Security stepped up for school parties | ||||||
1 | Security on foreign school | 4 | “We are concerned that, as other | |||
trips is being stepped up | sources dry up for smugglers, school | |||||
following a number of | parties will become more vulnerable | |||||
incidents in which coaches carrying | to these sorts of crimes.” | |||||
pupils were used for drug smuggling. | 5 | After five months of consultation | ||||
2 | Last autumn, three suitcases of | with school authorities, anti-drug | ||||
cannabis resin worth £1.5m were | experts and HM Customs and | |||||
found among the luggage of a group | Excise, it has introduced a bag- | |||||
of children returning from a foreign | tagging scheme. In future, all | |||||
trip. Another school party was | luggage on its trips will have special | |||||
delayed by 12 hours at Dover after | labels that will be allocated and | |||||
cannabis with a street value of | checked by the party leader in | |||||
£500,000 was discovered on their | conjunction with the coach driver. | |||||
vehicle as they headed home from | 6 | “At the end of a holiday, | ||||
Spain. | children come out of the hotel and | |||||
3 | Top Class Travel, a specialist | throw their bags into a pile in the | ||||
operator for school trips, is | street. It’s easy for someone who has | |||||
sufficiently disturbed to have | been watching the hotel to add an | |||||
launched a scheme with the Anti- | extra one or two,” says Manson. “It | |||||
Drugs Alliance: “We’ve had minor | is particularly common in Holland, | |||||
incidents in the past, but last year we | but it is also now happening in | |||||
saw a couple of serious ones,” said | France and Spain.” | |||||
Jim Manson, managing director at | The Sunday Times | |||||
Top Class. |