September is National Recovery Month, when treatment providers, campaigners, and people in recovery across the UK highlight what overcoming addiction looks like and celebrate those who have sought help.
However, new figures show that while more adults are accessing drug and alcohol treatment, the proportion completing treatment successfully is declining.
A record 329,646 adults were in contact with drug and alcohol treatment services in England last year, a 6% increase from the previous year. Yet only 46% completed treatment successfully in 2024 and 2025, down from 47% in 2023 and 2024 and 50.5% in 2015 and 2016, according to the GOV.UK Adult Substance Misuse Treatment Statistics 2024–2025.
The figures do not indicate that treatment itself is ineffective. A House of Commons Public Accounts Committee report found that alcohol treatment has a success rate of around 60% and generates £3 of social value for every £1 spent.
Despite this, 82% of the roughly 600,000 people dependent on alcohol in England are not receiving treatment, according to the Committee of Public Accounts’ 2023 report on alcohol treatment services.
Perry Clayman, founder of Rehab Today and The Perry Clayman Project, who has more than 22 years of personal recovery experience, said: “What is frustrating about these numbers is that they are not a verdict on whether treatment works; we already know it works. They are a symptom of how much capacity has been stripped out of the system that is supposed to deliver it. We hear from people who have 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 pressure on services has coincided with reduced public spending and specialist capacity. Local authority spending on drug and alcohol services fell 27% in real terms between 2014 and 2015 and 2021 2022, while the public health grant that funds them fell by £630 million over roughly the same period, from £3.96 billion–£3.32 billion.
The number of training places for addiction psychiatrists also fell from 64–27 between 2011 and 2019, according to the Committee of Public Accounts.
The government’s 10-year drugs strategy has begun rebuilding some capacity since 2022. However, a Local Government Association review of its first two years found that progress in getting opiate users into treatment had been uneven compared with progress among other substance and alcohol users.
Rehab Today’s guide to opiate addiction and treatment provides further information on why this group can be harder to reach: Rehab Today: Opiate Addiction
Clayman said the focus on recovery should also include improving access to treatment, particularly for people dependent on opiates. “Recovery Month should be about the people who make it through, and that is 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 stigma around addiction and treatment through education and awareness, with the aim of helping more people feel able to seek support.