Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:53 pm on 12 December 2017.
Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer, and thanks to the Minister for today's statement. Community safety is an interesting subject. A generation ago, when I was growing up, there were a lot more children playing in the streets and, in the summertime, in public parks, completely unsupervised by adults. I was probably doing this myself from an early age. I observed a few years later that parents were becoming more and more averse to allowing children to play on the streets due to fears of too much traffic and the impracticalities of too many parked cars, and also in public parks, which was largely due to fear of strangers. The odd thing is that children have increasingly become confined to their homes, and we now discover a few years later that they can also be unsafe in their home environment due to people interacting with them on the internet through social media.
The only solution to this might be to encourage parents to spend more time organising park outings in groups so that there is a safe environment for children to interact with each other in outdoor play. So, I wondered, Minister, when you consider the replacement schemes for Communities First, whether there is room for this kind of scheme enabling safer community play.
Another problem touching on this is that of substance misuse, because drug addicts don't always shoot up in back bedrooms; they sometimes do it in semi-public places, and there have been concerns over needles being left in public places. We've had newspaper reports about this fairly recently in Cardiff's Butetown area and residents in Valleys towns have also complained about this issue. There is a danger of children picking up the needles and inadvertently harming themselves. There have also been calls in some quarters for special areas where drug addicts can safely shoot up, called safe injecting zones. So, I'm wondering what your thoughts are on this subject, Minister. Would the safe injecting zones lead to a safer community, in your view, or is this kind of liberal provision only likely to encourage further drug abuse?
This is a pertinent issue, since several of the western states of the USA are now moving towards more liberal drug laws in general. But these moves have divided opinion among policymakers. There is a certain amount of statistical evidence already indicating that, where you do liberalise the drug laws, what you end up with, within a few short years, is simply more drug abusers, meaning more people having to be treated by health professionals, so they do become more of a drain on society.
Now, we're having a debate here in the new year about the medicinal use of cannabis. People taking cannabis for medicinal use is not the same as heroin addicts shooting up with needles, I fully understand that, but the liberalisation of drug policy has to start somewhere, so I suppose people who want to legalise hard drugs may have a good starting point in advocating the medicinal use of cannabis. So, I wondered what are your views on this subject and what are the views of the Welsh Government.
We've had a couple of debates here recently concerning the so-called superprison that you mentioned in your last remarks. I was intrigued to listen to some of the contributions in last week's debate, and to note that most of the people opposing the prison were doing so partly on the grounds that they didn't agree with the concept of superprisons. I thought this was interesting since I wasn't aware that we had legal competence over this aspect of the criminal justice system here in the Assembly. But, of course, some of the people who oppose superprisons may also want us to have legal competence over aspects of the criminal justice system. Bethan, I take it that that is yours and Plaid's position and I also take it, from your remarks, Minister, that that may well be your position. You spoke about the current devolution settlement not being coherent. What is your vision of how things would work if you had all the legal competence over the justice system that you wanted to have?