Agenda item

Report of the Director of Public Health and Wellbeing

The Cabinet considered a report of the Director of Public Health and Wellbeing which indicated that the Government’s new 10-year Drug and Alcohol Strategy ‘From Harm to Hope’ sets out an ambition to address substance misuse by breaking drug supply chains, delivering a world-class treatment and recovery system and achieving a generational shift in demand for drugs. A new Supplemental Substance Misuse Treatment and Recovery Grant (SSMTRG) is being issued to Local Authorities to enhance the delivery of treatment and recovery systems.

The City Council has been notified that it will be awarded a grant of up to £505,000 for 2002-23, with an indicative increase in the grant for 2023-24, and 2024-25.

Due to the time required for the acceptance of the grant award expiring prior to the date of this meeting, the Council Constitution in Paragraph 2.3.2 (c) of Part 3F permits the relevant Director (in this case being the Director of Public Health and Wellbeing) in consultation with the relevant Cabinet Member and Scrutiny Chair to accept the grant and thereafter to be reported to Cabinet retrospectively.

The SSMTRG provides the funding to support and deliver on the following priorities:

·  Improved system coordination and commissioning

·  Enhanced harm reduction provision

·  Increased treatment capacity

·  Increased integration and improved care pathways between the criminal justice settings, and drug treatment

·  Enhancing treatment quality

·  Residential rehabilitation and inpatient detoxification

·  Better and more integrated responses to physical and mental health issues

·  Enhanced recovery support

·  Other interventions which meet the aims and targets set in the drug strategy

·  Expanding the competency and size of the workforce

In 2021/22, Public Health England (now the Office for Health Inequalitiesand Disparities) issued local areas with a one-off grant -- the Universal Drug Treatment Grant – to invest in local treatment and recovery systems. The priorities for investment of this grant were to reduce drug related deaths and reduce drug-related offending. Coventry’s allocation was invested in various projects including:

·  Creating a dedicated criminal justice team within CGL (Coventry’s commissioned adult drug and alcohol treatment service) and employing a substance misuse worker embedded in the Caludon Centre

·  Employing an additional worker within Positive Choices (Coventry’s commissioned Young People’s risky behaviour service) to focus on supporting individuals engaged in County Lines activity

·  Employing a worker within the Housing and Homelessness team of the City Council to coordinate the multiagency Vulnerable Persons Forum

·  Introducing the use of long-acting opiate substitute therapy

·  Distributing additional naloxone (an intervention to reverse the effects of opiate overdose)

·  Providing additional residential rehabilitation placements

It is intended that the initial priorities for the SSMTRG award in 2022/23 are used to:

·  Continue and expand activity initially funded by the Universal Drug Treatment grant in 2021/22, with minor amendments

·  Increase quality within drug treatment services by reducing caseloads and increasing capacity for specific interventions such as groupwork and additional support for people affected by domestic violence and drug or alcohol misuse

In 2023/4 and 2024/5 it is anticipated that investment will increasingly focus on increasing the number of treatment places for people misusing drugs or alcohol.

RESOLVED that Cabinet:-

1)  Notes the acceptance of the Supplemental Substance Misuse Treatment and Recovery Grant in the sum of £505,210 in 2022-23; and

2)  Delegates authority to the Director of Public Health and Wellbeing, following consultation with Cabinet Member for Public Health and Sport, to approve subsequent annual awards in financial years of 2023-24 and 2024-25 up to a maximum of £2.5 million pound in each financial year.