Ben Everitt, the MP for Milton Keynes North, has welcomed the news Milton Keynes City Council will receive an extra £852,212 to improve drug and alcohol addiction treatment and recovery over the next two years.
The extra funding means that total local authority funding for treatment will have increased 40% between 2020/21 and 2024/25. It will enable the creation of over 50,000 high-quality places in drug and alcohol treatment across the country.
The funding will enable local authorities to recruit more staff to work with people with drug and alcohol problems, support more prison leavers into treatment and recovery services, and invest in enhancing the quality of treatment they provide. More people will benefit from residential rehabilitation or inpatient detoxification, while improvements to the recovery services will sustain them outside of treatment – helping to reduce relapse rates.
The government’s drug strategy, published in December 2021, set out the ambition to significantly increase the capacity of treatment and recovery services. 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.
Ben Everitt MP said: "It's absolutely vital that we invest in drug and alcohol addiction treatment and recovery to help us save lives and reduce crime across Milton Keynes so I welcome this extra funding from the Conservative Government.
"I will continue to lobby the Government for more funding for Milton Keynes to ensure we have world class healthcare in our city - and we've already been successful by securing funding for the Maple Centre which has now opened, and the announcement earlier this week that two new Community Diagnostic Centres will be opening in MK."
Steve Barclay, the Health and Social Care Secretary, commented: “Drug misuse has a massive cost to society – more than 3,000 people died as a result of drug misuse in 2021.
“This investment in treatment and recovery services is crucial to provide people with high-quality support, with services such expanding access to life-saving overdose medicines and outreach to young people at risk of drug misuse already helping to reduce harm and improve recovery.
“This funding will help us build a world-class treatment and recovery service which will continue to save lives, improve the health and wellbeing of millions of people, and reduce pressure on the NHS by diverting people from addiction into recovery.”
