Prisons (Substance Testing) Bill

Richard Holden Excerpts

2nd reading & 2nd reading: House of Commons
Friday 16th October 2020 Commons Chamber

[Mr Richard Holden (North West Durham) (Con)]

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time.

I am leading the debate on behalf of my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Dame Cheryl Gillan). She is unfortunately isolating and so cannot be here, but it is with great pleasure that I am speaking on her behalf. She has a great history of introducing private Members’ Bills. In fact, she took her first private Member’s Bill through over 10 years ago: the Autism Bill, which became the Autism Act 2009. I am hopeful that for the Bill’s later stages she may be able to return to take up the cudgel once more.

The purpose of the Bill is to ensure that our prisons and young offenders institutions are safer, more secure and ultimately better environments for rehabilitation. Although at the moment covid is proving a serious challenge to the prison system, overall in recent decades the misuse of drugs has become probably one of the biggest challenges faced in our prisons. A survey by Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons in 2018-19 showed that 45% of female prisoners and 48% of male prisoners found it easy or very easy to get drugs in prison. In 2019-20, 10.5% of random mandatory drug tests in prisons were positive for traditional drugs, such as cannabis or opiates, but when psychoactive substances are included the rate of positive tests rises by around 30% to 14% in all prisons.

Psychoactive drugs, and the misuse of prescription-only medication and pharmacy medicines in particular, is a relatively new problem in our prison system, but it is a growing and dangerous problem, and further action is needed now. The Bill seeks to improve the capability of prisons in England and Wales to test for the use of illicit substances and to take an important step forward in tackling the prevalence of drugs in prisons.

The Prison Service and the Youth Custody Service can currently test only for controlled drugs as defined under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 and specified substances listed in schedule 2 of the Prison Rules 1999 and the Young Offender Institution Rules 2000. In order to add a new drug to the list of specified substances, the Government need to manually add each new compound every time. As Members will appreciate, that causes delays, is resource intensive and is inefficient. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Hitchin and Harpenden (Bim Afolami), who tried to introduce this Bill in a previous Session. It is clear that the current process is not working. Despite the Prison Service and Youth Custody Service updating the list at regular intervals, ill-intentioned drug manufacturers and chemical experts can quickly get around the law by producing modified variants of the drugs, meaning that prisoners and young offenders are no longer able to be tested for them and their use goes undetected. They are often made in regimes in other countries around the world without any of the safeguards that we have here.

The scale of the problem with drugs in prisons is demonstrated by the data that is now available. In the year to March 2020 there were almost 22,000 incidents of drug finds in prisons in England and Wales alone—the highest number of incidents over the past decade—with an astonishing 182 kg of illicit drugs recovered from prisons. Drug use drives increased violence. We have seen that in prisons over recent years. Debts are enforced, discharged or avoided through assaults on other prisoners or on staff. Drug use also leads to incidents of self-harm.

Yesterday, I spoke to a prison officer at the Prison Officers Association in County Durham, who said that this was a serious and growing problem, and that psychoactive substances in particular cause real problems because officers often have no idea what is in them or how to treat them. They have had many suicide attempts by people on these drugs, which are very difficult to control. Prison officers are often putting their lives on the line to look after prisoners.

The Bill is a response to that issue. It is straightforward and simple. It allows the generalised definition of psychoactive substances provided by the Psychoactive Substances Act 2016 to be added to the statute book, which will allow the Prison Service and Youth Custody Service to test prisoners for any and all psychoactive substances, now and in the future. The Bill would, in a similar way, permit the testing of prisoners and young offenders for illicit use of prescription-only pharmacy medicines as defined by the Human Medicines Regulations 2012.

Crucially, the Bill future-proofs drug testing programmes in prisons and young offenders institutions, and it will allow the Prison Service and the Youth Custody Service to take the appropriate action to tackle the threat of drugs, whether that is referring prisoners and young offenders to healthcare treatment programmes or pursuing sanctions against those involved in the distribution and use of drugs.

The House has an opportunity to support provisions that could lead to fewer prisoners and young offenders leaving custody with drug dependency issues and therefore, hopefully, to a reduction in reoffending and safer communities for all our constituents. I hope that the benefits I have laid out are clear for the House to see and that the Bill will gain support from Members on both sides.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Holden]

With the leave of the House, I would like to make a very brief final remark. I know that my right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Dame Cheryl Gillan) has been watching because she has not only been messaging you, Mr Deputy Speaker; she has also been messaging me. She would like to say that she is very grateful to the entire House for its support for the Bill. She hopes to be able to take it back up in Committee, and she desperately hopes that it will end up on the statute book, as it will help save lives in prisons across our country.

Question put and agreed to.

Bill accordingly read a Second time; to stand committed to a Public Bill Committee (Standing Order No 63).