Written question asked by Brian Iddon (Labour) on Thursday, 5 July 2007, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Monday, 9 July 2007. It was answered by Lord Coaker (Labour) on Monday, 16 July 2007 on behalf of the Home Office.

Crime: Drugs

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department (1) how much and what proportion of anti-drugs spending the Government allocated to the monitoring and evaluation of the performance of the UK drugs strategy in (a) reducing the availability of illicit drugs, (b) educating young people, (c) drug addiction treatment and (d) tackling drug-related crime;

Answer: The Home Office allocated £11.4 million between 2002-03 and 2006-07 on monitoring and evaluation. A further £0.9 million allocated for the current financial year.The success of the strategy will be measured by the Drug Harm Index, which captures a range of social and health harms caused by drugs. This is published annually by the Home Office. In terms of research and evaluation, the complex nature of drug misuse and its associated problems means that research projects often address a range of substantive issues. As such, it is difficult to break down funding into discrete themes. However key projects since 2002 have been around assessing the impact of interventions to tackle the availability and problems caused by drugs, measuring the relationship between drugs and crime, estimating the trends in drug consumption and the number of problematic users, and the relationship between drug consumption and young people. Completed projects are published on the Home office Research, Development and Statistics web page.

Secondary information