Asked by: Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many individuals convicted of grooming offences have been subject to any orders or actions under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The use of most investigatory Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA) powers is not tracked by the Home Office on a case-by-case basis. Confiscation orders are tracked by the Joint Asset Recovery Database, although it does not record grooming offences separately. However, 114 confiscation orders have been issued in human trafficking cases from 2019 to 2025, with a total value in excess of £5.2 million.
The Crime and Policing Bill will add child criminal exploitation to the POCA Schedule 2 offences that a court must consider when determining whether a defendant has a criminal lifestyle and when calculating the defendant’s criminal benefit. This is alongside the people trafficking, prostitution, and child sex offences already included in Schedule 2. In this way, POCA ensures the courts take a broad view of the criminal benefit that has accrued from these heinous offences when setting the level of confiscation orders.
The figures provided above are a subset of the asset recovery statistics Annex A, referring to assets restrained and recovered from modern slavery offences. Please refer to the User guide to Asset recovery statistics - GOV.UK for further information on how to use these statistics
Asked by: Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government whether their expenditure on housing asylum seekers in hotels is increasing or decreasing.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office publishes information on asylum expenditure in the Home Office Annual Report and Accounts. The latest report records that expenditure on hotels was down almost a billion pounds in the last financial year.
Asked by: Lord Mohammed of Tinsley (Liberal Democrat - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government whether they have received applications for political asylum from citizens of the United States of America since January.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
Data on the number of asylum claims by nationality from January to March 2025 will be published by the Home Office on 22 May 2025 in the 'Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release' on GOV.UK.