Asked by: Kevin Brennan (Labour - Cardiff West)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he is taking to rectify the misidentification of individuals by the Home Office Person Centric Data Platform.
Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
The Person Centric Data Platform (PCDP) holds millions of identities that have been submitted or otherwise provided in support of immigration applications. Individuals have not been ‘misidentified’ by the PCDP. Rather, the Home Office has for some time been aware of issues around ‘merged identity’ - where a single ‘identity island’ has been formed with data belonging to two or more individuals.
The ‘merged identities’ issue affects around 0.02% of PCDP customer records - over 99.98% of records are not impacted by this issue. We have identified around 46,000 records with an identity issue, of which over 13,000 have already been resolved and we have a dedicated team working on the remainder.
The Home Office takes data security and accuracy very seriously. We continue detailed analysis to identify erroneous PCDP records so that appropriate remedial work can be undertaken as quickly, and as carefully, as possible.
Where customers identify an issue with their data, we encourage them to contact the UK Visas and Immigration Contact Centre to enable this to be investigated and resolved.
Asked by: Kevin Brennan (Labour - Cardiff West)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent estimate he has made of the number of individuals misidentified by the Home Office Person Centric Data Platform in the last 12 months.
Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
The Person Centric Data Platform (PCDP) holds millions of identities that have been submitted or otherwise provided in support of immigration applications. Individuals have not been ‘misidentified’ by the PCDP. Rather, the Home Office has for some time been aware of issues around ‘merged identity’ - where a single ‘identity island’ has been formed with data belonging to two or more individuals.
The ‘merged identities’ issue affects around 0.02% of PCDP customer records - over 99.98% of records are not impacted by this issue. We have identified around 46,000 records with an identity issue, of which over 13,000 have already been resolved and we have a dedicated team working on the remainder.
The Home Office takes data security and accuracy very seriously. We continue detailed analysis to identify erroneous PCDP records so that appropriate remedial work can be undertaken as quickly, and as carefully, as possible.
Where customers identify an issue with their data, we encourage them to contact the UK Visas and Immigration Contact Centre to enable this to be investigated and resolved.
Asked by: Kevin Brennan (Labour - Cardiff West)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether he has made a recent assessment of the effectiveness of the cross-criminal justice system rape data tool established by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) and Avon and Somerset Police to collect, share and analyse end-to-end rape data as part of the Police-CPS Joint National Rape Action Plan.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
We recognise the importance of linking end-to-end data across criminal justice agencies and are committed to continuing to improve the quality of and access to data to enable us to develop deeper insights and improve the response to crimes such as rape.
We publish regular statistics on adult rape through the CJS Delivery Data Dashboard. These statistics demonstrate progress on our ambition to more than double the number of adult rape cases reaching court by the end of this Parliament, and to return volumes of cases being referred to the police, charged by the CPS and going to court, to at least 2016 levels. In the year to June 2023 adult rape prosecutions were up 54% on the year to June 2022, this is the fifth consecutive year we’ve seen an increase in suspects being brought to trial.
In October 2023, the Home Office and Ministry of Justice published guidance and a template Memorandum of Understanding to support local criminal justice partners to share data for the purposes of monitoring and improving performance. The Home Office do not hold data on the cost of the development of this tool but through the Rape Review, the government provided £300,000 to the Police Digital Service to evaluate and develop guidance on a range of technical solutions which could be utilised by local agencies to link their data on rape, including the tool developed by Avon and Somerset Police.
Avon and Somerset were also the pioneering police force for Operation Soteria, which has developed new national operating models for the investigation and prosecution of rape to support police and prosecutors to ensuring cases are investigated fully and pursued rigorously through the courts.
Asked by: Kevin Brennan (Labour - Cardiff West)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the cost to the public purse of the cross-criminal justice system rape data tool set up by the Crown Prosecution Service and Avon and Somerset Police was in the financial year 2022-23.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
We recognise the importance of linking end-to-end data across criminal justice agencies and are committed to continuing to improve the quality of and access to data to enable us to develop deeper insights and improve the response to crimes such as rape.
We publish regular statistics on adult rape through the CJS Delivery Data Dashboard. These statistics demonstrate progress on our ambition to more than double the number of adult rape cases reaching court by the end of this Parliament, and to return volumes of cases being referred to the police, charged by the CPS and going to court, to at least 2016 levels. In the year to June 2023 adult rape prosecutions were up 54% on the year to June 2022, this is the fifth consecutive year we’ve seen an increase in suspects being brought to trial.
In October 2023, the Home Office and Ministry of Justice published guidance and a template Memorandum of Understanding to support local criminal justice partners to share data for the purposes of monitoring and improving performance. The Home Office do not hold data on the cost of the development of this tool but through the Rape Review, the government provided £300,000 to the Police Digital Service to evaluate and develop guidance on a range of technical solutions which could be utilised by local agencies to link their data on rape, including the tool developed by Avon and Somerset Police.
Avon and Somerset were also the pioneering police force for Operation Soteria, which has developed new national operating models for the investigation and prosecution of rape to support police and prosecutors to ensuring cases are investigated fully and pursued rigorously through the courts.
Asked by: Kevin Brennan (Labour - Cardiff West)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether he has received recent representations on the financial impact of the police pension scheme 2015 on retired police officers.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
Retired police officers have written recently to ask when they will receive information about the remedy, to resolve a discrimination case, that came into force from October 2023. This information is not held centrally.
The police pension scheme is locally administered by each of the separate police forces in England and Wales. The Home Office does not have any role in the administration of police pensions.
Asked by: Kevin Brennan (Labour - Cardiff West)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether he has made a recent assessment of the potential impact of (a) system upgrades and (b) maintenance on the time taken to produce biometric residence permits.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The Home Office releases weekly upgrades, including maintenance, to the Atlas caseworking system. Such releases are completed without the Atlas caseworking system, or services like BRP production, being down at all and so there is no impact upon caseworking or BRP production.
Where a maintenance release requires the system to be taken down temporarily, it is done so in quiet periods and for a very short time period, so that caseworking operations are not adversely affected.
Asked by: Kevin Brennan (Labour - Cardiff West)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether he has made a recent assessment of the potential impact of (a) system upgrades and (b) maintenance on the time taken to process leave to remain applications.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The Home Office releases weekly upgrades, including maintenance, to the Atlas caseworking system. Such releases are completed without the Atlas caseworking system, or services like BRP production, being down at all and so there is no impact upon caseworking or BRP production.
Where a maintenance release requires the system to be taken down temporarily, it is done so in quiet periods and for a very short time period, so that caseworking operations are not adversely affected.
Asked by: Kevin Brennan (Labour - Cardiff West)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to increase the speed of processing Leave to Remain applications.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The Home Office publishes a range of data including some on processing times. Please see link: Migration transparency data - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).
The resources available are deployed to decide applications as quickly as possible.
Asked by: Kevin Brennan (Labour - Cardiff West)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many and what proportion of Biometric Residence Permits issued in January 2023 have been subsequently reissued to correct errors in visa conditions.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The information is not available publicly and could only be obtained at a disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Kevin Brennan (Labour - Cardiff West)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many and what proportion of Biometric Residence Permits issued in each month since 1 January 2022 have been subsequently reissued to correct errors in visa conditions.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The information is not available publicly and could only be obtained at a disproportionate cost.