Asked by: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to her Department's policy paper entitled Fraud Strategy: stopping scams and protecting the public, published in May 2023, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of appointing a senior judge to lead that review.
Answered by Tom Tugendhat - Shadow Minister (Home Office) (Security)
As announced in the Fraud Strategy, the Home Office, in collaboration with the Attorney General’s Office and the Ministry of Justice, will shortly launch an independent review into the challenges of investigating and prosecuting fraud.
The review will consider the following:
Phase 1
Phase 2
The terms of reference will be published once a review chair is in post and the review is launched. The Home Office is working with the Ministry of Justice to identify suitable candidates to lead the review.
Asked by: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to her Department's policy paper entitled Fraud Strategy: stopping scams and protecting the public, published in May 2023, whether she plans to publish the terms of reference on the proposed review of the disclosure regime.
Answered by Tom Tugendhat - Shadow Minister (Home Office) (Security)
As announced in the Fraud Strategy, the Home Office, in collaboration with the Attorney General’s Office and the Ministry of Justice, will shortly launch an independent review into the challenges of investigating and prosecuting fraud.
The review will consider the following:
Phase 1
Phase 2
The terms of reference will be published once a review chair is in post and the review is launched. The Home Office is working with the Ministry of Justice to identify suitable candidates to lead the review.
Asked by: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to page 21 of her Department's policy paper entitled Fraud Strategy: stopping scams and protecting the public, published in May 2023, when she plans to launch the first phase of the independent review on the disclosure regime.
Answered by Tom Tugendhat - Shadow Minister (Home Office) (Security)
As announced in the Fraud Strategy, the Home Office, in collaboration with the Attorney General’s Office and the Ministry of Justice, will shortly launch an independent review into the challenges of investigating and prosecuting fraud.
The review will consider the following:
Phase 1
Phase 2
The terms of reference will be published once a review chair is in post and the review is launched. The Home Office is working with the Ministry of Justice to identify suitable candidates to lead the review.
Asked by: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, if he will make an estimate of the number of Law Centres that have closed in England since 2010; and how much funding his Department has provided to Law Centres since 2010.
Answered by Mike Freer
The Ministry of Justice does not hold direct information on the number of law centres in England or those that have ceased operating.
Since 2015/16, the Legal Aid Agency has paid £57.2m to law centres across England and Wales, in respect of Civil and Criminal Legal Aid work. We are unable to provide the information from 2010 onwards as Legal Aid Provider Statistics data is only available from 2015/16 onwards.
Further, the Government has invested over £25m in grant funding for the not-for-profit sector including law centres since 2014.
In March 2023, the Government announced a new £10.4m Improving Outcomes Through Legal Support (IOTLS) grant. This grant runs from July 2023 until March 2025 and is being administered by the Access to Justice Foundation on behalf of the Ministry of Justice. The grant has been awarded to 59 organisations across England and Wales, including 15 law centres. This funding will enable organisations to provide legal advice and support to help people resolve their problems as early as possible.
The IOTLS grant builds on the previous legal support grants including the £4.8m Help Accessing Legal Support grant which ran from September 2022 until June 2023 and supported 52 front line organisations including 14 law centres.
Between April 2020 and March 2021, during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, organisations were awarded Government emergency grant funding totalling £5.4m via the Covid-19 Specialist Advice Service Scheme. Of the total amount, £3m was distributed to law centres via the Law Centres Network. This funding enabled organisations to continue providing critical services to the most vulnerable and prevented the closure of a number of law centres.
Asked by: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, whether his Department collects data on the number of cells that are overcrowded in each prison.
Answered by Damian Hinds - Shadow Secretary of State for Education
All prisoner accommodation is certified in line with the Certified Prisoner Accommodation Framework. Cells are only shared where a Prison Group Director has certified them to be of an adequate size and condition. The process of certification requires every prison to record all cells that have been assessed as suitable for crowding, and this information is held centrally.
Crowding data is published annually as part of the HMPPS Annual Digest. The 2022/23 version of the Annual Digest is due to be published on 27 July 2023.
Asked by: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, pursuant to the Answer of 7 June 2023 to Question 187087 on Prison Accommodation, for what reason it is not practicable to collect data on time out of cell for each prison in England and Wales.
Answered by Damian Hinds - Shadow Secretary of State for Education
Prison governors set a regime for each day specifying when prisoners will ordinarily be unlocked. There will be occasions, however, when certain prisoners will remain in their cell during these times. Reasons for this will include illness, being over retirement age, the management of operational incidents, and other operational reasons such as staff needing to be deployed to other duties.
There will also be occasions where prisoners will be out of cell at times when they are scheduled to be locked in, for example to attend medical appointments at hospital, a late arrival from court, or a transfer between prisons.
To accurately record the amount of time prisoners spend out of cell, His Majesty’s Prison and Probation Service (HMPPS) would therefore be required to record information for each individual prisoner, taking into account their unique movements on a daily basis.
Asked by: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment his Department has made of implications for his policies of rises in the number of diagnoses of sexually transmitted infections.
Answered by Neil O'Brien
We are committed to improving sexual heath in England, including tackling sexually transmitted infections (STIs) and are considering the next steps for delivering the best outcomes, but no specific assessment has been made of our policies and the increase in STIs.
Sexual health services (SHSs) play a key public health role in diagnosis, early treatment and management of STIs and we are providing more than £3.5 billion to local authorities through the public health grant to fund public health services, including SHSs, in this financial year. Individual local authorities are responsible for and well placed to make funding and commissioning decisions about the SHSs that best meet the needs of their local populations.
As part of the HIV Action Plan, we are investing over £3.5 million from 2021 to 2024 to deliver the National HIV Prevention Programme for England, including HIV Testing Week and other campaigns to improve information and testing for HIV and other STIs.
The UK Health Security Agency published a Syphilis Action Plan to address the increase in syphilis diagnosis in England, focusing on key interventions such as targeted testing, partner notification and awareness raising.
Asked by: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department plans to take steps to provide funding for sexual health clinics for mpox work that was not covered by local authority tariffs.
Answered by Neil O'Brien
No additional funding is currently planned for sexual health services in response to Mpox. Funding has been provided for antiviral medicines to treat Mpox, the procurement of the smallpox vaccine and for sexual health services to deliver this vaccine to those eligible for vaccination. There have been very few Mpox cases reported in the United Kingdom so far this year compared to the 2022 outbreak. It is likely that multiple factors, including vaccination, have contributed to the decline in transmission. We continue to work towards the goal of elimination of person-to-person Mpox transmission in the UK.
The Department is providing more than £3.5 billion this financial year to local authorities through the Public Health Grant to fund public health services, including sexual health services, increasing to £3.575 billion in 2024/25. This will provide every local authority real-terms funding protection over the next two years. Individual local authorities are responsible for and well placed to make funding and commissioning decisions about the sexual health services that best meet the needs of their local populations.
Asked by: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether his Department plans to extend the mpox vaccination programme, in the context of case numbers in London in summer 2023.
Answered by Maria Caulfield
In December 2022, the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) led the four public health bodies of the United Kingdom in publishing a joint strategy for Mpox control which is available at the following link:
This stated the ambition to work towards elimination of person-to-person Mpox transmission in the UK. The strategy made clear that vaccination was one of eight key areas of public health intervention, and that the vaccination programme would continue to be reviewed, drawing on the best available evidence, to ensure it delivers as efficiently as possible to protect those most at risk from Mpox.
The Government remain committed to delivering on this strategy. UKHSA continues to monitor the epidemiology of the Mpox outbreak very closely, including the recent, small cluster of cases in London, and are ready to scale up a response as required.
Asked by: Andy Slaughter (Labour - Hammersmith and Chiswick)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to her Department's press release entitled Thousands of asylum seekers to be moved out of hotels, published on 5 June 2023, what site in West London is being used to house asylum seekers; what hotels her Department plans to use to accommodate asylum seekers in (a) Hammersmith and Fulham and (b) Kensington and Chelsea; and what her Department's planned timescales are for the use of those sites to house asylum seekers.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The specific location of any of our asylum accommodation is not put in the public domain in order to maintain the privacy and security of those accommodated.