September is National Recovery Month, when treatment providers, campaigners, and people in recovery across the UK spotlight what overcoming addiction looks like and celebrate those individuals who have sought help. But despite the positive work this month of awareness highlights, data shows that recovery rates are stagnating, and more work needs to be done.
Last year, a record high of 329,646 adults were in contact with drug and alcohol treatment services in England, that’s a 6% rise from the year before. However, only 46% of people completed their treatments successfully in 2024/25, which is a slight decrease from 47% the year before, and down further from 50.5% in 2015/16 (GOV UK, Adult Substance Misuse Treatment Statistics 2024 to 2025).
The reason doesn’t appear to be that treatment doesn’t work. A House of Commons Public Accounts Committee report found alcohol treatment specifically has a success rate of around 60% and delivers £3 of social value for every £1 spent. Yet, a staggering 82% of the roughly 600,000 people dependent on alcohol in England are not in treatment at all (Committee of Public Accounts, Alcohol treatment services, 2023).
Perry Clayman, founder of Rehab Today and The Perry Clayman Project, who has over 22 years’ personal recovery experience, said:
“What’s frustrating about these numbers is that they’re not a verdict on whether treatment works; we already know it works. They’re a symptom of how much capacity has been stripped out of the system that’s supposed to deliver it. We hear from people who’ve been trying to get help for months before anything becomes available near them, and by the time they reach us, the problem has usually got worse, not better.”
The same Committee of Public Accounts report found local authority spending on drug and alcohol services fell 27% in real terms between 2014/15 and 2021/22, while the public health grant that funds it dropped by £630 million over roughly the same period, from £3.96 billion down to £3.32 billion.
Specialist capacity fell with it: the number of training places for addiction psychiatrists dropped from 64 to 27 between 2011 and 2019 (Committee of Public Accounts, Alcohol treatment services, 2023).
The government’s newer 10-year drugs strategy has started rebuilding some of this since 2022, but a Local Government Association review of its first two years found the progress has been uneven for getting opiate users into treatment, when compared to other substance and alcohol users (LGA, Two years on: a progress review of ‘From harm to hope’, September 2024).
Rehab Today’s own guide to opiate addiction and treatment has more on why this group is often harder to reach: www.rehabtoday.com/opiate-addiction
Perry added, “Recovery Month should be about the people who make it through, and that’s worth marking. But real progress also means the wait to start treatment getting shorter, not longer, especially for people dependent on opiates, who the data shows are being left furthest behind. Even with all of this, help is still there. It just tends to work best when someone asks early, rather than waiting for a crisis to force the issue. We have a higher success rate of completing treatment than the national average, with around 65% completing treatment successfully.”
Rehab Today has several UK-wide CQC and HIW registered centres, offering personalised residential treatment for substance and behavioural addictions. The team also works to reduce the stigma around addiction and treatment through education and awareness, so more people feel able to ask for help.
Photo by SHVETS production: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-group-of-people-talking-7176137/
