I am grateful to the noble Lord for giving us an opportunity to look at this important area of trading standards. We expect businesses currently openly selling psychoactive substances to comply with the new law. We will be working with the police and local authorities in the lead-up to the provisions coming into force—which we aim to have happen on 1 April 2016 —to ensure that head shops and online traders operating in the UK are in no doubt that they must clear their shelves of these substances and clean up their websites by 31 March. If they do not, they can expect an early visit from the police or a local authority officer. For those who fail to comply with the law, prohibition orders will offer one possible tool with which law enforcement agencies can respond.
I am very much aware of the excellent work that trading standards officers do around the country. I have noticed their work many times, particularly in my former constituency, where they did tremendous work. Local authorities have overall responsibility for public health and spend around 25%—£760 million—of their health budget on dealing with drug and alcohol misuse. The introduction of the ban should reduce this expenditure, allowing councils to use funds to tackle other public health priorities. If it were the Government saying that, I would expect the noble Lord to say, “I’m not too sure about that”. In fact, the LGA is saying just that. It sees this as assisting councils in focusing on the other real problems in their areas which need to be tackled. Far from incurring cost, it sees the blanket ban as easing pressure.
The shop in Canterbury which I keep referring to, which is just across the road from the King’s School, was closed down by trading standards and reopened under a different name. As we have said all the way through, this kind of whack-a-mole game of cat and mouse that is going on between law enforcement agencies and the purveyors of new psychoactive substances goes to the very heart of what the Bill is about.
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