Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how many incidents of confiscation of the legal high known as spice there were in prisons in England and Wales in each year since 2010.

The HMPPS Annual Digest for the relevant years, where available, contains information in relation to the number of drug finds on the prison estate. The digest contains all available data on drug type and class.

The Government takes seriously the conveyance of drugs into prisons, including psychoactive substances. In April 2021 we published a National Prisons Drugs Strategy to reduce drug misuse in our prisons, in order to increase safety for both staff and prisoners, and contribute towards ensuring that prisons are places of opportunity and change for prisoners.

In September 2016, HMPPS became the first prison service in the world to introduce innovative mandatory drug tests for psychoactive substances. We have made it a criminal offence to possess psychoactive substances in prison and trained more than 300 sniffer dogs specifically to detect these drugs.

In August 2019, the Government committed to invest £100 million in prison security in an ambitious new Security Investment Programme. One of the aims of the Programme was to reduce the quantity of drugs entering the prison estate.

Since then, we have installed 73 X-ray body scanners across the prison estate and to date have had over 9000 positive indications. The roll out of Enhanced Gate Security (EGS), replicating the tough measures used in airport screening, has resulted in hundreds of illicit items being prevented from entering prisons.