Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 8 January 2024 to Question 7583 on Prisons: Drugs, how many random mandatory drug tests carried out between 2018 and 2023 were positive.

Between April 2018 and March 2023, there were 25,323 positive rMDT tests for both traditional drugs and psychoactive substances. Data for April to December 2023 will be published as part of the 2023-24 Annual Digest.

No new Official Statistics on rMDT positivity have been published since the year to March 2020, because since the start of the COVID pandemic testing levels and the number of prisons with sufficient testing have been too low to provide robust data.

The range of drugs tested in the rMDT panel is subject to change in response to new emerging drug types and new patterns of drug use. This is necessary to ensure our testing approach is targeting the right substances. These limitations mean no robust rate of positive tests can be calculated from the above data and this number of positive tests should not be compared to the number of tests.

Care is taken when processing and analysing returns, but the detail is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large-scale recording system. Although shown to the last case, the figures may not be accurate to that level.

This does not include tests that were spoilt or lost in transit on the way to the laboratory.