Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Labour - Denton and Reddish)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to his Department’s press release entitled New tech partnership to stop the boats, published on 6 August 2023, when the Online Capability Centre became operational.
Answered by Michael Tomlinson - Minister of State (Minister for Illegal Migration)
Following the announcement by the Prime Minister of the new tech partnership to stop the boats on 6 August 2023, the Home Office and National Crime Agency (NCA) have strengthened the voluntary partnership with social media companies, Meta, YouTube, X/Twitter, to accelerate action to tackle people smuggling content online. We continue to explore further options, such as a ‘hackathon’ model to develop our innovative approach to break the business model of people smugglers advertising their services online.
To date we have successfully removed 98% of content flagged to social media companies, with over 9000 posts, pages and accounts removed since November 2021.
The Online Communications Centre (previously known as the Online Capability Centre) has been operational since October 2023 and with expertise in policy, investigations and intelligence and with access to a range of niche capabilities in tackling the online threat. We cannot comment on individual numbers of officers in classified roles.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Labour - Denton and Reddish)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to his Department’s press release entitled New tech partnership to stop the boats, published on 6 August 2023, how many (a) posts, (b) pages and (c) accounts have been (i) removed and (ii) suspended as a result of the partnership with social media companies.
Answered by Michael Tomlinson - Minister of State (Minister for Illegal Migration)
Following the announcement by the Prime Minister of the new tech partnership to stop the boats on 6 August 2023, the Home Office and National Crime Agency (NCA) have strengthened the voluntary partnership with social media companies, Meta, YouTube, X/Twitter, to accelerate action to tackle people smuggling content online. We continue to explore further options, such as a ‘hackathon’ model to develop our innovative approach to break the business model of people smugglers advertising their services online.
To date we have successfully removed 98% of content flagged to social media companies, with over 9000 posts, pages and accounts removed since November 2021.
The Online Communications Centre (previously known as the Online Capability Centre) has been operational since October 2023 and with expertise in policy, investigations and intelligence and with access to a range of niche capabilities in tackling the online threat. We cannot comment on individual numbers of officers in classified roles.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Labour - Denton and Reddish)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to his Department’s press release entitled New tech partnership to stop the boats, published on 6 August 2023, when the hackathon event took place.
Answered by Michael Tomlinson - Minister of State (Minister for Illegal Migration)
Following the announcement by the Prime Minister of the new tech partnership to stop the boats on 6 August 2023, the Home Office and National Crime Agency (NCA) have strengthened the voluntary partnership with social media companies, Meta, YouTube, X/Twitter, to accelerate action to tackle people smuggling content online. We continue to explore further options, such as a ‘hackathon’ model to develop our innovative approach to break the business model of people smugglers advertising their services online.
To date we have successfully removed 98% of content flagged to social media companies, with over 9000 posts, pages and accounts removed since November 2021.
The Online Communications Centre (previously known as the Online Capability Centre) has been operational since October 2023 and with expertise in policy, investigations and intelligence and with access to a range of niche capabilities in tackling the online threat. We cannot comment on individual numbers of officers in classified roles.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Labour - Denton and Reddish)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to his Department’s press release entitled New tech partnership to stop the boats, published on 6 August 2023, with which social media companies his Department is in partnership.
Answered by Michael Tomlinson - Minister of State (Minister for Illegal Migration)
Following the announcement by the Prime Minister of the new tech partnership to stop the boats on 6 August 2023, the Home Office and National Crime Agency (NCA) have strengthened the voluntary partnership with social media companies, Meta, YouTube, X/Twitter, to accelerate action to tackle people smuggling content online. We continue to explore further options, such as a ‘hackathon’ model to develop our innovative approach to break the business model of people smugglers advertising their services online.
To date we have successfully removed 98% of content flagged to social media companies, with over 9000 posts, pages and accounts removed since November 2021.
The Online Communications Centre (previously known as the Online Capability Centre) has been operational since October 2023 and with expertise in policy, investigations and intelligence and with access to a range of niche capabilities in tackling the online threat. We cannot comment on individual numbers of officers in classified roles.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Labour - Denton and Reddish)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many staff are currently employed at the Online Capability Centre.
Answered by Michael Tomlinson - Minister of State (Minister for Illegal Migration)
Following the announcement by the Prime Minister of the new tech partnership to stop the boats on 6 August 2023, the Home Office and National Crime Agency (NCA) have strengthened the voluntary partnership with social media companies, Meta, YouTube, X/Twitter, to accelerate action to tackle people smuggling content online. We continue to explore further options, such as a ‘hackathon’ model to develop our innovative approach to break the business model of people smugglers advertising their services online.
To date we have successfully removed 98% of content flagged to social media companies, with over 9000 posts, pages and accounts removed since November 2021.
The Online Communications Centre (previously known as the Online Capability Centre) has been operational since October 2023 and with expertise in policy, investigations and intelligence and with access to a range of niche capabilities in tackling the online threat. We cannot comment on individual numbers of officers in classified roles.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Labour - Denton and Reddish)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether he has made an assessment of the adequacy of the time taken for care providers to receive Certificates of Sponsorship for (a) overseas and (b) senior care workers.
Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
The Defined Certificate of Sponsorship process for carers and senior carers from overseas is the same and frequently requires an assessment to establish whether or not the sponsor is able to offer a genuine vacancy. This usually requires the sponsor to submit additional documentation, while the timeframes involved are adequate for the purposes of preventing the exploitation of proposed migrant workers.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Labour - Denton and Reddish)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people referred to Prevent whilst in prison subsequently committed a terror offence in each year since 2015.
Answered by Laura Farris - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Ministry of Justice) (jointly with Home Office)
We do not hold data on the number of people referred to Prevent in prison that subsequently committed a terror offence. The below data shows the number of referrals to Prevent from HMPPS since 2015/2016.
Table 1: Number of referrals to the Prevent programme from HMPPS each year, 2015/16 to 2022/23
Financial year | 2015/16 | 2016/17 | 2017/18 | 2018/19 | 2019/20 | 2020/21 | 2021/22 | 2022/23 |
Number of referrals to Prevent made by HMPPS | 155 | 283 | 269 | 297 | 373 | 335 | 287 | 267 |
This data is taken from the annual statistical release ‘Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent programme’ which can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/individuals-referred-to-prevent HMPPS includes staff working for HM Prison and Probation Service, including Youth Offender Services.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Labour - Denton and Reddish)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment he has made of the effectiveness of his Department's measures to tackle anti-social behaviour.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
In March, the Government launched the Anti-Social Behaviour Action Plan, backed by £160m of funding overseen by the ASB taskforce. This includes funding Police and Crime Commissioners to increase patrolling in ASB hotspot areas and to run immediate justice schemes.
In July we launched Round 5 of the Safer Streets Fund funding PCCs to deliver ASB and crime prevention measures.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Labour - Denton and Reddish)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many arrests have been made in the last 12 months related to the sale of illegal vapes.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The information requested is not held.
The Home Office collects and publishes data on arrests in England and Wales, as part of the ‘Police powers and procedures’ statistical bulletin, available here: Police powers and procedures: Stop and search and arrests, England and Wales, year ending 31 March 2022 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
However, the data are broken down by wider offence group, therefore data on more specific offences such as the sale of illegal vapes is not available.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Labour - Denton and Reddish)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 30 January 2023 to Question 132324 on National Crime Agency: Asylum, whether the number of National Crime Agency officers working on child asylum seekers has increased since 21 January 2023.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
For security reasons, we do not disclose how many staff are working on an issue at a given time.