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Seven partnerships awarded Drug System Change Pilot status

18 May 2009

The pilot programme will operate over two years.

This is an exciting opportunity for these seven partnerships:

• Safer Lambeth Partnership
• Safer Essex Partnership Board
• Hampshire/Southampton Partnership Trust
• Leicester City Drug and Alcohol Action Team (DAAT)
• Hertforshire DAAT
• Bradford Safer Communities Partnership
• Sefton DAT

They will lead the drug sector in creating a step change in performance, to stimulate new ideas and to focus on the delivery of positive outcomes for drug users, their families and the local community.

This is an important and challenging programme of work and within the Drug Systems Change Pilot these partnerships will be given freedoms and flexibilities to explore innovative approaches that, if successful, will help to determine the future direction of regional and local drug funding, commissioning and delivery systems.

The awards of pilot status to these areas is a testament to the excellent proposals that each of the partnerships worked together locally to develop.

Since 2001, there has been an expansion in drug treatment services in England to help protect communities as well as individual drug users and their families from the harm problem drug use causes. The pilots have been launched to test new approaches to drug treatment and the broader social support needs of drug users both in the community and in prisons, including the ongoing care of drug-using offenders leaving prison.

This new approach stems from the 2008 drug strategy - Drugs: protecting families and communities. The strategy outlines the need for 'end to end' management of drug users including more effective use of funding to have a sharper focus on achieving outcomes for drug users, their families and their communities.

An independent evaluation process for the series of pilot as a whole is currently in the process of being developed. 

The Drug System Change Pilots programme will operate over two years, having started in April 2009.

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