PAC report update: Home Office forced to evaluate drugs strategy

We promised to keep you updated after the powerful Parliamentary Committee of Public Accounts (PAC) extracted a verbal promise from the Home Office to (finally) evaluate the efficacy of its own drug strategy.

The failure to properly scrutinise the efficacy of drug policy spending is an urgent concern, and the need for such evaluation on a consistent and transparent basis is something Transform has been calling for since 2002, most recently through our campaign for an Impact Assessment of the UK drug strategy.

Well, the PAC has now published its report on those hearings titled "Tackling Problem Drug Use". Despite all the election froth the report was reasonably well reported in the media (including some good duscussion from the BBC's Mark Easton; "Hard drugs and weak evidence").

The PAC report includes some very useful analysis and its recommendations include:

1. The Government spends £1.2 billion a year on measures aimed at tackling problem drug use, yet does not know what overall effect this spending is having. We welcome the Department's commitment to evaluating this spending. From 2011, the Department should publish annual reports on progress against the strategy's action plan. These should set out expenditure on each measure, the outputs and outcomes delivered, and progress towards targets.

So the Government is not just being asked to evaluate its current strategy properly, but to do so each year, which, from a PR perspective at least, makes it much harder to gloss over failure than a mega-review every 5-10 years.

2. Around one-quarter of problem drug users are hard-core offenders who resist measures to reduce their offending or 'drop out' of drug treatment. The Department's action plan should set out specific measures directly aimed at driving down offending by hard-core problem drug users for whom the Drug Interventions Programme and drug treatment does not work.

This should mean looking at new approaches, including wider provision of heroin prescription which the PAC was particularly interested in (and which is, of course, one of the models of legally regulated availability Transform advocates).

6. Measures to reduce problem drug use by young people have had limited impact. The Department should include reliable and consistent estimates of the number of new young problem drug users each year in its annual report on progress against the strategy. It should evaluate the effectiveness of measures aimed at reducing problem drug use by young people, including long-term residential care services, and should set targets to bring down the overall number of problem drug users, over time.

There used to be just such targets, but they were dropped because they underlined the failure of the Government's current approach. Their reintroduction should increase the pressure to come up with new ways to tackle drug related problems.

I asked the National Audit Office (NAO) what happens next. They explained that:

"The Government is required to publish its [formal] response to the report by the Committee of Public Accounts. This response is called a Treasury Minute.

In the Treasury Minute, the Government will state whether it accepts or does not accept each recommendation in the Committee of Public Accounts report. The Committee of Public Accounts examines the Government response to assess the degree to which the Government responds to recommendations from Parliament.

The National Audit Office examines the commitments made by the Government in the Treasury Minute and follows up the degree to which Government Departments carry out the commitments made in the Treasury Minute. This can result in a follow up examination and report by the National Audit Office. The follow up report may be taken by the Committee of Public Accounts. The Committee can then summon the Accounting Officers (heads of the relevant Government Departments) to account for their role in carrying out the commitments and the resulting impacts."

OK, it's a bit convoluted, but given the Government has already agreed to put in place an evaluative framework, and given the clout of the NAO and PAC, this is potentially a useful route to hold the Government to account. Particularly at a time when public spending is going to be increasingly scrutinised.

All the same, we should probably wait and see what that "Treasury Minute" says first...likely to be at least a month away. So keep watching this space.

It is also useful to see how other countries have addressed the drug policy evaluation issue, and the US, as the chief architect of global drug enforcement policy and the historically dominant influence on the evolution of UK drug policy, warrants particular examination. In 2001 the National Academy of Sciences produced a two hundred page report for the White House Office of Drug Control Policy called 'Informing America’s Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don’t Know Keeps Hurting Us'. The report shows that the US faces many similar problems to the UK in evaluating effectiveness, with much of its analysis a clear echo of the new PAC report:

"The committee finds that existing drug use monitoring systems are useful for some important purposes, yet they are strikingly inadequate to support the full range of policy decisions the nation must make."

"The central problem is a woeful lack of investment in programs of data collection and empirical research that would enable evaluation of the nations investment in enforcement."

"Because of a lack of investment in data and research the country is in no better position to evaluate the effectiveness of its enforcement than it was twenty years ago."

"It is unconscionable for this country to continue to carry out a policy of this magnitude and cost without any way of knowing whether or to what extent it is having the desired effect."

There is, of course, a simple and obvious reason why the Government is so reluctant to subject its drug policy to the sort of serious scrutiny that is routine for most other areas of social policy. They know precisely what such scrutiny would reveal, namely that the policy has been a failure on almost all meaningful measures, and offers terrible value for money to the taxpayer, particularly the elements of the budget directed at supply side enforcement. We got some hint of this from the suppressed 2007 Home Office value for money study (that we finally got to see this year after a three year FOI battle), and the 2002 Treasury ‘Stock Take of Anti-Drug Interventions and Cost Effectiveness' (that we also required a protracted FOI saga to access).

The Government are terrified of where meaningful analysis of such historic failings would lead - to a politically unpalatable shift in drug policy away from the criminal justice led punitive prohibitionist paradigm - and instinctively do whatever they need to, by way of obfuscation, spin and propaganda, to avoid facing reality.

Whatever one's take on our approach to drugs, there can never be an excuse for poor evaluation of policy outcomes. Inadequate evaluation means bad policy, and bad policy comes at a huge personal and financial cost to individuals and society at large.

Home Office forced to evaluate its drugs strategy...but not yet

Whilst we were busy at the Commission on Narcotic Drugs in Vienna a potentially really important meeting of Parliament's Committee on Public Accounts happened, following up the National Audit Office report on the UK Drugs Strategy we blogged about. To recap, the NAO report said:

"Without an evaluative framework for the [Drug] Strategy as a whole, the NAO is not able to conclude positively on value for money." and, "So overall performance measurement across the range of programmes needs to be put in place."

This was no shock. For decades, successive Governments have avoided developing meaningful measures of success, or research to objectively test the effectiveness of their drugs strategies.

For example, Parliament's Science and Technology Committee pointed out in their 2006 report "Making a Hash of it." that there was no evidence of a deterrent effect from criminalising drug use. The Government promised to do research to prove the link, but...hasn't.

Even the limited evaluations of the drugs strategy that have been done have been suppressed - like the value for money study of the last ten year drugs strategy that Transform recently prised from the fingers of the Home Office only after a three year Freedom of Information battle.

Why this coyness about evaluating billions of pounds of public spending? Well, in 2003 at a press conference, we asked the drugs spokesperson at the Home Office, Bob Ainsworth MP, whether the government would support a cost benefit analysis of drug law enforcement. "Why would we want to do that unless we were going to legalise drugs?" he replied.

So no evaluation, because they know it would show prohibition is failing.

Of course it is not just the UK that fails to evaluate its approach to drugs in a rational, effective way, it is a worldwide problem, including in the American heart of the drug war, as the US National Academies report, "Informing America's Policy on Illegal Drugs: What We Don't Know Keeps Hurting Us" back in 2001 makes clear.

And let's not fool ourselves, this failure to evaluate is not a victimless crime. It is a double hit. Not only do we squander billions that could be spent on treatment, schools, hospitals or other social goods, but the current policies themselves are often actively counterproductive.

That is why Transform, The Howard League for Penal Reform, the Institute for Criminal Policy Research, Release, the International Drug Policy Consortium, the Green Party, Plaid Cymru, the Liberal Democrats, the Home Affairs Select Committee etc. are all calling for one or more of; a cost benefit analysis, a value for money assessment or a full Impact Assessment comparing current policy with the alternatives. Then we could move forward based on evidence of what works, not what is politically convenient.

Now the good news. Maybe, just maybe the Government will now have to put in place the first step towards a genuine evaluation of its current strategy. So back to where this blog started, with the Committee of Public Accounts: Tackling Problem Drug Use meeting on the 10th March 2010.

Chair Sir Edward Leigh MP:
Sir David, if I may start with you and refer you to paragraph eight of the Comptroller's Report [NAO] on page five, it starts off by saying, "Neither the current Strategy, nor the supporting action plan for 2008-2011, set out an overall framework for evaluating and reporting on the degree to which the Strategy is achieving the intended outcomes ..." Sir David, how are you going to evaluate and measure your success?

Sir David Normington, Permanent Secretary at the Home Office:
"...we have not had an overall framework of evaluation. We accept that in the new Strategy that is what we need to have..."


Chair Sir Edward Leigh MP:
So if you come back to this Committee in a couple of years' time we will have this overall evaluation at a more sophisticated level, will we? Remember that was the very first question I asked Sir David and he said, "We are doing it individually but we are not doing it comprehensively". This is your job, so you are going to be working with us now and you will be able to report back to us within a couple of years, will you?

Ms. Mandie Campbell, Director, Drugs, Alcohol and Partnerships Directorate, Home Office: Yes, I will. We have agreed with the National Audit Office that we will put a framework for evaluation in place that will look to identify and address those areas that are not evaluated at the moment.

So there it is - Make a note. the Home Office has promised to put in place a framework to evaluate its drug strategy...in theory we should have more detail in about four months from now, so watch this space...But perhaps don't start holding your breath just yet.