Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, if she will bring forward an AI Bill that ensures the safety of current and emerging AI products to help tackle the harms of tech-facilitated gender-based violence.
Answered by Kanishka Narayan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
Tackling violence against women and girls, including online, is a government priority. The Online Safety Act (OSA) establishes a strong regime requiring in-scope AI services to tackle illegal content and protect children from harmful content.
However, we’ve always been clear we would go further where necessary to tackle emerging AI harms. We have criminalised the creation of non-consensual sexual deepfakes and we decided to make it an OSA Priority Offence. We have banned AI nudification apps. We have also legislated in the Crime and Policing Act to ensure that platforms are required to take down non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours. Ofcom has accelerated and announced its decision that service providers should use ‘hash matching’ technology to combat image abuse online.
New powers will also enable regulation of currently unregulated chatbots, requiring them to protect their users from illegal content, including non-consensual intimate images and child abuse. In response to the AI Action Plan, the Government committed to work with regulators to boost their capabilities.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, with reference to the report by AI Forensics entitled ‘Harassment as Infrastructure’, what assessment she has made of the potential implications for her policies of payment providers facilitating payments for access to non-consensual intimate image.
Answered by Kanishka Narayan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
The Online Safety Act places clear duties on in-scope services to tackle illegal content, including non-consensual intimate image abuse, backed by Ofcom’s strong enforcement powers. Where services fail to comply, Ofcom can seek Business Disruption Measures to restrict access to those services, including measures which may require third-party payment providers to withdraw services from non-compliant sites.
We are strengthening the regulatory framework through new criminal offences and a 48-hour removal duty, alongside Ofcom’s use of hash-matching to prevent re-sharing.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, whether her Department has made an estimate of how much money online platforms receive from image-based sexual abuse channels on their services.
Answered by Kanishka Narayan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
Non-consensual intimate images (NCII) are completely unacceptable and tackling this abuse is a priority for this government.
Under the Online Safety Act, services must assess for the risk of NCII, take steps to prevent this content appearing and removing it swiftly when it does. This government has built on the framework by introducing a new requirement on service to remove NCII within 48 hours of a valid report.
This is complemented by Ofcom’s update to its illegal content codes on the use of hash-matching to deliver victim-centred protection from this horrific abuse.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the cost to the public purse of AI innovations increasing violence against women and girls.
Answered by Natalie Fleet - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Home Office)
We are determined to keep women and girls safe from the ever-evolving threat of criminal misuse of artificial intelligence. Accurately estimating the cost to the public purse of AI-enabled violence against women and girls (VAWG) is difficult given uncertainties with regards to the scale of AI-enabled offending. AI has the potential to considerably increase these costs by making it easier for criminals to produce more realistic material and at greater scale than ever before.
The Home Office will continue to ensure that Law Enforcement have the capabilities they need to tackle perpetrators who exploit the use of artificial intelligence to commit violence against women and girls.
In addition, the Home Office has introduced world leading measures, becoming the first country to criminalise the possession, creation and distribution of AI tools to generate child sexual abuse material, as well as the criminalisation of the development and supply of nudification tools.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether she is taking steps to engage with the (a) National Association of Teachers of Religious Education and (b) Religious Education Council on the RE curriculum.
Answered by Georgia Gould - Minister of State (Education)
The purpose of teaching on religious education (RE) is to help pupils understand the wide range of religions and beliefs, including non-religious beliefs, that exist in our country and the wider world. A consequence of high-quality teaching can be the development of respect, tolerance and community cohesion, built through a greater understanding of different viewpoints. The department has previously issued guidance on the teaching of RE which is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/religious-education-guidance-in-english-schools-non-statutory-guidance-2010.
The government is grateful to Vanessa Ogden for her work leading the sector to come together on developing a draft RE curriculum. The Curriculum and Assessment Review recommended that government should explore including RE in the national curriculum, contingent on sector consensus. We continue to engage with the sector, including the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education and the Religious Education Council.
More widely, our reforms to the curriculum will support pupils’ understanding of mutual tolerance and respect.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department provides guidance to schools to use religious education to promote respect, tolerance, and community cohesion.
Answered by Georgia Gould - Minister of State (Education)
The purpose of teaching on religious education (RE) is to help pupils understand the wide range of religions and beliefs, including non-religious beliefs, that exist in our country and the wider world. A consequence of high-quality teaching can be the development of respect, tolerance and community cohesion, built through a greater understanding of different viewpoints. The department has previously issued guidance on the teaching of RE which is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/religious-education-guidance-in-english-schools-non-statutory-guidance-2010.
The government is grateful to Vanessa Ogden for her work leading the sector to come together on developing a draft RE curriculum. The Curriculum and Assessment Review recommended that government should explore including RE in the national curriculum, contingent on sector consensus. We continue to engage with the sector, including the National Association of Teachers of Religious Education and the Religious Education Council.
More widely, our reforms to the curriculum will support pupils’ understanding of mutual tolerance and respect.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department plans to publish an annual assessment of care leavers' experiences of education, training and employment destinations, housing status and criminal justice involvement.
Answered by Josh MacAlister - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department knows care leavers have some of the worst long-term life outcomes in society. We are determined to address this so that all care leavers have support to build enduring relationships and stable homes.
Through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, we will roll out the Staying Close programme to support care leavers up to the age of 25; require each local authority to publish information about its arrangements for supporting care leavers’ transition to adulthood; change housing legislation so that care leavers cannot be found intentionally homeless; and introduce new corporate parenting responsibilities for government departments and relevant public bodies.
The government collects national data on care leavers through the Children Looked After in England including adoptions dataset. This is published annually, and provides information on accommodation, education, training and employment and is used to monitor outcomes and inform policy development and the targeting of support for children and young people leaving care nationally.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Education:
To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department has a strategy for reducing inequalities experienced by care-experienced children and young people.
Answered by Josh MacAlister - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Education)
The department knows care leavers have some of the worst long-term life outcomes in society. We are determined to address this so that all care leavers have support to build enduring relationships and stable homes.
Through the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, we will roll out the Staying Close programme to support care leavers up to the age of 25; require each local authority to publish information about its arrangements for supporting care leavers’ transition to adulthood; change housing legislation so that care leavers cannot be found intentionally homeless; and introduce new corporate parenting responsibilities for government departments and relevant public bodies.
The government collects national data on care leavers through the Children Looked After in England including adoptions dataset. This is published annually, and provides information on accommodation, education, training and employment and is used to monitor outcomes and inform policy development and the targeting of support for children and young people leaving care nationally.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, whether her Department has had discussions with Ofcom on the likely categorisation of Telegram; and what assessment she has made of the potential impact of that categorisation on the risks of violence against women and girls on that platform.
Answered by Kanishka Narayan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
Assessment and designation of services against the categorisation threshold conditions is a statutory duty for Ofcom. The regulator plans to publish the register of categorised services and to launch consulting on the relevant additional duties in July.
In November 2025, Ofcom published guidance for services on how they can tackle online VAWG on their platforms. The Secretary of State has been clear that platforms should implement this guidance by the end of the year – regardless of how services are categorised under the Online Safety Act. Information on Ofcom’s approach to implementing the Act, including on categorisation, is available here.
Asked by: Jess Asato (Labour - Lowestoft)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, whether her Department plans to allocate funding from Ofcom’s fines to platforms for failure to comply with the Online Safety Act 2023 to organisations working to end violence against women and girls.
Answered by Kanishka Narayan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
Under the Online Safety Act, fines imposed by Ofcom are paid into the Consolidated Fund, in line with standard practice across its regulatory functions. This ensures funds are distributed in accordance with overall government priorities, which may include victim support services.
However, fines are intended to drive compliance, not to act as a funding stream. Their inherently unpredictable nature makes them unsuitable for directly supporting work on violence against women and girls or compensating victims.
Decisions on the use of such funds are for HM Treasury, while the Ministry of Justice retains primary responsibility for victim support and compensation policy in England and Wales.