Written question asked by Philip Davies (Conservative) on Tuesday, 15 December 2009, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Tuesday, 5 January 2010. It was answered by Phil Hope (Labour) on Thursday, 14 January 2010 on behalf of the Department of Health.

Prisons: Drugs

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice what proportion of prisoners receiving methadone treatment are serving sentences of (a) less than three months, (b) between three and six months, (c) between six months and one year, (d) between one and two years and (e) more than two years.

Answer: I have been asked to reply.The information requested is not yet available.A joint Home Office, National Offender Management Service, National Treatment Agency and Department project has redesigned the Drug Information Record (DIR) and Prison Activity Form which came into use on 1 April 2009, therefore mechanisms are now in place for prisons to collect baseline data on the number of drug users in effective treatment.Section 5.2 of the new DIR collects the following information:If the length of sentence is:"less than one year;""between one to four years; and""more than four years."As this data collection only began in April 2009 it will not be until 2011-12, when the data improvement project has had a chance to take effect, that data on methadone prescription by sentence length is likely to be sufficiently robust to produce reliable data.

Secondary information