“(1) The Secretary of State must prepare an assessment of the value for money of the provisions of this Act in achieving their objectives.

(2) That assessment must consider—

(a) the extent to which the Act is achieving its objectives;

(b) the number of tests conducted;

(c) the number of positive results;

(d) the number of novel psychoactive substances found;

(e) the number of prescription-only substances found;

(f) the timeliness of updates to the testing regime when new substances are introduced into prisons;

(g) the amount spent on testing;

(h) the net effects on expenditure on the treatment of substance misuse;

(i) the effects of this Act on value for money in substance testing in prisons.

(3) A report on the assessment must be laid before Parliament no later than one year after the Act comes into force.”—

Brought up, and read the First time.

I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.

With this it will be convenient to discuss new Clause 2—Reports by the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs—

“(1) The Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs must make biannual reports to Parliament on substance testing in prisons.

(2) Each report under this section must include assessments of—

(a) the number of substances that have been tested for;

(b) which substances have newly appeared in prisons, and in what quantities;

(c) the speed at which novel substances are being accounted for by the testing regime;

(d) the effects of the provisions of this Act on the health of prisoners, including any effects on numbers of suicides or serious self-harm events in prisons.

(3) Any report under this section may contain recommendations for action they might have for healthcare providers in prisons, HM Prisons Service or any other public body relating to substance testing in prisons

New Clause 1 would require the Government to publish an assessment of the impact and value for money of the Bill within a year of its coming into force. I hope the Bill will increase the speed at which new psychoactive substances are identified in the prison system, and I hope the system will be able to identify quickly where medicines are being misused before that leads to harm. I hope that more people who need treatment for their drug problems will be identified, and that access to treatment will therefore improve. I hope the performance and value for money of the testing provider will improve, because it has a new, clearer mission and renewed scrutiny from the Ministry and Parliament.

We all hope there are results, but whether the benefits of the Bill are realised will depend on policy decisions and their implementation by both the Prison Service and the outsourced testing provider. I hope the Minister will say something about that, particularly about the value for money of the existing contract and what is happening to ensure that the testing service provided will be fit for purpose by the time the Bill comes into force. For me, the most important aspect of this is ensuring that treatment improves, because we know there are currently failures in the system.

The most recent data show that 11% of people receiving substance misuse treatment in prison said they had a problem with NPSs. For many, they will not be the only substances they are misusing. That proportion has been rising; it was just 5% in 2015-16, but, given the very high estimates for use in some prisons, it is probably reasonable to expect that the numbers of NPS users in treatment will need to increase further.

Those figures suggest that currently, spice users may be disproportionately unlikely to be in treatment; as we know, some evidence suggests that around one third of those misusing drugs in prison last year were NPS users. Given that the tests have been inaccurate, the true proportion could be even higher. All that suggests that treatment rates for NPS in prisons are significantly lower than they need to be. In the community at large, just 0.8% of those known to the national drug treatment monitoring system had an NPS problem last year.

That is concerning, because it raises the possibility that there may not be the knowledge or established treatment options available for people leaving custody across the country. I would like to hear what recent assessments the Government have made of the proportion of NPS users in prison who are in treatment, what plans the Government have to improve access to treatment for NPS users on the basis of the Bill, and what plans are in place to ensure that NPS users leaving custody have good access to treatment in the community.

The potential for a significant improvement in monitoring treatment and outcomes is there. Passing this Bill will be a good prompt for the Government to ensure that they provide the resources required for that to happen. If the Minister will commit to making a written statement on these matters in due course, after the Bill has commenced and enough time has passed for an assessment to be made, I will happily withdraw this new clause.

New clause 2 would require the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, as an expert body that has the central role in advising us on all issues relating to substance misuse, to publish a report to Parliament every six months on the substances that are getting into our prisons and their effects, the adequacy of the testing regime and any recommendations it might have as a result of its findings.

The Bill would remove the requirement for the Government to involve Parliament in the process for adding new substances to the testing regime. As a means to improve the responsiveness of testing, that is welcome, but it reduces the number of opportunities for and the level of scrutiny that we can apply to drug testing and to the way drug testing is used.

I believe we need to find a way to remedy that potential lack of transparency and scrutiny and to ensure that the results of anonymised prevalence testing are not kept as a secret for prison governors, HMPPS, managers and so on. We need to make maximum use of this information as a source of understanding of what is going on in our prisons, what is going wrong and how we might fix it.

On Second Reading, I raised the fact that both the branches and the national organisation of the Professional Trades Union for Prison, Correctional and Secure Psychiatric Workers—the POA—are currently denied access to results of the prevalence studies that already happen. I suspect that ensuring that staff know what substances were getting in, and what their effects are, would be helpful in improving responses to incidents. If there are regular, transparent reports, that will also help the prison system as a whole to respond to problems proactively, even if they have not yet shown up locally. It will aid the Justice Committee and external watchdogs such as Her Majesty’s inspectorate, independent monitoring boards and the prison and probation ombudsman to perform their essential work to improve the prison system.

Knowing how many prisoners are affected by the misuse of substances would also be helpful to probation services and local authorities, which will be responsible for meeting people’s needs, including their need for substance misuse services, once they are released. If we do not know what those needs are, how can we put plans in place to ensure that the right treatment will be accessible as soon as it is needed and where it is needed?

As we have heard, the Bill extends the testing regime to cover prescribed and pharmacy medicines that can be misused. On Second Reading, I raised the need to ensure that the results of testing are shared with healthcare partners, because understanding what substances are out there will help them to prioritise resources and ensure that the right training is in place. We also need to ensure that prisoners who test positive for a substance are not penalised if they have a genuine medical need, but that their need is recognised and properly and adequately responded to. Sometimes, people who cannot access the right healthcare quickly resort to self-medication, even if they do not have a legal prescription or they risk their health in doing so. That happens with vulnerable people in the community and, as we know, in prison.

Timely and transparent reports on the outcomes of prevalence testing would keep us informed about another essential aspect, which is how illegal drugs get into our prisons in the first place. As my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate said, there has finally been some progress on that in recent years as a result of new internal body scanners, along with extra staffing and metal detectors, being introduced at the prisons with the largest number of people moving in and out regularly. Obviously, we hope that progress continues but, again, we need to do more than hope. If we had a clear basis for monitoring where different substances are getting in, and if regular reports were being published, it would help us to ensure that there was accountability in the system to drive that progress forward.

The Minister will know that there are calls for further investment in technology to shut down routes into prison. Devices are available to prisons to detect packages being smuggled within the body, but anything that can be concealed underneath or within clothing can be found only in a manual search. That is particularly difficult with drugs such as spice that can be soaked in sheets of paper or an extra layer of clothing and transported into prison that way. Although the technology available has significantly improved, it can be improved further.

One option is millimetre wave scanners, which hon. Members may have experienced at many UK airports. I am told that they can detect hidden items more accurately than a manual search. They can reduce the close contact required and possibly make visiting more comfortable for law-abiding family members. In a written parliamentary answer, the Minister told me that the Government do not currently believe that the scanners “meet…operational requirements”, but I would like to hear more about what the flaws are and whether it is rather a cost-benefit issue.

Finally, it would be remiss of me not to mention the pandemic that is still raging all around us. One of the consequences of covid, I understand, is that the mandatory drug testing programme was shut down during the first wave. Another consequence is that two of the biggest routes for drugs into prisons—on prisoners as they enter, or on prison visitors—were, and are, heavily restricted.

Surely, there must be lessons to be learned from whether access to harmful substances has or has not reduced, which should tell us something helpful about targeting efforts to shut down access to drugs in future. Likewise, we should be able to learn lessons about the connection between mandatory testing and treatment, and between testing and disciplinaries, from the extraordinary period we are in. I say gently that I do not think the Minister engaged with that point on Second Reading, so I am really hoping that today she is enthusiastically wanting to say more.

The hon. Member for West Ham has highlighted two matters in her Amendment, both of which relate to reporting. I am very grateful for her having raised these very important matters, but I would like to reassure her that the amendment is not necessary, because sufficient procedures are already in place to measure and record what work will be done.

I would like to highlight, as the hon. Lady has, that making sure treatment is available is critical, and the first step is this one: identifying what substances are out there. The second step is identifying those people who we need to help, and the third is to give treatment. I hope that in the points I raised in response to her earlier speech, I have identified the considerable measures that we are taking to support people in their treatment, including the significant sums we are giving to rough sleepers—of course, there is an overlap there with prison leavers—and the RECONNECT service that the NHS links up with those treatments within prison and in the community.

I would like to go through the substance of the amendment. Through proposed new Clause 1, the hon. Lady is seeking to expand the current scope of reporting by obligating an assessment of value for money after a year, so I will identify the structures that are already in place. As I said, the key objective is to ensure that people are identified, so that they can get treatments, and the effectiveness of that objective is continually reviewed as part of the national prison drugs strategy, which we published in April last year.

The Department also released an annual assessment, with accompanying statistics, as part of HMPPS’s annual digest. This provides a number of the items that the hon. Lady has enumerated in her amendment, including the number of tests conducted, the number of positive tests, and the number of psychoactive substances found. Furthermore, we believe that the contract for providing the drug testing service is effectively managed and reviewed by operational and commercial teams through regular formal contract meetings. To understand the capabilities of the various testing providers, HMPPS has undertaken extensive market engagement with potential suppliers, and it will do so again during future contract tendering processes.

In relation to the specific points the Shadow Minister made about value for money, I can reassure her that the provisions in the Bill would contribute to value for money through drug testing in prisons and ensuring that complete information is routinely gathered relating to the misuse of substances in custody. This, as I said, will enable us to make the right operational responses, as well as ensure that we get the right interventions. I believe that there is scrutiny for drug testing in prisons, supported by existing processes, and we should not rush into legislating on this issue.

I would, of course, be happy to write to the hon. Lady when the annual digest is published—I believe the next one is due in July—to draw her attention to those matters, so that she gets that material as quickly and speedily as possible. Of course, I am always happy to engage with her when she has questions, so that we can resolve any issues that she feels have not been fully dealt with. I ask her to withdraw new clause 1.

10.30 am

In new clause 2, the hon. Lady is asking that the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs make biannual reports to Parliament on substance testing in prisons—that is quite similar to new clause 1. As I have explained to the Committee, the effectiveness of drug testing is continuously reviewed and the contract in which it sits is already scrutinised.

Officials at the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs have advised us that the council is not set up for the type of role proposed in the new clause, which appears to be about reporting on the operations and performance of the substance testing system. The council’s role is to provide independent science advice to the Government. That may involve, for example, synthesising advice based on evidence collected on misuse and societal harms. Its role is not to report on the objectives of specific drug testing programmes. I can reassure the shadow Minister, however, that the ACMD already has a role in making recommendations for action, but more broadly, under its role in the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971. The new clause would broaden those functions beyond their current scope.

I will address a few of the specific points that the hon. Lady made and I hope that I can alleviate some of her concerns. She identified and mentioned the significant investment that we are making in security—the £100 million investment to which I referred earlier when addressing the main clauses. In the course of that significant programme and of ensuring that we have funding from the Treasury for it, we have identified where we think, having done some work, the best value for money is. That is why we are pursuing those measures in the course of our programme.

The hon. Lady talked about the impact of covid on drug testing and the importance of lessons learned. I completely agree with her about the importance of looking at what we have learned in this period, and we are undertaking a broad study on that, with input from a wide range of people, including service users, third parties, and HMPPS itself. We suspended drug testing between April and June because of the social distancing measures and the lockdown within prisons, but under our current national framework prisons can reintroduce testing. Where that is done, prisons must take account of social distancing and cohorting measures. At the moment, it is too early to evaluate the impact of the changes on the drug testing programme, but we will of course be looking at all those issues in due course.

On the point about the impact of covid, will the Minister join me in paying tribute to all the staff in HMPPS—the officers, the staff in prisons, the governors and those at HMPPS head office—for their tremendous effort to minimise and mitigate the effect of covid on the prison estate during the pandemic?

I absolutely join my hon. Friend in that. He makes an important point: at HMPPS, the governors, prison officers and all the staff in the service have done such a remarkable job through extremely challenging times. The statistics show that we were looking at a significant number of deaths—2,500 to 3,500 deaths—and in the first wave, the death count was in the mid-20s. Although all those deaths are, of course, very sad, that figure is a credit to the joined-up working at every level, including with the POA. Again, I put on the record my thanks to them for the constructive way that they have engaged; I know that they are tired and that it is difficult.

I am very pleased with this morning’s news about the vaccine, because we can see some light at the end of the tunnel of this very difficult period. While many people will be celebrating Christmas, many of our prison officers will still be on the wings doing their work. I pay tribute to them for all the work that they have already done and for the work that I know that they will do, unrelentingly, over the next three months. May I say that I do not find that my hon. Friend the Member for Aylesbury only does PMQs? He is a regular participant in all justice matters, and it is a pleasure to see him serving on the Committee.

I make one last point to the hon. Member for West Ham. She made some important points about who we will give the information to and how it will be used. Like her, I agree that once we collect information, we should use it to our best advantage. We will look very closely at her suggestion that the information be widely shared and see what we can do to share that data within prisons.

My understanding is that we do currently share some of the prevalence data with the POA for substances that have already been tested for. Of course, we need to ensure that we respect security and that we do the right thing in terms of policy making, but that is something that I am very happy to look at further. She also mentioned sharing data with the NHS. We will, of course, be sharing our insights with healthcare providers so that they can quicker adapt their services.

I am always happy to engage with the hon. Lady, as she knows, on these and any other matters, but I ask her to withdraw the new Clause.

Having heard the Minister’s peroration, I will happily go away and think about what she has said. For now, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the motion.

Clause, by leave, withdrawn.

Bill, as amended, to be reported.

Committee rose.