Living beside the UK’s first drug consumption room
It’s 8.34am on a Tuesday and Vanessa Paton is taking me on a tour of Glasgow’s east end, where she has lived for almost 50 years.
Half a mile away sits the newly opened taxpayer-funded facility, named The Thistle, where drug addicts can bring their heroin and cocaine, are handed clean needles and invited to inject under NHS medical supervision.
The concept, a UK first, is controversial and costs £2.3m a year.
Authorities believe it provides a safer, cleaner area for users to do their business, away from the dirty, HIV-ridden back alleys of Glasgow city centre.
It opened in January, and around 250 people have used it so far.
But there is a growing feeling among some that a by-product of this bold project is the alleged “war zone” being created in the community around the new building.
Vanessa Paton
Former council worker Ms Paton is one of an ad-hoc group of furious locals who pick up needles as part of desperate efforts to clear their streets.
She says: “It is getting worse. The new room has appeared, and the problems have escalated with it. It’s a no-go war zone every day and night.
“The area’s becoming a toilet. That is the harsh reality of it.”
‘It is disgusting’
Sky News spends the morning being shown areas where it is claimed the issues are getting out of control.
Ms Paton pulls a bloodied, faeces-covered hospital gown out of a bush as we walk along a path behind a row of houses.
We turn the corner to a street where children play and are greeted with syringes filled with blood at our feet, discarded needle packaging and dirty underwear.
Angela Scott
Local resident Angela Scott says: “It’s become a lot worse. It’s heightened. I’m scared that if I am picking up my dog dirt am I going to prick a needle.
“Am I going to end up with an infection that a lot of drug addicts tend to have because they are sharing needles? I don’t want to pick up something infectious.”
Adverts installed in known drug dens
Officials have installed a new needle bin in one hotspot in recent days, with posters erected advertising the nearby consumption room.
A new needle bin and poster for the nearby consumption room
Ms Paton alleges safety steps are being taken at a nearby nursery.
“There is a nursery that actually uses a metal detector in the morning to scan the sandpits before the children go out because of the concern of the needles being in it,” she claims.
This area is known as Calton and has had its troubles with drug taking and crime for many years.
Ms Paton takes us to a tucked-away, overgrown area opposite social housing and a few metres from where a new school is being built. It is a makeshift drug den.
There are hundreds of freshly used needles. It is like a minefield.
One needle is stabbed into a large tree, there is even a wooden seat which is covered in drug-taking equipment.
Once again, there is a laminated A4 piece of paper pointing users in the direction of The Thistle.
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Ms Paton says: “We picked up 50 needles in one minute last week. If we were to pick up every needle that is here today, we’d be talking hundreds.
“We are struggling to find somewhere safe to stand. There are needles between my legs, you’ve got needles behind your head.
“It’s totally soul-destroying. Nobody living here expected it to be this bad.”
Officials deny it is a new problem
Glasgow City Council told Sky News there had not been an increase in reports despite the community alleging the opposite.
Councillor Allan Casey, who is responsible for drug policy in the city, said: “This has been a long-standing issue and that is one of the main reasons why The Thistle has been placed where it is because there has been decades-long discarded needles in public places.
Responding to claims of increasing problems around the new facility, Mr Casey said: “Those reports don’t back that up.
“The council has not seen a rise in reports of injecting equipment and there has not been an increase in crime reports.”
Scotland is ravaged by drugs. The country has the worst drug death rate in Europe.
Scotland’s first minister John Swinney told Sky News the new drug room required time to “see the impact”.
He said: “The Thistle is a safe consumption facility which is designed to encourage people to come off the use of drugs – that’s its purpose. We’ve got to give that venture time to see the impact.
“We need to engage with the local community… and address any concerns.”
It is understood police have logged no calls about the facility since it opened in January, despite some residents suggesting they have contacted officers with concerns.
Inspector Max Shaw from Police Scotland said: “We are aware of long-standing issues in the area and continue to work closely in partnership to address these concerns.”
The UK-US trade deal has been signed and is “done”, US President Donald Trump has said as he met Sir Keir Starmer at the G7 summit.
The US president told reporters in Canada: “We signed it, and it’s done. It’s a fair deal for both. It’ll produce a lot of jobs, a lot of income.”
Sir Keir said the document “implements” the deal to cut tariffs on cars and aerospace, describing it as a “really important agreement”.
“So this is a very good day for both of our countries – a real sign of strength,” the prime minister added.
Mr Trump added that the UK was “very well protected” against any future tariffs, saying: “You know why? Because I like them”.
However, he did not say whether levies on British steel exports to the US would be set to 0%, saying “we’re gonna let you have that information in a little while”.
Mr Trump also praised Sir Keir as a “great” prime minister, adding: “We’ve been talking about this deal for six years, and he’s done what they haven’t been able to do.”
He added: “We’re very longtime partners and allies and friends and we’ve become friends in a short period of time.
“He’s slightly more liberal than me to put it mildly… but we get along.”
Sir Keir added that “we make it work”.
As the pair exited a mountain lodge in the Canadian Rockies where the summit is being held, Mr Trump held up a physical copy of the trade agreement to show reporters.
Several leaves of paper fell from the binding, and Sir Keir quickly stooped to pick them up, saying: “A very important document.”
Sir Keir Starmer picks up paper from the UK-US trade deal after Donald Trump dropped it at the G7 summit. Pic: Reuters
The US president also appeared to mistakenly refer to a “trade agreement with the European Union” at one point as he stood alongside the British prime minister.
Mr Trump announced his “Liberation Day” tariffs on countries in April. At the time, he announced 10% “reciprocal” rates on all UK exports – as well as separately announced 25% levies on cars and steel.
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In a joint televised phone call in May, Sir Keir and Mr Trump announced the UK and US had agreed on a trade deal – but added the details were being finalised.
Ahead of the G7 summit, the prime minister said he would meet Mr Trump for “one-on-one” talks, and added the agreement “really matters for the vital sectors that are safeguarded under our deal, and we’ve got to implement that”.
Whitehall officials tried to convince Michael Gove to go to court to cover up the grooming scandal in 2011, Sky News can reveal.
Dominic Cummings, who was working for Lord Gove at the time, has told Sky News that officials in the Department for Education (DfE) wanted to help efforts by Rotherham Council to stop a national newspaper from exposing the scandal.
In an interview with Sky News, Mr Cummings said that officials wanted a “total cover-up”.
Politics latest: Grooming gangs findings unveiled
The revelation shines a light on the institutional reluctance of some key officials in central government to publicly highlight the grooming gang scandal.
In 2011, Rotherham Council approached the Department for Education asking for help following inquiries by The Times. The paper’s then chief reporter, the late Andrew Norfolk, was asking about sexual abuse and trafficking of children in Rotherham.
The council went to Lord Gove’s Department for Education for help. Officials considered the request and then recommended to Lord Gove’s office that the minister back a judicial review which might, if successful, stop The Times publishing the story.
Lord Gove rejected the request on the advice of Mr Cummings. Sources have independently confirmed Mr Cummings’ account.
Education Secretary Michael Gove in 2011. Pic: PA
Mr Cummings told Sky News: “Officials came to me in the Department of Education and said: ‘There’s this Times journalist who wants to write the story about these gangs. The local authority wants to judicially review it and stop The Times publishing the story’.
“So I went to Michael Gove and said: ‘This council is trying to actually stop this and they’re going to use judicial review. You should tell the council that far from siding with the council to stop The Times you will write to the judge and hand over a whole bunch of documents and actually blow up the council’s JR (judicial review).’
“Some officials wanted a total cover-up and were on the side of the council…
“They wanted to help the local council do the cover-up and stop The Times’ reporting, but other officials, including in the DfE private office, said this is completely outrageous and we should blow it up. Gove did, the judicial review got blown up, Norfolk stories ran.”
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Grooming gangs victim speaks out
The judicial review wanted by officials would have asked a judge to decide about the lawfulness of The Times’ publication plans and the consequences that would flow from this information entering the public domain.
A second source told Sky News that the advice from officials was to side with Rotherham Council and its attempts to stop publication of details it did not want in the public domain.
One of the motivations cited for stopping publication would be to prevent the identities of abused children entering the public domain.
There was also a fear that publication could set back the existing attempts to halt the scandal, although incidents of abuse continued for many years after these cases.
Sources suggested that there is also a natural risk aversion amongst officials to publicity of this sort.
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Mr Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave Brexit campaign and was Boris Johnson’s right-hand man in Downing Street, has long pushed for a national inquiry into grooming gangs to expose failures at the heart of government.
He said the inquiry, announced today, “will be a total s**tshow for Whitehall because it will reveal how much Whitehall worked to try and cover up the whole thing.”
He also described Mr Johnson, with whom he has a long-standing animus, as a “moron’ for saying that money spent on inquiries into historic child sexual abuse had been “spaffed up the wall”.
Asked by Sky News political correspondent Liz Bates why he had not pushed for a public inquiry himself when he worked in Number 10 in 2019-20, Mr Cummings said Brexit and then COVID had taken precedence.
“There are a million things that I wanted to do but in 2019 we were dealing with the constitutional crisis,” he said.
The Department for Education and Rotherham Council have been approached for comment.
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