Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many incidents there were of drugs being found in HM Prison (a) Belmarsh, (b) Feltham, (c) Isis, (d) Pentonville, (e) Thameside, (f) Wandsworth and (g) Wormwood Scrubs in each year from 2010 to 2014.

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.

There is growing evidence that there has been an increase in smuggling of New Psychoactive Substances (NPS) into prisons. We have already announced a series of measures to crack down on this and will ensure Governors have the powers and support they need to tackle it.

In addition the Justice Secretary announced last week that NOMS will continue to invest in new technology, such as bodyscanners, to stop drugs getting into prisons.

The number of finds in each prison establishment for the calendar years 2010 through to 2014 is shown in the table below.

Table 1: Reported incidents of where a drug was found (1)

Source: National Offender Management Service NOMIS IRS

Key: ‘-‘ Establishment not operational

Notes on table:

(1) The table shows the number of reported incidents where a drug was declared to be found. More than one type of drug may be found in any one incident.

(2) Isis opened in July 2010

(3) Thameside opened in March 2012

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 are not subject to audit.