Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent steps he has taken to prevent drug use in prisons.

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. These include drug detection dogs, procedures to tackle visitors and others who seek to smuggle drugs and phones into prisons, and mobile phone detection technology. NOMS has rolled out a networked IT intelligence system and provided prisons with short range portable mobile phone blockers which will help prisons prevent prisoners using mobile phones, which are often associated with drug supply.

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 prisoners are being tested for a greater range of drugs.

The government recently introduced an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill to expand prisons' powers to test prisoners for non-controlled drugs. If agreed and enacted, 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.