Team spirit: Hamoaze house users have used the NDC-funded astro pitch to play in football tournaments with staff, police and residents.

ANDY, born and bred in Plymouth, was a heroin user from 18 and is now at 42 a regular attender at Hamoaze House. 'Here we feel like we're a family looking out for one another, helping each other recover. When local people were against this project they probably feared that we would all be dealers and so on, but then they saw that we were coming here to get off drugs, not to spread them.' As Hamoaze House's chief executive Roma French explains, 'users here are stabilised on prescription or coming off drug use, not people who are out of their heads'.

The centre has a much wider impact than its drug recovery work. Many local families' lives have been severely affected by drug and alcohol. Children in these families have often had problems with anti-social behaviour, disrupting their education and that of their classmates. And drug dependency has also increased crime.

'Six years ago we all went mad when we read in the local paper that there would be a drug centre coming here,' says Lynne Bell, a Devonport resident who is now employed by the local New Deal for Communities [NDC] team as cultural development officer. 'We made protest banners and marched against it. Yet today 99% of residents who were on that march completely support the work of Hamoaze House.

'It has had a huge impact helping us deal with problems that we perhaps didn't face up to before as a community. I for one just didn't realise that many of my neighbours had issues like this in their families.'

Bell, who has also worked in security (a former store detective), says that many of the people she once detected for shop lifting are now using the facilities at Hamoaze House: 'Shoplifting is the normal way for drug and alcohol users to finance their habit here, we have found. When I was a store detective I just felt I was nicking the scrudge. Now I can see that these are real people with real lives who have an impact on others around them. They are people who need help to stop doing this, not just punishment.'

Devonport, the part of Plymouth where the NDC is based, has had a major problem with heroin for some years but also with crack more recently. Hamoaze House helps people get off their habits, offering a carrot that complements the stick of the extra police sergeant and eight PCs paid for in the NDC area by NDC (whose costs are gradually being absorbed by Devon and Cornwall Police).

How Hamoaze House works

Roma French, chief executive of Hamoaze House: 'We had a major meeting and I asked if there was anyone in the hall who wanted the project. Just one lady put her hand up and said "My son died of an overdose two months ago. Maybe you could have stopped that happening". I saw that as the turning point.'

'The Devonport area has disproportionate problems, often with alcohol,' explains Roma French, the chief executive. 'It was seen as the place where sailors got smashed. Union Street, which connects Devonport to the city, once had 100 boozers. Even now it is a red light area. None of this has been a good environment for local people.

'We see ourselves as being at the forefront of helping to improve the local community's sense of safety and self worth. Users who come here from the NDC area and elsewhere are signing up to a new way of life. The more we can help this way the more we can reduce the impact of drug misuse and alcohol on everyone else around them in their area.'

Project manager Mark Bignell helps to run the 'affected others' group: 'There is a huge job to be done helping those around drug and alcohol abusers to cope with the impact this has on them and the wider community. For example, we have grannies coming in here worried about their grandchildren because their daughters are on heroin.'

The affected others group, previously only available on Monday afternoons, is being funded by the Drug Action Team to run two evenings a week as well as the afternoon session, so that working people and more fathers can come. Bignell: 'This group is all about sharing concerns, sharing knowledge, and destigmatising the problem. Parents feel they have to solve this problem themselves - we help them understand that they can't do this on their own. Sometimes they lie on behalf of their children. Sometimes they pay their children's bills. We help them understand that by doing these things they are removing the consequences of drug users' actions.' So far this group has helped 46 people, with 11 actively attending session regularly in June 2004.

NDC support

The NDC has funded capital works at the House, including the gym and a small astro pitch. It also pays for two of the five drug workers and two sports development workers. They offer users a chance to improve their fitness and get used to exercise, as well as running the gym for any local resident and community group to use.

Offering services and facilities to residents with no connection to its core services has helped to demystify what Hamoaze House does. It has also helped to provide support services that were previously unavailable to local residents.

Lynne Bell: 'the only real social activities in Devonport have tended to be going out on the beer. There is so much going on at Hamoaze House that gives people real alternatives, people can be free of the pressure to go to the pub here.'

Some of the funding for Hamoaze recently has come from seized assets from a local drug dealer - £6,000 was donated by the police to help pay for facilities that local children can use, such as trampolines and a 'junk' band.

Health and community cohesion

Fitness for all: Matt Connell and Tom Stead at the Hamoaze House gym, frequented by users and residents together.

Community consultation was a challenge for the charity, which now runs Hamoaze House, a prestigious former Navy residence last used by the Royal Marines as their headquarters during the Falklands war. Chief executive Roma French: 'We only had three weeks to find the money we needed to set up this centre when the former Urban Development Corporation was given the task of finding a new user in 1998. It was very unfortunate that we couldn't consult effectively but this property deal was too good to miss.'

Once residents saw that the centre would help people from their community rather than bring problems in from outside, the conflict subsided. Today, with NDC support, the building has a mixed use, helping to reduce any misunderstandings or accusations of special treatment.

Local residents use the gym here alongside service users, helping to break down the barriers between the groups. NDC area residents can get exercise on prescription in a project called Fit for Life being run with local GPs. This gives them access to free or low cost gym facilities as part of their healthy living.

Matt Connell and Tom Stead are the NDC-funded sports development workers. They explained that some gyms can be intimidating but here there are no worries that people will all be body builders or wearing Lycra. Matt Connell: 'a complete mix of residents and service users use the gym, which is busy all hours. Our work has included setting up a six a side tournament on the astro pitch. We put together a team of service users to play against teams from the local area, from the probation service, local PCs, the CID and officers from the drug squad. Everyone beat the police! Our Service users didn't win this year but we hope they will next.'

Stigma or access?

Even if residents now accept and value Hamoaze House in Devonport, wasn't it stigmatising a deprived area further to site a drug recovery project here? Wendy Hannon, joint commissioner of the Drug Action Team: 'That would be the case if there were no other facilities in middle class areas, but in fact the service centres that deal with people with the immediate problem of getting off drugs in the first place are based in those areas.'

Gary Wallace, the Drug Action Team's coordinator, agrees: 'what people with drug problems want is easily accessible places to get help. Their families want this too. We found previously that city centre facilities were hard to get to, especially for people living in an area like Devonport where there is no tradition of being in the city centre every day. And transport can be costly. This was putting people off accessing the facilities available to help them. The shared care scheme we operated here did not include any GPs in the NDC area - they were worried about people burgling their properties and stealing methadone etc. That has now changed, thanks to the NDC. Hamoaze House is now central to our city wide strategy on drugs.'

Mainstreaming

Making music with new technology at Hamoaze House: Paul is a drum and bass DJ learning how to mix his own music: 'I'm doing this to keep my options open.'

NDC support has been a catalyst to encourage the mainstream agencies to pick up funding for projects that prove their worth, says Wallace. 'With NDC you can try things out. NDC provides a test bed. We can't fund all projects. But here we can evaluate activities and services that are funded by NDC. Then, when we know how they operate, we go with the ones that work and fund them ourselves.'

Hamoaze House has revenue costs of around £311,000 per year, the majority of which is covered by a cocktail of grants including £90,000 from the NDC. 'Gradually we are mainstreaming this and taking the cost into the Drug Action Team budget,' he says. 'For example, this year is the first year we have been able to exceed its minimum running costs for skeleton services.

'The reason this project is important is that there were previously serious gaps in service provision. Once people had come off the worst of their drug addiction, there was no next stage for them to move on to, to get off treatment altogether. Now that has changed, with help from NDC.'

The link with anti-social behaviour

Kay is a former crack user convicted for selling heroin: 'When I got out of prison in 2002 things didn't look like they were going to improve for me. I moved away from where all my old associates were hanging out and came here.'

Lynne Bell believes that the sport, music and holiday activity sessions for young people held at Hamoaze House are particularly important: 'We have a lot of problems with anti social behaviour by young children here. At the moment there are ten Anti Social Behaviour contracts in force in Devonport. Many of the kids on these contracts live with parents who have chaotic lifestyles or are drug users or alcoholics. Yet under-8s can only help from social services - often an inappropriate last resort. 'These young people are often excluded from youth provision in the area and are usually already caught up in the criminal justice/social services system somewhere,' she says.

During the first summer of opening, the staff team built links with the local kids using the grounds as a place for them to escape and play. 'The staff didn't need to wander the streets looking for these children, the kids would be waiting on the doorstep. They decided this was a place where they felt safe, secure, valued and where they wanted to be. This was a great way to build links with the community and strengthen the staff team.' Funding was recently secured for a dedicated youth team at the house.

Roma French explains: 'we found a strong link between the behaviour of children with problems in the area and users of drugs and alcohol in their families. In that sense, our work here with recovering drug and alcohol users can have a huge impact on the prospects of local children and on community cohesion. With NDC support we are doing an awful lot more than helping the minority of Devonport people with drug problems. Our impact extends well beyond that group.'