Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he will take to address unmet treatment needs for dependence on a) alcohol and b) other drugs, in the context of a recent report from the Forward Trust that estimates that 750,000 UK citizens are currently addicted to alcohol and 400,000 are addicted to other drugs.

Local authorities are responsible for commissioning alcohol and drug treatment and recovery services as part of their public health responsibilities. As a condition of the Public Health Grant, local authorities are responsible for improving the uptake of, and outcomes from, their drug and alcohol treatment services, based on an assessment of local need and a plan which has been developed with local health and criminal justice partners.

The Government’s estimates of dependence for opioids and crack, and for alcohol, have been used to produce estimates of unmet need, which are added to the Local Outcomes Framework, i.e. national priority outcomes delivered at the local level. Over the next three years, through the Public Health Grant, we will provide local authorities with a minimum of £3.4 billion of ringfenced funding for drug and alcohol prevention, treatment, and recovery.

Key elements of the Addiction Healthcare Goals (AHG) programme are already being rolled out, including the provision of over £10 million for the Addiction Research Leadership Programme to create a UK-wide pipeline of future research leaders, and £20 million for the ‘AHG: Catalysing Innovation Awards’ to accelerate new pharmaceutical, medical technology, and digital solutions. This work will strengthen our evidence base, and generate new treatments and recovery approaches to improve healthcare outcomes.