On 16 February 2023, the UK government announced an additional £421 million in funding for local authorities across England to improve drug and alcohol addiction treatment and recovery services up to 2025. The investment represents a 40% increase in total local authority funding for treatment, enabling the creation of more than 50,000 high-quality places for drug and alcohol treatment. This funding will enable local authorities to employ more staff to work with people with drug and alcohol problems, support more prison leavers in treatment and recovery services, and provide Will increase the quality
The increased funding will also benefit residential rehabilitation and inpatient detoxification services, while improvements to the recovery services will sustain people outside of treatment, helping to reduce relapse rates. The quality and capacity of drug and alcohol treatment and recovery services will be increased across England with the aid of this funding, which will benefit 151 local authorities. £154.3 million has been allocated for 2023/2024, and £266.7 million has been allocated for 2024/2025 as indicative funding.
This investment is part of the government’s drug strategy published in December 2021, which aimed to increase the capacity of treatment and recovery services as part of the whole system approach to tackling supply and demand. It is estimated that over the first three years of the strategy, the additional investment in treatment and recovery will prevent nearly 1,000 drug-related deaths, reversing the upward trend in drug deaths for the first time in a decade. The strategy also identified that illegal drugs drive half of all homicides, and nearly half of all burglaries, robberies, and other acquisitive crimes are linked to heroin and crack addiction.
Dame Carol Black’s Independent Review of Medicines found that the best way to tackle the problem is to increase the capacity of the treatment and recovery system. The government is also working to crack down on criminal gangs that profit from the trade of illegal drugs. They have invested £300 million in dismantling more than 2,000 county lines, making thousands more arrests and protecting those who are being exploited.
The UK Health and Social Care Secretary, Steve Barclay, stated that drug misuse has a massive cost to society, with more than 3,000 people dying as a result of drug misuse in 2021. He also said that the investment in treatment and recovery services is crucial to providing people with high-quality support and expanding access to life-saving overdose medicines and outreach to young people at risk of drug misuse.
Source: Gov[Dot]UK
