Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many drug seizures were made in each West Midlands prison in the last five years.

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 number of finds of drug seizures is provided in table 1. This table provides management information on drug seizures, counting a find of each drug type as one seizure. As these data have come from administrative systems they are subject to the issues inherent in any large scale administrative system, although every effort is made to record data accurately. This data has not been quality assured to the standards required of official statistics.

Prisons already use a comprehensive range of robust searching and security measures to detect items of contraband with intelligence-led searches, body searches, use of x-ray machines, metal detectors and CCTV surveillance cameras, as well as body orifice scanners all helping to tackle the use of mobile phones.

Increases in the above figures can be attributed to a number of different factors including management changes, leading to new data recording practices and introduction of new measures to combat drugs. An increase in searches and intelligence-gathering, including increased detection of New Psychoactive substances, has lead to higher detection rates.

Recently, prison governors received new guidance from the Ministry of Justice which sets out clearly for the first time the measures available to them to deal with the growing problem of New Psychoactive Substances (NPS /‘legal highs’). This reinforces the prison estate’s zero tolerance approach to contraband.