Eight of the country’s largest alcohol and drug treatment and recovery service providers have recently come together to form Collective Voice. Together they will promote the sector as a whole and the interests of people using drug and alcohol services.
Over the next six months Collective Voice aims to:
- Effectively engage with the new government to establish how the drug and alcohol treatment sector can help the government achieve its ambition
- Identify the most effective structures and mechanisms to enable the entire drug and alcohol treatment sector to represent the interests of its service users to relevant stakeholders
- Create alliances across other relevant sectors such as mental health, criminal justice, housing, to identify issues of shared concern
- Develop a business plan and funding proposal to take forward this work
(Read the Statement of Purpose in full on its website.)
Paul Hayes, former chief executive of the National Treatment Agency, has been appointed to lead Collective Voice. Paul met with MEAM last week and we will be in regular contact over the coming months, particularly as we develop our respective submissions to the Government’s Spending Review and the Dame Carol Black Review.
Andrew Brown will continue to work on drug and alcohol issues for MEAM and, in the longer-term, we will begin to consider our plans for the representation of drug and alcohol issues within MEAM in the future.