Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what recent assessment she has made of the prevalence of the use of the psychoactive substance, spice, in prisons.

The emergence of psychoactive substances in our prisons has been a game changer. We take a zero tolerance approach drugs in prisons. In response to the growing use of dangerous psychoactive substances, we have developed innovative new drug testing, trained over 300 drug detection dogs to specifically detect psychoactive substances and introduced new legislation, which makes it a criminal offence to possess any psychoactive substance in a custodial institution.

An important tool in assessing the use of drugs in prisons is via Random Mandatory Drug Testing (MDT). We introduced innovative testing for psychoactive substances as part of MDT in September this year. Data on use of psychoactive substances will be published alongside data for other drugs as part of official statistics next year.