Mr. Nick Glynn:

I agree with everything that has been said. The challenge is that if you do not change legislation, it is quite difficult to effectively change practice at the coalface. As Dr. Ó Concubhair just said, you can have senior leaders in policing saying one thing, but what happens on the street with constables and sergeants can be a very different thing. One approach is education, persuasion and the like, but if there is an opportunity to change legislation it forces police officers - in a good way – to say that they are going to take that approach because the law has changed. The example I use is that in the police codes of practice around stop and search, I introduced in the guidance from the College of Policing the fact that the smell of cannabis alone should not be grounds for a stop and search. That was introduced into the guidance, but what we were not able to do was to change the law. Unless you are able to take the next step and change the law, you can understand why some police officers do not get on board with it. In the interim, the approach that Dr. Ó Concubhair mentioned in Durham with Mike Barton, who was the chief constable at the time, was that they have more important things to do than deal with somebody growing a cannabis plant in their house, and they are not bothered about that. Again, that is people having the moral courage to get ahead of what the legislation is saying, but you need to change the law and the rules and bake in those changes in order that they cannot be reversed if political will or sentiment changes.