The Drug Seizures and Offender Characteristics statistical bulletin: FOI release

Information requested

You asked for the number of Class A drug seizures and quantity of Class A drugs seized through supply crimes and total estimated quantity of drugs seized by drug type for 2022-23, 2023-24 and 2024-25.

Response

While our aim is to provide information whenever possible, in this instance the Scottish Government does not have the information regarding drugs seized in 2022-23 and 2023-24 (further details provided below).

An exemption under section 27(1) of FOISA applies to some of the information you have requested. The 2024-25 Drug Seizures and Offender Characteristics Official Statistics bulletin will be published on the 27 January. Under this exemption we do not have to provide you with the requested data since it will be published within 12 weeks of the date you requested it.

The 2024-25 publication will include some changes to the methodology, which are outlined further below.

The Drug Seizures and Offender Characteristics statistical bulletin is split into two parts. The first covers seizures relating to drug supply, whereby Police Scotland manually checked all drug supply-based crimes (around 4,000 – 5,000 each year).

The second relates to crimes of drug possession (for personal use), where Scottish Government statisticians produced an estimate of the type of drugs seized and offender characteristics, based on an annual random sample of 400 crime records.

The latest published statistics relate to 2021-22. At that time we highlighted Police Scotland’s plan to roll out a new national IT system for recording crime, and that this may offer opportunities to improve the efficiency of the data collection process for this product, which due to the manual element of part one places a significant burden on police staff resources to complete. Whilst discussions are continuing on the potential of the new system, it is clear this will not be ready in the short term and so an interim approach has been taken to provide users with an update to these statistics.

Given the manual review of around 5,000 drug supply records each year is no longer considered an effective use of policing resource, Scottish Government statisticians will instead produce an estimate of the type of drugs seized from these crimes based on a random sample of 400 cases. This is in addition to the 400 cases we already review each year for the possession based crimes. To make the most effective use of analytical resource, we have focused this approach on the latest year of 2024-25 – which will provide users with the most up-to-date analysis. The new bulletin will also include a more detailed update on how the 2024-25 figures should be interpreted, the impact on time series analysis and future plans for this data collection.

About FOI

The Scottish Government is committed to publishing all information released in response to Freedom of Information requests. View all FOI responses at https://www.gov.scot/foi-responses.