Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many opioid overdoses in custodial settings have (a) been successfully reversed and (b) resulted in fatalities in each of the last ten years.

The information requested is not held centrally.

Naloxone kits have been issued and maintained by individual healthcare providers across the prison estate and have not been supplied by the Ministry of Justice over the time specified in the question.

From January 2024, His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) is coordinating roll-out of Naloxone training on a voluntary basis to prison staff. We will collate data on the use of Naloxone by HMPPS staff as roll-out and usage progresses.

The information requested for opioid overdose reversals is not held centrally. In relation to fatalities, ONS data on drug-related deaths includes the number in which opiates are mentioned on the death certificate (which differs from the number of overdoses) – table 7 in this publication Drug-related deaths and suicide in prison custody - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk). However, this only covers up to 2019, as it uses data from Coroner’s reports on which there is a considerable time lag. Furthermore, depending on the circumstances, an opioid overdose could be classed as a self-inflicted death or an ‘other: non-natural' death. Therefore, without checking the individual cases, it is not possible to obtain an accurate figure from the wider data, on fatalities.