The Government has taken decisive action to reduce prescription drug-related deaths in England by tackling overprescribing and improving patient safety. In September 2021, the Department published the National Overprescribing Review, which set out measures to ensure that patients receive the most appropriate treatment. These measures include better use of technology, more effective prescription reviews, and alternatives to medicines where clinically appropriate.

In March 2023, NHS England issued a framework entitled Optimising personalised care for adults prescribed medicines associated with dependence or withdrawal symptoms. This framework sets out five actions for integrated care boards, focusing on the early identification of risk, personalised care planning, and shared decision-making to support safe tapering of medication and alternative treatments. These steps aim to improve patient outcomes by reducing harm from dependency-forming medicines such as opioids and benzodiazepines.

Integrated care boards are the National Health Service organisations responsible for arranging the provision of health services within their area in line with local population need and taking account of relevant guidance.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

A response to the Hon gentleman’s Parliamentary Question of 30th October is attached.

The Government is committed to ensuring that anyone with a drug or alcohol problem can access the help and support they need, and we recognise the need for evidenced-based, high-quality treatment.

Local authorities are responsible for assessing local need for alcohol and drug prevention and treatment in their area, and for commissioning services to meet these needs. In addition to the Public Health Grant, in 2025/26 the Department is providing a total of £310 million in additional targeted grants to improve drug and alcohol services and recovery support, which includes housing and employment. Havering Borough Council, of which Romford is a part, will receive £400,302 from this additional grant funding in 2025/26. Further details are available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/drug-and-alcohol-treatment-and-recovery-funding-2025-to-2026/drug-and-alcohol-treatment-and-recovery-funding-allocations-2025-to-2026

Alongside the funding allocations, the Department also has a range of existing and forthcoming best practice resources and guidance that supports those working in the sector to tailor drug and alcohol treatment services to meet local needs, to improve treatment outcomes. For example, the commissioning quality standard provides guidance to local authorities on how to ensure they have a shared understanding of local need, including the experiences of diverse populations. The commissioning quality standard can be found at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/commissioning-quality-standard-alcohol-and-drug-services

Later this year the Department will also be publishing the United Kingdom’s clinical guidelines on alcohol treatment. The aim of the guidelines is to improve and support good practice to achieve better outcomes for people with alcohol problems.

Drug-related deaths are tragically at record highs and this government is committed to gripping this problem.

The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) is actively working to reduce the number of drug-related deaths and has invested an additional £267 million in drug and alcohol treatment this year, improving the quality and capacity of drug and alcohol treatment services in England.

This is supporting delivery of a national action plan to prevent a greater number of drug and alcohol-related deaths. The plan has five priorities around improving: treatment practice; local systems; toxicology and surveillance; stigma; and poly-drug and alcohol use. Guidance was published in September 2024 Preventing drug and alcohol deaths: partnership review process - GOV.UK to help local partnerships set up and evaluate their review processes for drug-related deaths, alcohol-related deaths and near-fatal overdoses.

Alongside this, the Home Office is providing funding to law enforcement partners to target the organised crime groups and county lines gangs supplying harmful drugs to our streets.

A further part of our response is addressing the threat from synthetic drugs, including synthetic opioids like nitazenes, as well as synthetic cannabinoids and benzodiazepines, which have been linked to drug related deaths in the UK. The Home Office, DHSC, National Crime Agency, Border Force and the National Police Chiefs Council are working with local partners to proactively monitor the situation, tracking drug related deaths and other intelligence to ensure a quick response to respond to the threat as required. This includes expanding access to naloxone, a life-saving medicine that reverses the effects of an opioid overdose, including synthetic opioids.

Through our mission-driven government, we will continue to work with partners across health, policing, devolved governments and wider public services to coordinate and drive down drug use and build a fairer Britain for all.

The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.

A response to the Hon gentleman Parliamentary Question of 21st March is attached.

The Government has not made a formal assessment of the benefits of drug checking facilities, but it recognises the potential harm reduction benefits of them.

The Government facilitates drug checking facilities provided that the possession and supply of controlled drugs are licensed by the Home Office Drugs and Firearms Licensing Unit or, exceptionally, relevant exemptions under the Misuse of Drugs Regulations 2001 may apply.

Ministers are clear that drug checking services must not condone drug use and should only be delivered where licensed and operated responsibly, in line with Government policy to ensure that they discourage drug use and signpost potential users to treatment and support.

The Department of Health and Social Care continues to monitor the use of nitazenes and other synthetic opioids and has taken action to tackle the threat they pose. In July 2023, a National Patient Safety Alert was issued to the National Health Service and others, warning of potent synthetic opioids implicated in heroin overdoses and deaths and actions that local areas should take. The Department of Health and Social Care is a core member of the cross-government Task Force to develop mitigations to the synthetic opioids threat. Membership of the task force also includes the Home Office, the Ministry of Justice, National Crime Agency, HM Prisons and Probation Service, Border Force and the police. As part of those mitigations, the Department of Health and Social Care is accelerating its work to expand access to naloxone and developing a drugs surveillance and early warning system.

The Government is investing £780 million nationally between 2022/23 and 2024/25 through drug strategy funding to improve drug treatment and recovery systems which will focus on increasing the numbers in treatment for opiate use.

In the South East specifically, an additional £43.7 million has been allocated via the Supplementary Substance Misuse Treatment and Recovery (SSMTR) Grant and £3.3 million for the Inpatient Detoxification Grant to improve drug and alcohol treatment and recovery systems, totalling £47m. The following tables show indicative funding allocations for these grants for each area in the South East:

Further details of funding allocations for individual local authority areas are available at the following link:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/extra-funding-for-drug-and-alcohol-treatment-2024-to-2025

In December 2021, the Government launched its ten-year drug strategy, From Harm to Hope, to cut crime and save lives. As part of this, £300 million has been allocated to fund activity to break drugs supply chains from end-to-end, this includes restricting upstream flow, securing the UK border, and ensuring we remain agile in the face of changing threats.

The NCA, the Police and Border Force are delivering a robust multi-agency response to detections of nitazenes, ensuring lines of enquiry are prioritised and vigorously pursued to stem any supply of illicit synthetic opioids to and within the UK. This approach sends a clear message to serious and organised criminals that supply of these dangerous substances will not be tolerated in the UK.

We have also established a cross-Government Taskforce to lead and co-ordinate the UK’s strategic response to the risk from synthetic opioids. Members include the Home Office, the Department for Health and Social Care, Ministry of Justice, National Crime Agency, HM Prisons and Probation Service, Border Force and the police.

The Government recently laid a draft affirmative Order in November 2023 to control 20 substances under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971, including 14 nitazenes as Class A drugs. This will likely come into force in March. The maximum sentence for possession or supply of a Class A drug is up to life imprisonment, a fine, or both.

On 15 December 2023, the ACMD recommended an updated generic definition for nitazene variants. The Government will respond to this recommendation shortly.

Additionally, through the Criminal Justice Bill, we are introducing new powers for the police to take action against criminals who intend to use pill presses and encapsulators to manufacture illicit drugs like nitazenes and other synthetic opioids.

As part of the cross-government Drugs Strategy, MoJ received up to £120m funding to get more offenders into treatment. We work closely with NHS England to ensure that all those who need drug treatment in prison have access to a full range of high-quality treatment, with a focus on abstinence-based recovery.

To do this we are rolling out up to 18 new Drug Recovery Wings, providing a dedicated space for prisoners to focus on achieving abstinence from illicit drugs and prescribed substitutes such as methadone. We are also opening 100 Incentivised Substance Free Living Wings, recruiting Drug Strategy Leads in all male category C and women's prisons to coordinate a whole system approach to tackling drugs, as well as Health and Justice Coordinators nationwide to ensure continuity of care for prison leavers.

We have also invested £100m in prison security to prevent drugs from entering prison in the first place through our Security Investment Programme, including reducing the conveyance of illicit items such as drugs and mobile phones.

The Government takes the supply of substances for their psychoactive effect very seriously. There are legitimate uses for nitrous oxide, such as in medicine, dentistry and as a propellant for whipped cream canisters, but those who supply nitrous oxide who know, or who are reckless as to whether, it will be used for its psychoactive effect may be subject to a maximum sentence of seven years’ imprisonment, an unlimited fine, or both under the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016. The term “supply” includes distribution for the purposes of the legislation.

The Government has published guidance for retailers to satisfy themselves that they comply with the law, available on the gov.uk website. The guidance recommends that retailers, including those operating online, should pay particular attention to the potential for abuse of nitrous oxide, especially where customers seek to buy in bulk or large volumes, and suggests that retailers may wish to carry out age checks to prevent those at highest risk from gaining access to psychoactive substances.

With regard to the online sale of nitrous oxide, in the Queen’s Speech on 19 December 2019, the Government committed to develop legislation to improve internet safety for all. We have published the Full Government Response to the Online Harms White Paper consultation, which sets out the new expectations on companies to keep their users safe online. The new regulatory framework will establish a duty of care on companies to improve the safety of their users online, overseen and enforced by an independent regulator. The Full Government Response will be followed by legislation, which we are working on at pace, and will be ready this year.

The National Statistics release ‘Permanent and fixed-period exclusions in England 2016 to 2017’ includes information on permanent and fixed period exclusions by reason. The full release is available here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/permanent-and-fixed-period-exclusions-in-england-2016-to-2017.

Information for local authorities by reason and academic year is available in the 'Underlying data' section of the release.

The misuse of drugs in prison drives violence, vulnerability and crime and so tackling this is one of our top priorities. We do not have statistics to demonstrate a causal link between illicit phones and drug misuse but we know that illicit mobile phones can be used for a variety of harmful purposes by criminals in prison, including to organise the supply of drugs. The use of mobile phones in prisons is an important cog in the infrastructure that supports and fuels crime and violence. Consequently, we are improving our security to restrict the availability of both drugs and mobile phones. We use body, property, cell and area searches, metal-detecting scanners and drug and phone detection dogs across the estate. We have recently invested an additional £7 million in modern technology, including extending the use of phone blocking technology and improved searching techniques. We are also investing £6 million to tackle drug supply and reduce demand in 10 of the most challenging prisons, with body scanners and more staff focused on effective searching.

To reduce the demand for illicit mobile phones, we are also expanding the roll-out of in-cell telephones. Currently, 20 public sector prisons have in-cell phones. We are now investing a further £10 million to roll-out in-cell phones to a further 30 prisons by March 2020. Calls can only be made to pre-agreed numbers and can be monitored, with governors able to remove phones from those who misuse them. We know that maintaining prisoners’ family ties is hugely important too, with prisoners who receive contact from their family while in prison 39% less likely to reoffend. This will enable prisoners to maintain relationships with their family and access talking support services, in a managed and secure way, while we continue to take action to restrict the supply of illicit phones.

The number of offenders found guilty and sentenced to immediate custody at all courts for offences of possession of a controlled drug, broken down by class of drug, in England and Wales, from 2009 to 2013, can be viewed in the table.

The number of offenders found guilty and sentenced to immediate custody at all courts for offences of possession of a controlled drug, broken down by class of drug, in England and Wales, from 2009 to 2013, can be viewed in the table.

The Department has not undertaken an assessment of the link between alcohol misuse and obesity.

The Government's ‘Healthy Lives, Healthy People: A call to action on obesity in England’, October 2011, states that alcoholic drinks can be high in calories and contribute to the energy imbalance that can lead to being overweight and obesity. A copy of the document has already been placed in the Library.

We do not collect data on a constituency by constituency basis. The following table shows the number of reported personal injury road accidents where at least one car driver was assigned a contributory factor of "impaired by alcohol" or "impaired by drugs (illicit or medicinal)", for the London region, in each of the last five years:

The Ministry of Justice Court Proceedings Database holds information on defendants proceeded against, found guilty and sentenced for criminal offences in England and Wales.

The number of defendants found guilty at all courts for selected offences under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 relating to methylamphetamine (Crystal meth) and amphetamines, within the Havering local justice area and England and Wales in 2011, can be viewed in the following table.

FRANK, the Government's drugs information and advice service, includes information on the risks of the use of methamphetamine. The Department obtains expert medical advice to ensure that the information on FRANK is as accurate and up to date as possible.

Information on the effects of methamphetamine use, as well as other illicit and licit substances, is contained in the document published by the Department in August 2011: ‘A summary of the health harms of drugs: A guide to the risks and harms associated with substance misuse’. A copy of this document has already been placed in the Library.

Data on the cost of treating users of individual drugs, such as methamphetamine, are not centrally collected.

FRANK, the Government's drugs information and advice service, includes information on the risks of the use of methamphetamine. The Department obtains expert medical advice to ensure that the information on FRANK is as accurate and up to date as possible.

Information on the effects of methamphetamine use, as well as other illicit and licit substances, is contained in the document published by the Department in August 2011: ‘A summary of the health harms of drugs: A guide to the risks and harms associated with substance misuse’. A copy of this document has already been placed in the Library.

Data on the cost of treating users of individual drugs, such as methamphetamine, are not centrally collected.

The Alcohol Strategy published in March 2012 outlines the action that the Government are taking to address underage binge drinking including support to parents and young people about the dangers of alcohol. This also includes doubling the maximum fine for the offence of persistently selling alcohol to children to £20,000 and increasing the punitive period of closure that can be imposed on a premises from 48 to 336 hours (two weeks).