FUNDING for vital spiking prevention training is being provided by Devon’s police and crime commissioner, Alison Hernandez, to help combat what has now been recognised as a specific criminal offence.

Spiking prevention, early identification and effective response training will be given to security guards, bar staff and student union representatives at the University of Exeter and Falmouth University.

It will be delivered by Exeter-based Stamp Out Spiking, the UK’s national charity tackling spiking.

Its founder, Dawn Dines, has relentlessly campaigned for more than 20 years for clearer and stricter laws to be implemented around spiking.

Stamp out Spiking has received community safety funding from the Office of the Police and Crime Commissioner (OPCC) to help it achieve those aims.

Additional funding of £10,000 will be used to help Stamp Out Spiking expand its prevention and response work across the South West.

It will also include distributing anti-drink spiking protective covers which forms part of the Commissioner’s programme to explore ways to disrupt, reduce and combat violence against women and girls.

Stamp Out Spiking has long called for reforms that improve public understanding, increase reporting, and strengthen the criminal justice response to spiking which remains widely underreported and too often goes unprosecuted.

A new criminal offence of administering a harmful substance without consent, including spiking, has been introduced under the Crime and Policing Act 2026 which received Royal Assent – the final step that turns a bill into law – on April 29.

According to latest statistics from Devon and Cornwall Police, the number of reported spiking incidents between April 1, 2025, and March 31, 2026, was 311 – a slight increase from the previous year when there were 292 recorded.

Of those incidents reported from 2025-26, 198 tests were conducted.

Of those, 17 – 5.4 per cent – confirmed a spiking incident, compared with a national average of six per cent.