Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the remarks by Lord Hanson of Flint on 22 July (HL Deb col 135), on what basis they calculated that 35,000 people who arrived in the UK specifically by small boats were removed last year.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
I would like to correct a statement I made in the House of Lords on 22 July 2025 whilst debating a Topical Question raised by Lord Empey; ‘To ask His Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the “pull factors” attracting migrants to enter the United Kingdom illegally’. [Illegal Migration: Pull Factors. Volume 848: debated on Tuesday 22 July 2025]
On 22 July 2025, I stated that, ‘35,000 failed asylum seekers who came on small boats were removed last year, which is 13% more than in the 12 months previous, when his Government were in charge. There has been a 51% increase in the number of people who have been arrested and prosecuted on illegal working visits.’
The correct information should have been, ‘35,000 people were returned last year, which is 13% more than in the 12 months previous, when his Government were in charge. There has been a 51% increase in the number of people who have been arrested on illegal working visits.’
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many returns of people who arrived by small boat there have been in each month since July 2023, broken down by nationality.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office publishes data on returns in the Immigration System Statistics quarterly release. Quarterly data on enforced and voluntary returns of small boat arrivals can be found in Ret_06 of the ‘Returns summary tables’. This dataset covers the period 2018 to March 2025, with data up to June 2025 to be published on 21 August. Additionally, you can find more information on these returns in section 6.1 of the ‘How many people are returned from the UK?’ chapter of the Immigration System Statistics quarterly release.
Enforced and voluntary returns of small boat arrivals by quarter:
Date of return | Returns | Of which, Albanian nationals |
2018 Q1 | 0 | 0 |
2018 Q2 | 0 | 0 |
2018 Q3 | 4 | 0 |
2018 Q4 | 5 | 5 |
2018 Total | 9 | 5 |
2019 Q1 | 21 | 0 |
2019 Q2 | 25 | 0 |
2019 Q3 | 44 | 1 |
2019 Q4 | 38 | 0 |
2019 Total | 128 | 1 |
2020 Q1 | 21 | 0 |
2020 Q2 | 1 | 0 |
2020 Q3 | 76 | 0 |
2020 Q4 | 49 | 0 |
2020 Total | 147 | 0 |
2021 Q1 | 3 | 1 |
2021 Q2 | 6 | 0 |
2021 Q3 | 4 | 0 |
2021 Q4 | 16 | 2 |
2021 Total | 29 | 3 |
2022 Q1 | 36 | 5 |
2022 Q2 | 60 | 13 |
2022 Q3 | 86 | 45 |
2022 Q4 | 203 | 161 |
2022 Total | 385 | 224 |
2023 Q1 | 309 | 252 |
2023 Q2 | 460 | 390 |
2023 Q3 | 589 | 522 |
2023 Q4 | 695 | 624 |
2023 Total | 2,053 | 1,788 |
2024 Q1 | 572 | 512 |
2024 Q2 | 629 | 531 |
2024 Q3 | 571 | 470 |
2024 Q4 | 558 | 443 |
2024 Total | 2,330 | 1,956 |
2025 Q1 | 482 | 356 |
2025 Jan-Mar | 482 | 356 |
Note: This table is a combination of data from Ret_06 and the chart found in section 6.1 of the ‘How many people are returned from the UK?’ chapter of the ‘Immigration System Statistics quarterly release’.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to continue with the immigration reforms introduced by the Home Secretary as part of the Plan for Change.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office’s Immigration White Paper, published on 12 May, set out proposed reforms to restore order, control and fairness to the legal migration system, reduce net migration, and promote economic growth.
On 1 July changes to the Immigration Rules were set out to deliver the first set of reforms:
Work is underway to deliver the wider measures announced in the White Paper with further updates to follow in due course. We will set out further measures around asylum and border security later this year.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure the effective implementation of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme released on 1 July.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
On 1 July 2025, FIRS was officially launched. To ensure effective implementation, the Home Office has a Case Management Team recruited and trained to administer the scheme, a web portal that is fully operational and detailed published guidance available online. The Government is also continuing to engage with those who may need to register to ensure they understand the requirements during the grace period which ends on 1 October.
There will also be an annual report laid before Parliament on the operation of FIRS. This will include the number of registrations under the scheme, together with the number of people charged and prosecuted for failing to comply with the scheme’s requirements.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what analysis they have conducted on whether the current visa system is incentivising employers to recruit from overseas rather than invest in training UK-based workers.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office’s Immigration White Paper, published 12 May, looked in depth at the flaws in the previous Government’s visa system that had incentivised employers to recruit from overseas rather than investing in training UK-based workers and set out proposals for extensive reform of that system.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many incidents of shoplifting were recorded in each of the past five years; and how many resulted in a charge or summons.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office collects and publishes information on the number of notifiable offences and their outcomes.
The table below show the volume of the shop theft offences outcomes recorded by the police in the years from 2020 to 2024 and how many of those resulted in a charge or summons.
Table 1: Shoplifting offences recorded by the police from 2020 to 2024, and those resulting in charge/summons, England and Wales [Note: 1] | |||
Calendar year (offence recorded) | Shoplifting offences | Charged/Summonsed | % |
2020 | 254,547 | 44,969 | 18% |
2021 | 256,198 | 39,353 | 15% |
2022 | 315,052 | 48,268 | 15% |
2023 | 429,873 | 72,144 | 17% |
2024 | 516,971 | 93,156 | 18% |
1. Figures for the period January to March 2020 exclude Greater Manchester police (GMP) | |||
as they were unable to provide full data to the Home Office Data Hub (HODH) in this period. | |||
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the remarks by Lord Hanson of Flint on 10 July (HL Deb col 1487), whether there have been any instances of the General Data Protection Regulation or other data protection legislation preventing the Home Office from removing foreign criminals from the UK.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The UK’s data protection legislation allows for personal data to be processed to pursue legitimate aims.
In particular, the international transfers regimes, which this Government recently improved through the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, allows for personal data to be transferred to third countries where that is necessary for important reasons of public interest, including for immigration control and law enforcement.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the prevalence of the underreporting of (1) domestic abuse, (2) sexual violence, and (3) hate crimes.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The best measure of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), including domestic abuse and sexual violence, is prevalence as reported through the CSEW because this is anonymous, includes crimes not reported to the police and is unaffected by changes in levels of reporting to the police or police recording practices.
The gap between police reports of domestic abuse and sexual violence and the number of victims and survivors estimated by the CSEW means there is a significant number of unidentified cases.
As part of our unprecedented mission to tackle the national emergency of VAWG we have worked with the ONS to develop a new combined metric to better capture the scale of these crimes for the first time.
For our forthcoming Strategy for tackling Violence Against Women and Girls we will use a broad suite of metrics to provide a more comprehensive understanding of VAWG across Government and society.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what proportion of reported shoplifting offences result in police attendance.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
Data published by the NPCC (Policing Retail Crime Action Plan shows early impact), from a dip sample of 1,500 shoplifting incidents in December 2023, show that police attended:
Our Safer Streets Summer Initiative will see increased police patrols and local action in over 500 town centres this summer. As part of our Safer Streets Mission, we are committed to restoring neighbourhood policing, and as a result of our £200 million investment, we will see an additional 3,000 neighbourhood officers and PCSOs on the beat in communities across the country this year.
In the Crime and Policing Bill, introduced to Parliament on 25 February, we brought a new offence of assaulting a retail worker to protect the hardworking and dedicated staff that work in stores. We are also repealing legislation which makes shop theft of and below £200 a summary-only offence, sending a clear message that any level of shop theft is illegal and will be taken seriously.
To help tackle retail crime, we will provide £5 million over the next three years to continue to fund a specialist analysis team within Opal, the national policing intelligence unit for serious organised acquisitive crime.
We will also invest £2 million over the next three years in the National Business Crime Centre which provides a resource for both police and businesses to learn, share and support each other to prevent and combat crime.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they have taken to ensure the full participation of local authorities in Bradford and Wales in their inquiry into grooming gangs.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Government continues to focus on delivering real change for victims and survivors of child sexual abuse and exploitation.
I refer the Noble Lord to the statements made by the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls on 08 April and Lord Hanson of Flint on 22 April 2025, which provided an update on the Government's work to tackle child sexual abuse and exploitation, including progress on the recommendations of the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA). IICSA, led by Professor Alexis Jay, was a full national inquiry taking 7 years, which engaged over 7,000 victims and survivors, and had 15 separate strands, including a specific two-year inquiry into child sexual exploitation by organised networks.
Victims, survivors and experts, including Alexis Jay, have been clear that they want to see action now. That means protecting more children, pursuing more criminals, and getting justice for more victims and survivors. That is why we are delivering on the package of measures announced by the Home Secretary in January, including expanding the victims’ right to review and asking all police forces to review historic grooming cases that were closed with ‘No Further Action’. We are also developing a new national best practice framework for victim-centred, locally-led inquiries, drawing on the experience of experts, including victims and survivors. Further details will be provided later this month.
Alongside that, we will set out how local authorities can access support for independent local inquiries or related work through a national fund. The Home Secretary has commissioned Baroness Louise Casey to conduct an audit to improve national understanding of the scale, nature, and profile of group-based child sexual abuse, including the characteristics of offenders. The audit is well underway and will report to the Home Secretary in the coming weeks.