Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how she is monitoring deaths from synthetic drugs.

The Department has a longstanding surveillance system in place to collect information on the nature and location of novel drug use and drug markets, and receives reports alerting us to harms experienced. Work is ongoing to improve drug surveillance on synthetic opioids, through development of an early warning system which will include new data feeds, such as ambulance call-out data.

For surveillance purposes, the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities reconciles local and regional reports received via our drug alerts system, with police force reports received by the National Crime Agency, to arrive at an agreed figure for recent nitazene deaths. Statistics on the number of deaths related to other synthetic drugs are reported by the Office for National Statistics, and will be published in its annual report on the number of deaths related to drug poisoning.