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Inside Housing

Cambridge two case is too close to home
Alexander Masters
Chair, Cambridge Two Campaign

In your article 'Wyner case is no cause for alarm' (Inside Housing, 23 June), drugs tsar Keith Hellawell is quoted as saying: 'To my knowledge, this is the only case of this nature - if there were similar cases, people would be worried.'

On the contrary, people around the country are already extremely worried because the convictions provide not just a precedent, but confusion. Nobody knows what will make them safe from similar prosecutions. As one homeless manager said to me: 'I am just as guilty as Ruth or John, because it's impossible to do my job - working with drug addicts - and not be. I've already committed their crime twice this morning.'

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GuardianUnlimited
July 2000

Extensive coverage of the Cambridge Two case by The Guardian and
The Observer newspapers including background information, letters and articles.
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Eastern Daily Press
12 July 2000

Joy as charity pair bailed
By Chris Bishop

Two charity managers jailed for allowing drugs to be peddled at a drop-in centre for the homeless were yesterday freed on bail pending their appeal against the conviction.

Cambridge Evening News
15th June 2000

John Brock has found it hard to cope with the daily separation from his wife and two children.

He has been suffering from depression and his dose of Prozac has recently been increased as he struggles to face being parted from his wife Louise and two sons Lloyd, 16 and Dylan, 11.

(John explained...)

"For me it was not a matter of not being able to take the situation in, it was the reality that became too difficult to bear.

"I saw years stretching in front of me, with the same routine every day. I really never thought I would go to prison...

..."I could not believe it in court when they said we 'knowingly permitted' heroin to be supplied".

Cambridge Evening News
14th June 2000

Paul Boateng has rejected Mrs Campbell's arguments during the report stage of the bill.

(Cambridge MP Anne Campbell had tabled an amendment to a government bill to help protect charity staff working with drugs).

He said: "If reasonable steps are taken to deal with the problem and there is no action to condone, encourage or turn a blind eye, the offence is not committed." Mr Boateng said he believed the Cambridge Two were the first care agency staff to be prosecuted under the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act.

He added: "The fact that only one prosecution has been brought shows there is not a widespread problem of care activity being inhibited by ill-founded prosecutions, accusations and convictions in the area."

The government is considering issuing new guidelines to charities on anti-drug measures, although it does not intend to change the law.

NGO Finance
May 2000

Cambridge Two are not alone
By Simon Falush

Over half of the hostel workers trained by drug advice body Release since January could fall foul of the same laws that saw two day centre managers imprisoned on drugs charges.
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Cambridge Evening News
24th May 2000

Cambridge MP Anne Campbell has tabled an amendment to a government bill to help protect charity staff working with drugs - but her move stands little chance of becoming law.
Mrs Campbell has tabled an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Court Services Bill in the wake of the Cambridge Two case...
...The clause would make it a defence if homelessness workers could prove they did not "wilfully permit" drug taking on the premises.

The Big Issue
15th - 21st May 2000

Prisoner of Conscience
By Max Daly

In this exclusive interview, John Brock, jailed for 'allowing' drug dealing at the wintercomfort homeless drop-in centre, speaks out from prison for the first time.

Lloyd was finishing his breakfast when the doorbell rang. It was a man and a woman. They were looking for a Mr John Brock. The 14-year-old said his dad was asleep upstairs and offered them a cup of tea while they waited. A third visitor arrived through the open back door and Lloyd, in a rush to get ready for school, shouted up for his mum. Within five minutes the three CID officers had arrested John Brock and were escorting him out of the house to the police station.
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The Independent
21st March 2000

Families of jailed charity workers appeal to Straw
By Cherry Norton

Children of two charity workers jailed for allowing the supply of heroin at the day centre they ran, handed a petition to the Home Secretary yesterday, asking for them to be freed pending appeal.

The Friend
18th February 2000

The Untouchables
By Deborah Padfield

Two people are in prison because of drug offences. They did not deal drugs or use them. The charge was 'having knowingly permitted or suffered' the sale of illegal drugs on premises that they managed. The fact that they were working to help people with drug addictions and other problems was not enough. They, according to the law, should have turned those people in.

The Independent
10th February 2000

Five years: is that what you get for helping people?
By Mary Braid

Bus staff are struggling to accept that Wyner, "a brilliant director", and Brock, "utterly anti-drugs", are locked up. Supporters campaigning for their release insist that Wyner and Brock have been punished for their unflagging work with a difficult, and not always grateful, social group, backed by slender resources. Charities argue that, subjected to similar police scrutiny, their staff could also be jailed. Of particular concern was Judge Haworth's refusal to accept that client confidentiality - essential in winning the trust of the homeless, of whom up to 70 per cent are estimated to take drugs - prevented Wyner from giving police the names of people banned from Bus on suspicion of dealing. Bus staff claim that Cambridgeshire police, "buoyed up" by the outcome of the case, are now pushing them to become "casual contacts" - a euphemism for informers.
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Cambridge Evening News
1st February 2000

Top comedian joins growing support for the Cambridge Two
By James Regan

Controversial comedian Mark Thomas is to highlight the conviction of Cambridge homeless charity workers Ruth Wyner and John Brock on his television show. The latest episode of his TV show - The Mark Thomas Product - will see four supporters of the jailed Wintercomfort bosses turn themselves in at Parkside police station. Prof David Brandon and Linda Bendall, members of the Cambridge Two Action Committee, are among the quartet who tell police they are guilty of the same offences which sent the pair to prison, and ask to be arrested.
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Mental Health Care
February 2000

Cold Comfort
By Catherine Jackson

Ruth and John were charged under Section 8 of the 1971 Misuse of Drugs Act, which makes it illegal for someone to allow drug dealing on their premises… …Section 8 of the Misuse of Drugs Act was never, legal experts aver, intended for this purpose. It was meant to draw under the powers of the Act those people who profit from allowing their premises - nightclub, bar, opium den - to be used for drug dealing. There was no question that Ruth and John were involved in the dealing, nor that they received money from the dealers.

Private Eye
Judge Dreadful

...thanks to an overzealous interpretation by police, peosecutors and Judge Jonathan Howarth - Cambridge's answer to hanging Judge Jeffries - charity workers Ruth Wyner and John Brock have been jailed for a staggering five and four years apiece.

Cambridge Evening News
31st January 2000

Hundreds join demo for jailed charity workers
By James Regan

Hundreds of people marched through Cambridge city centre in support of jailed homeless charity bosses Ruth Wyner and John Brock… …Wyner and Brock's solicitors were refused leave to appeal against the convictions at the High Court in London on Friday, but were allowed to appeal against sentence. Their next step is to go to the Court of Appeal.
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New Law Journal
21st January 2000

Who'll be next?
On the possible implications of the Wintercomfort case for HM Prisons
By Julian Broadhead

One man who has expressed concern about the extent of the drug problem in prisons is HM Chief Inspector, Sir David Ramsbotham, who said: "The people who cause the real misery in prisons are the drug dealers… …I hope that the Prison Service will declare war on the dealers and that prisons will make suitable arrangements for them." Such arrangements, post - Wintercomfort, are intriguing to contemplate, given the lengths to which the judge said the defendants in that case should have gone to prevent the offence of supply.

The Independent
20th January 2000

Living agony for prison life for charity worker jailed for allowing homeless to deal in drugs
by Ian Burrell and Cherry Norton

The sentencing at Cambridge Crown Court last month has provoked uproar, with thousands of people, including the local MP and university dignitaries joining a campaign for their release… …Their conviction has stunned the National Homeless Alliance, which said people with drugs problems would now be turned away from homeless shelters. The Alliance also predicted that head teachers and prison governors could become liable for drug dealing on their premises.
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The Economist
15th January 2000

Going Dutch?

A Police Foundation report is about to recommend major changes to Britain's drugs laws. The government should respond without delay… …the zeal with which drugs offences are perused can depend on chance, or the policies of particular police forces. Two Cambridge care workers, charged with allowing their clients to deal in hard drugs in a day centre, were recently imprisoned for four and five years.

The Times Higher
14th January 2000

Doing time for doing good
By Karen Gold

The sentences were the final blow in a series of events that has left trustees and supporters reeling. Cambridgeshire police had been represented on the centre's advisory committee for at least a year, and had said nothing about the operation or that the police felt precautions were inadequate, says Padfield: (Nicky Padfield, lecturer in criminology and president of Fitzwilliam College) "The whole prosecution came out of the blue, because we thought we were working with all the agencies, including the police. That's what is so shocking about it."

New Law Journal
14th January, 2000

Justice for those who help the homeless?
By Nicola Padfield

On Friday December 17, 1999 two well respected people, Ruth Wyner and John Brock, who have spent over twenty years working in the homeless sector, were sent to prison, one for five years, and the other for four years, for having knowingly permitted or suffered illegal heroin dealing on the premises they managed, under section 8 of the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971… Or on an alternative interpretation, for doing their job in good faith.
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The Observer: Letters to the Editor
9th January 2000

Why justice failed Brock and Wyner

Drug use and exchange is common and hard to control in NHS wards, in prisons, in hospitals and specialists' services. The majority of senior staff in these desperate settings at some time will have made Ruth Wyner's choice, to impose sanctions but not to report infractions to the police. Indeed for many years it has been seen as good practice for agencies to maintain strategic liaison with local police in return for which the police do not harass them. This judgment unilaterally undermines future co-operation between police and care services.
Lorraine Hewitt
South London and Maudsley NHS Trust
London SW9

The imprisonment of Ruth Wyner and John Brock is a perversion. As a volunteer manager with a church alliance emergency winter homeless shelter in the United States, any of my colleagues could easily have landed in precisely the same predicament at the bizarre but commonplace whims of our nation's police and prosecutors.
Robert Merkin
Northampton
Massachusetts

I no longer believe that the US has the most ruthless drug warriors in the Western World. Even your judges, like ours, are subject to political ambition and lynch-mob mentality.
Gerald M Sutliff
Emeryville
California

The Observer
9th January 2000

A sentence too far for the judge who said too much
By Nick Cohen

As we reported last week, one of the many peculiar aspects of this disgraceful prosecution was that the judge said in public before the case was over that he was going to jail the charity workers because the desperate homeless had taken drugs in or near their Cambridge shelter.

The Jewish Chronicle
7th January 2000

Big Issues

The trustees of Wintercomfort, who include two vicars and George Reid, bursar of St John's College and a former mayor of Cambridge, responded unequivocally saying: "we are absolutely shocked by this verdict which will have dire consequences for the whole of the homeless sector across the country and for every agency working with vulnerable people abusing heroin."

The Observer
2nd January 2000

Jailed for doing her job
by Nick Cohen

By the standards of what used to be conventional morality, Wyner and Brock were admirable people who had followed the instructions of Tony Blair and Louise Casey, his Homelessness Tsarina, and got beggars off the streets and in to Wintercomfort, an acclaimed network of refuges in Cambridge that supplied hot food, tea, washing machines, baths, GPs, advice on finding homes and jobs and, indeed, rehabilitation from drug addiction.

The Sunday Mirror
26th December 1999

Fight to free the charity chief jailed for 5 years
By Dominic Turnbull

A campaign has been launched to free a charity chief who was jailed for five years just before Christmas for refusing to betray the trust of drug victims. Ruth Wyner, 49 a mother of two, could also lose her family home after being convicted under laws aimed at heroin dealers.

The Guardian
15th December 1999

A poke in the blind eye
By Janet Snell

Kevin Flemen, senior project officer with Release, says the case has created a lot of anxiety among staff working with vulnerable groups. "The message from the authorities is that you must prevent supplying taking place," he says. "Doing your best is not good enough - you have to stop it. As about 80% of this client group are using drugs that's no easy task, but now clearly the stakes have been raised".