Agencies in dock over mining villages ravaged by heroin

Police, magistrates and teachers have been summoned by their Labour MP to account for the worsening heroin problem threatening a former mining community in north Nottinghamshire.

John Mann, elected last year to represent Bassetlaw, called the three-day inquiry after he was inundated with complaints about what was happening in Worksop and surrounding villages. Mr Mann, 45, a former trade union executive, had tried to stop the increase in heroin addiction since his election. But he grew frustrated that government agencies – police, social services, schools and the courts – were either shifting the blame or remaining silent for fear of losing funding.

In the meantime hundreds more young people were experimenting with heroin, while others were dying.

Mr Mann, who has three children under 16, decided at Christmas to act. His inquiry was inspired by the adversarial style of the Whitehall select committee as typified by Gwyneth Dunwoody, the no-nonsense chairwoman of the Transport Select Committee. Through his Westminster office, Mr Mann wrote to agencies demand evidence be presented to the inquiry.

This week all manner of experts have filed into the high-ceilinged grandeur of the town hall's assembly room to face their inquisitors, a panel including a churchman and the editor of the Worksop Guardian, whose front pages have been dominated by pictures of syringes and junkies.

Speaking on the inquiry's second day yesterday, Mr Mann said: "Too many people have been prepared to duck questions, go off the record or just speak about what they have achieved in the past. If we sense that happening here, then things get serious."

Most of those seeking a solution agree the problem dates back to the demise in the early 1990s of the north Nottinghamshire coalfields. Since then aspirations have plummeted and the heroin problem has reached epidemic proportions in the past three years. Primary school teachers have reported sightings of the drug around their schools. Nottinghamshire police estimates 80 per cent of crime in the Worksop area is drug-related.

The drug abuse is not new, experts concede, but the "crime" is that few lessons appear to have been drawn from the problems of other former mining communities.

Kate Davies of the Nottinghamshire drug and alcohol action team, who gave evidence, said most drug strategies were tailored to cities rather than to small and sometimes isolated communities. By the end of the second day the consensus was that a piecemeal approach had let down Worksop's youth. The evidence came in the responses of the interviewees but was also clear in the gaunt, scar-marked faces of the users who sat facing them.

A report of the submissions will be written and Mr Mann will speak at Prime Minister's Question Time next month about "co-ordinated" national policy. But should the Whitehall machine devour his words and documents, here is what "must be done" if the next area of economic slump is to avoid the damage heroin has done to villages such as Manton, Carlton in Lindrick and Whitwell.

The project will set up a database of addicts to try to show a correlation between the demise of mining and the drug problem. The courts need to impose more drug treatment and testing orders, which pin down users and force them off drugs, and be more generous in offering community service. Counselling and rehabilitation services need to come to the addicts. Those in Worksop have to go to Mansfield, which is 15 miles away and costs nearly £5 return on the bus, the equivalent of a half-wrap of heroin.

But perhaps the most important lesson was heard from Brandon Utley, 28, a heroin user of eight years. Speaking before he addressed the inquiry, he said: "It's more about the questions they ask me – that will show how they are thinking. They like to bracket us into a social group – minors, no hope, etc." Mr Utley had travelled from an outlying village. The son of civil servants, he was ruined by heroin after he graduated in graphic design from Loughborough University, and set up a desktop publishing firm.

He said: "Before anyone can help, they need to stop dealing in stereotypes."