Weymouth could lose Public Health funding for drug recovery centre

The news comes after plans for a centre in a former Abbotsbury Road b&b met with public opposition last year and was abandoned.

It has now been revealed that other sites in the town were also investigated. Two likely properties in the Dorchester Road area were abandoned and an offer to buy a third property was beaten by another bidder.

Borough councillors have now been told that the £620,000 grant for an integrated treatment facility is likely to be withdrawn by the Department of Health which offered the money through Public Health Dorset.

The council will now try and delay the decision to withdraw the finance and is to hold a special meeting later in the year to look at how the area deals with drug and alcohol problems.

The issue of what the borough council is doing was raised by Cllr Penny McCartney at a meeting of the borough council scrutiny and performance committee on Thursday evening.

She said there was a public perception that next to nothing was being done by the council although most drug and alcohol programmes were not in its remit.

“But we should be more visible about what we are doing,” she said.

She told how she had watched a drug dealer at 2pm in a Melcombe Regis car park “palming deal after deal.”

“This is a family resort yet all I’m seeing on social media is comments about people being drunk and injecting in the streets.”

She said that the public no longer reported this type of incident because their experience had been that nobody turned up to do anything about it.

The Tophill West Labour councillor said that she understood there was pressure on budgets and that some funding for drug services had disappeared but believed that the council could, and should, be doing more.

Head of community protection Graham Duggan had circulated a report to councillors about the problem – which was not made public or given to the media.

But in public he told the committee that the police were doing what he described as “a significant amount of work” to disrupt drug distribution into the area.

“A lot of the work is going on behind the scenes and as a result the police are less visible to deal with street dealers. They’re interested in the people behind the street dealers,” he said.

Confirming that the money for a integrated treatment facility for the borough was at risk of being withdrawn he said that talks would continue to try and persuade the authorities responsible for the money not to take it away from the borough.

He said the aim of the ‘recovery hub’ was to bring services together in one place and to offer 6-8 detox’ beds.

“It is not a treatment centre, as such, but will bring services together and provide a single point of contact…

“Finding a property has been immensely difficult…two were looked at on Dorchester Road but were not progressed. An offer was put in on a property at this end (town centre) of Dorchester Road but so did somebody else,” he said, adding that, at the moment, there was no immediate prospect of finding a suitable location.

“We are in discussions to get an extension to the funding so we can continue to look for a suitable property. It would be a significant loss if the funding disappeared.”

Committee chairman Cllr Andy Blackwood agreed that a special meeting of the committee will be held, possibly in October, when all the agencies involved in drug and alcohol work, would be invited.

“I am getting a sense that this is something we do want to take on…we will try and review the situation in a single meeting and see what we can do.”

* It has previously been said that the rates of drug use in Weymouth are double that in Dorset as a whole, and more than 40 per cent of those who currently access treatment in Dorset live in Weymouth and Portland.