Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what proportion of police time is spent on possession offences compared with tackling organised drug crime.

The Police Activity Survey (PAS) provides an estimate of how much police time is spent on various policing activities. The PAS was conducted over a 7-day period in February 2023, with 35 out of the 43 police forces in England and Wales participating.

The results show that over this period, responding to specific crime incident activity accounts for 34.9% of all recorded police time. Of the time spent on specific crime incident activity, 3.1% was spent on possession of drug crime incidents, 2.7% on possession of weapons incidents and 5.6% on trafficking of drug incidents.

The PAS does not capture whether or not the offences were organised crime related. Therefore, no specific data is available on the proportion of time spent on tackling organised drug crime.