Prisons (Substance Testing) Bill

Rob Butler Excerpts

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

[Rob Butler (Aylesbury) (Con)]

I rise to speak in support of this excellent Bill, and I must declare my interest: immediately prior to my election, I was a non-executive director of Her Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service and previously spent four and a half years as a member of the Youth Justice Board. In those roles, I visited many prison establishments in England and Wales, and I should add that HMYOI Aylesbury is in my constituency. I would like to take this opportunity to pay tribute to the staff of custodial establishments up and down the country for their work, especially during the coronavirus crisis.

Drugs are the scourge of prisons. Indeed, in one that I visited, I was told that drugs now outranked escape as the main threat. We have heard some of the figures on drug testing, but behind numbers, as always, lie human experiences. I well remember being in a workshop of one category B prison and being overwhelmed by the brilliant craftsmanship of the offenders working there each morning. They would carve or sculpt intricate designs. They were doing work that is in great demand in the outside world. They were motivated and skilled. I asked one of the prisoners what he did in the afternoon, once the vocational training had finished. His answer was simple: “Get high to forget—take drugs so the time goes faster.” That is because, as the hon. Member for West Ham (Ms Brown) said, in many prisons the main driver of drug use is boredom. Other prisoners take drugs because they cannot cope. Drugs in prison provide escapism, albeit in an extremely dangerous way. That means that drugs in jail are big business. They generate substantial amounts of money for criminals, both inside and outside the prison estate.

Psychoactive substances, or PS, are of particular concern. They are often harder to intercept on the way into prisons, not least because they can be hidden on ordinary sheets of paper. There have even been cases of fake legal letters that are soaked in psychoactive substances being sent to prison, where they are then cut up into tiny pieces and sold on to other criminals to give them a fleeting high. In a category A prison, I was told that one A4-sized piece of paper soaked in PS can be worth £400.

The criminalisation of possession of psychoactive substances in custodial establishments is a very good thing, but there are always unintended consequences, and it has led to a boon for organised crime gangs operating inside the prison estate. PS are still relatively easy to come by outside prison, meaning, as one prison officer put it to me, that “everyone can now become Pablo Escobar.” It is a terrifying thought. One of the biggest dangers of PS is the unpredictable impact on different individuals. Some prisoners become catatonic. Others engage in extreme behaviours that almost defy imagination. Others still are humiliated.

What all this illustrates is the challenge that faces our prison staff day in, day out, and we as parliamentarians should do anything we can to help. However, our current legislative process to update the list of illegal substances is no longer fit for purpose. Making repeated amendments through secondary legislation to add each new formulation of a substance is cumbersome, slow and inefficient. Adopting the generic definition of a psychoactive substance, as proposed in clause 1 of the Bill, will mean that small alterations to the chemical formulation will not provide a loophole such that prisoners can claim they took nothing illegal. I submit that the proposed change is a necessary and sensible step to improve the ability of HMPPS to tackle PS in the estate.

It is important that we provide HMPPS and all its staff with the right tools to stay one step ahead of the criminals. Prevalence testing is one way to do that, enabling staff to identify new substances that are being taken. Creating an express statutory footing to do so, as proposed in the Bill, is therefore not only wise but necessary. There are also, unfortunately, cases where prescription and other pharmacy medicines are abused by prisoners, and I therefore welcome the intention in the Bill to widen the range of such substances that can be tested for, in order to clamp down on the illicit economy that arises from their misuse.

It is absolutely essential that we have a process of testing for drugs in our prisons and our youth offender institutions that is thorough, effective and able to respond to rapid changes in the market in both illicit and legal substances that are abused in our jails. This is a short Bill, which, on the face of it, makes relatively minor changes to the regime of drug testing, but its impact could be profoundly beneficial. I warmly congratulate my constituency neighbour and good friend Dame Cheryl Gillan on her efforts to make it more straightforward to tackle the curse of drugs in prison, and I thank the hon. Member for North West Durham (Mr Holden) for bringing it to the House on her behalf.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Eleanor Laing)]

Order. Will the hon. Gentleman reiterate that bit, instead referring to the right hon. Lady as—

[Rob Butler]

My right hon. Friend the Member for Chesham and Amersham (Dame Cheryl Gillan).

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

Thank you very much.