence out of neighbourhoods across the country and saving lives through reducing the number of drug related deaths and homicides. The plan is supported by record investment of nearly £900 million of dedicated additional funding.
And if you think this is something that only affects inner city areas, think again. This affects us all and it blights lives across our country.
The 10-year plan is also the formal, substantive response to the Independent Reviews of Drugs led by Dame Carol Black and it accepts all of her key recommendations.
The plan sets out 3 core priorities: break drug supply chains, deliver a world-class treatment and recovery system, and achieve a shift in the demand for recreational drugs
For one, this will be achieved by continuing to roll-up exploitative and violent county lines – which I have seen at work in Winchester - and strengthen our response across the drug supply chain, making the UK a significantly harder place for organised crime groups to operate.
Secondly, we will be investing heavily to rebuild drug treatment and recovery services, including for young people and offenders.
And third, we will be strengthening the evidence for how best to deter use of recreational drugs, ensuring adults change their behaviour or face tough consequences, and with universal and targeted activity to prevent young people starting to take drugs in the first place.
You can see more, watch what I said in Parliament and comment at www.stevebrine.com/new-drugs-strategy
Secondly, I have written a lot about Green Winchester lately and events leading to – and since – COP26 in Glasgow.
Our focus now shifts to holding Ministers to promises made and delivering our ambitious Net Zero Plan. Further to all of this, I will be holding a very special AskTheMinister event in Winchester in the new year with COP President Alok Sharma MP. Look out for details of that and sign-up to receive my GW updates at www.greenwinchester.com
Finally, sadly, the year has to end where it started; with Covid. This week we have debated and voted on various measures to move to Plan B in response to fears and modelling around the Omicron variant.
As reported elsewhere, I certainly did not support the vaccine passport idea. As I have said many times before, we need to mean it when we say ‘learn to live with Covid’ and we need to trust our vaccines.
I will go on making this point to Ministers in what I hope is a balanced and measured way that represents as much constituency opinion as possible.
And I will work closely with our local primary care teams to help them hit the extremely ambitious booster programme outlined by Ministers; which to my mind still needs to bring the jabs much closer to my constituents instead of asking us to drive miles to get the third jab. I suspect this story has a way to run yet.
I wish all readers of the Hampshire Chronicle a Merry Christmas and a peaceful New Year.
Steve Brine MP
