Kent’s police and crime commissioner has called for a "grown up" debate around the decriminalisation of cannabis.

Matthew Scott said that any change in legislation should only come after a wide-ranging examination that was evidence based.

He said the idea of a Royal Commission to examine the issue "might not be a bad idea".

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The Home Secretary has announced there is to be a review of the medicinal use of cannabis but the current ban on recreational use remained in place.

Asked about the issue, Mr Scott said: "When it comes to use of cannabis oils for medicinal use, absolutely we should be doing all we can for that poor little boy [referring to Billy Caldwell, 12-year-old with severe epilepsy, who was hospitalised after his medical cannabis oil was confiscated.

"I don’t see that, if we have medical evidence that this is an effective treatment and that it is safe, why we should not be using it."

But he was cautious over calls for relaxing the current laws.

"When it comes to legalisation more generally, we need to have a much more grown up debate about it, not one that just says arbitrarily let’s legalise it.

"We need to look at who's growing it; who is supplying it. We need to look much more carefully [and] we need to be careful about where this issue is being addressed from and that we are not inadvertently supporting criminality by making something legally available."

He added: "The law at the moment is robust but until there is a proper grown up debate that looks at the criminality and who is supplying it, we should not make any changes and jump to any conclusions."

The former Conservative Party leader William Hague has claimed the "battle [against cannabis] is effectively over" and the UK's drug policy is "inappropriate, ineffective and utterly out of date".