Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the answer by Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford on 28 October (HL Deb, col 772), why data on the costs of the supply of methadone are not collected centrally; and what data are available on the number of patients using methadone in different regions of England.

The Government does not collect detailed data like the costs of supplying specific drugs, such as methadone.

Public Health England collects data from the National Drug Treatment Monitoring System on the number of people in treatment for opiates who are receiving a pharmacological intervention. Most of these people received prescriptions as part of opiate substitution therapy, for which methadone is the most commonly prescribed medication.