Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many incidents of confiscation of legal highs there were in prisons in England and Wales in each year since 2010.

The National Offender Management Service (NOMS) takes the issue of all contraband in prisons extremely seriously and deploys a comprehensive range of robust searching and security measures to detect items of contraband both at the point of entry to the prison and concealed within the prison. We do not tolerate drugs in prison and anyone caught with them will be punished and could face further prosecution.

The success of NOMS Drug Strategy is illustrated by the reduction of drug misuse - as measured by the random mandatory drug testing programme - which has declined by 17.0 percentage points over the past 17 years (positive rates were 24.4% in 1996/7 and 7.4% in 2013/14) despite the fact that more drugs are being tested for.

New psychoactive substances are a recent issue affecting many parts of society, both here and abroad, including our prisons. NOMS is working with its partners to develop methods for testing for NPS and preventing them from entering establishments. Work is also taking place to increase levels of understanding about the risks that NPS present to offenders, with a view to providing them and those who work with them in prisons and the community with appropriate information, guidance and support.

The Government recently introduced an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill to expand prisons' powers to test prisoners for non-controlled drugs. This would allow prison staff to conduct mandatory drug tests on prisoners for non-controlled drugs, such as new psychoactive substances and medicines, if the required tests were available.

All figures in this answer have been drawn from live administrative data systems which may be amended at any time. Although care is taken when processing and analysing the returns, the detail collected is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. The data has been extracted by searching for the exact terms given in the question and not any slang or alternative spellings. The data are not subject to audit.

The table below gives the number of seizures in prisons in England and Wales in the timeframe requested of Mephedrone, BZP, Spice and Ketamine, and described exactly as such on the database.

The term “Legal Highs” represents hundreds of different substances of which spice is just one. To try to calculate the instances of all such substances being confiscated would therefore only be possible at disproportionate cost.