Written question asked by Ian Lavery (Labour) on Wednesday, 25 April 2012, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Monday, 30 April 2012. It was answered by Crispin Blunt (Conservative) on Tuesday, 1 May 2012 on behalf of the Ministry of Justice.

Prisons: Drugs

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Justice how many drug rehabilitation programmes were removed from prisons in England and Wales due to reductions in budget and staffing in the latest period for which figures are available; and from which prisons.

Answer: Prior to April 2011, decisions regarding the commissioning and decommissioning of substance misuse rehabilitation programmes were based upon a local needs analysis and were made at a local level in consultation with former regional NOMS offices.There may have been numerous reasons why programmes were removed including changes to the need of the local prison population and decisions would not necessarily have been based upon budgets and staffing costs alone. As such decisions were made at a local level, this information is not centrally available and therefore could be obtained only at disproportionate cost, by obtaining information held in local and national data systems, validating it, collating it in a common format and then calculating the overall number of programmes removed on the basis of budgets and staffing costs alone, in order to provide a response.The Department of Health (DH) became responsible for funding drug and alcohol treatment services in prisons and the community in England from April 2011. Responsibility for deciding which drug and alcohol prevention, treatment and recovery services to commission and fund has been devolved to local partnerships as these are considered best placed to determine what is required to meet local needs. As such, information about which specific drug and alcohol treatment programmes have been removed in each establishment is not held centrally.

Secondary information