Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many drug overdoses took place in prisons from March (a) 2021-2022 and (b) 2022-2023 broken down by institution.

Between January 2021 and December 2021, a total of 2,273 incidents of self-harm were recorded that were linked to overdoses.

The total figure for January 2022 to December 2022 was 2,387 incidents linked to overdoses. Please see the accompanying table.

The data has been produced on a calendar basis to match published figures on method of self-harm. Information is reported for calendar rather than financial years to avoid the risk of identifying individuals in combination with published calendar year breakdowns of self-harm data.

We do not explicitly collect data on an “overdose” incident type. The data we have provided is based on the “self-harm” incident type. In particular, the data is based on self-harm categorised as “Self-Poisoning/Overdose/Substances/Swallowing” and subcategorised as “illegal drugs”, “own persons medicine” or “other persons medicine”.

The data provided is based on two main assumptions:

• Incidents relate to the consumption of substances, including illegal drugs and prescription medication.
• Incidents were judged by staff to be incidents of self-harm, i.e. where a prisoner deliberately harmed themselves.

There will be other incidents involving the consumption of substances that are not included as they were not reported as self-harm by the prison and so would not have been captured in the provided data.

These figures have been drawn from the HMPPS Incident Reporting System and although care is taken when processing and analysing returns, the detail is subject to the inaccuracies inherent in any large scale recording system. Although shown to the last case, the figures may not be accurate to that level.

The data only includes self-harm incidents collated centrally; identifying any wider incidents that lead to a hospitalisation and have a connection to drugs would exceed the cost threshold as it would require reading through the text of each incident.

We are committed to doing all we can to prevent deaths from drug overdoses in prison. We have outlined in both our Prisons Strategy White Paper and the Government’s 10-year drug strategy ‘From Harm to Hope’ (2021) how we will achieve this.

All prisons have a zero-tolerance approach to drugs. Our £100m Security Investment Programme, completed in March 2022, introduced measures such as 75 additional X-ray body scanners and airport-style gate security. To prevent the smuggling of illegal drugs such as psychoactive substances through the mail, we have deployed 95 next generation drug trace detection machines. We are aiming for full coverage of public sector prisons by March 2024.

We are also increasing the number of Incentivised Substance-Free Living units, where prisoners commit to remaining free of illicit drugs with regular drug testing and incentives. We have more than doubled the number of these from 25 last summer to 60 now and we are aiming to reach up to 100 by March 2025.