Prisons Commissioner Hubert Dean will help hand-pick a trusted team for drug searches after tip-offs have made a mockery of the daily sweeps.

He hopes to create a team of up to seven people but could not say who was leaking the information about the trawls for contraband.

He told : ?I am saying at the moment the chief officer at Westgate is responsible for security.

?This team would come in without the authority of the chief officers and do whatever they have to do. ?At the moment there is a lot of problems with the leakage of information.

?I am not suggesting he?s doing that but information gets leaked. By the time the search teams arrive everyone knows including the inmates.?

The team would then be backed up by whoever was on duty at the time, explained Mr. Dean.

?My people will carefully select individuals to be part of a security team.

?We are sending people to Caymans next month to look at their security team and work alongside them.?

Mr. Dean hopes to form the team in the next few months who will be trained to take over the dog team and use the drug scanner and oversee the rest of the prison?s security.

?It will be handpicked from current officers for various jobs without going through red tape.?

But he has dropped the idea of using foreigners after saying there was no money in the budget, even though he likes the idea after noting the Caymans uses overseas recruits for similar jobs to counter nepotism.

He said: ?There?s a concern you have relatives, friends and school mates all in the same mix.

?Even though I have no evidence to support something is going on I would feel comfortable if I had people not in any way associated with the people currently here.

?But that is not going to happen.?

Recently he stepped up cell searches from an occasional event to an every day occurrence. Drugs were turning up in small twists rather than large stashes, said Mr. Dean.

?One problem we have had in the last few months is people coming up to the fence and throwing them over. We have received several packages.?

He said the drugs were usually thrown over just before the prisoners were taken to the exercise yard so prison officers were now sweeping the area prior to letting the inmates out.

?Three weeks ago we had a security camera pick up someone riding from Malabar field, we saw him take a long run up to the wall to get momentum to throw it over. He left very quickly and we could not get the licence plate of the bike.?

Cell searches was one of the things mentioned by Mr. Dean as he hopes for improved standards in a back to basics campaign.

Mr Dean said he was starting a massive push to increase training. ?Everyone is going to be in the classroom at some point during the course of the year.?

Prison Officers Association spokesman Russ Ford said he was unaware of the details of Mr. Dean?s plan for a specialist security team and said the priority was reversing currently depleted staffing levels. Eighteen recruits are due to start at the end of February.