Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what assessment he has made of the level of use of synthetic drugs in prisons in each of the the last three years.

• Psychoactive substances are a significant driver of violence and instability in prisons. We have put in place a range of supply and demand reduction measures to address the availability and use of such harmful substances. This is based on a multi-agency approach working closely with health partners and law enforcement agencies. We are the first prison jurisdiction in the world to have developed a test for psychoactive substances, and have trained more than 300 sniffer dogs to specifically detect psychoactive substances. We have invested £3m in enhancing our intelligence capability to identify the organised crime groups and individuals behind supply routes, and are using this intelligence to work with the police to disrupt them.

• Figures drawn from the HMPPS Incident Reporting System suggest there were just under 10,000 incidents where psychoactive substances were found in prisons between October 2015 and October 2017 in England and Wales. Data prior to October 2015 cannot be provided as this is when a new incident type was introduced to the Incident Reporting System.

• Testing for psychoactive substances was only in place across the whole prison estate from September 2016 onwards. Between October 2016 and March 2017, there were 27,277 random mandatory drug tests administered. Each sample taken is tested for a range of illicit drugs, including psychoactive substances. As these are random drugs tests, prisoners tested in a single month are unique, but an individual prisoner could be chosen in multiple months. Figures for 2017/18 will be published in the Annual HMPPS Digest in July 2018.