Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what steps he is taking to limit prisoners' access to (a) legal drugs and (b) other psychoactive substances.

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.

NOMS is aware of the increase of the use of New Psychoactive substances (NPS) across the prison estate and has developed comprehensive guidance for prison governors and staff, which sets out the existing measures available to them to deal with NPS in the same way as other drugs. This includes;

Any prisoner who is suspected of being involved in smuggling prohibited items, including legal highs, through visits can face cellular confinement, loss of privileges or have days added to their time in prison.

The government recently introduced an amendment to the Criminal Justice and Courts Bill to expand prisons' powers to test prisoners for non-controlled drugs. New, additional powers in the Criminal Courts and Justice Bill will give powers to specify non-controlled drugs (including so-called ‘legal highs’) which can be tested for as part of the Mandatory Drug Testing Programme.

In addition to the existing searching measures in place NOMS have trained 13 active drug dogs in the detection of NPS. Training kits will shortly be issued to all trainers to enable all active drug dogs to be trained to detect NPS as a ‘bolt on’ to their standard training.