Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate her Department has made of the number of people who have been spiked through the use of injection needles in (a) Wales, (b) England, (c) Scotland and (d) Northern Ireland in each month since January 2021.

The Home Office does not collect figures for the number of people who have been spiked through the use of injection needles.

However, following the concerns raised about this new phenomenon last year, the Home Secretary has been receiving regular reports from the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC). The NPCC has established a reporting mechanism to enable forces to report any reported incidences of needle-spiking to help us to gain a better understanding of the scale and nature of the problem.