Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, if he will take steps to ensure the financial stability of the British Council.

Answered by Hamish Falconer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)

This Government is committed to a successful British Council that is financially stable. Our funding to the British Council underlines our support. The FCDO will provide the British Council with £162.5 million Grant-in-Aid in 2024/25. Funding for 2025/26 will be announced in due course.

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what headcount cap has she set for the National Crime Agency for financial year (a) 2024-25 and (b) 2025-26.

Answered by Dan Jarvis - Minister of State (Home Office)

The Home Secretary has not set headcount caps for the National Crime Agency.

Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, how much the late filing penalties from companies failing to file their annual accounts within the deadline were in each financial year between 2018-19 and 2023-24.

Answered by Justin Madders - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade)

Official statistics on the value of collected late filing penalties are published in the annual report of Companies House. We have excerpted and reproduced the relevant figures for companies failing to file their annual accounts within the deadline below:

Expenditure for the LFP scheme activity is not funded through fees. Penalties collected in respect of company accounts filed late with Companies House are paid to HMT, net of costs incurred in running the scheme.

Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs, if he will take steps to use UK-based assets that were expropriated by the Assad regime for (a) aid and (b) re-development projects to help the Syrian people.

Answered by Hamish Falconer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)

UK-based assets expropriated by the Assad regime remain frozen. As with all our sanctions, we keep our approach under review.

We do not comment on future designations as to do so lessens their potential impact.

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that Crown Dependencies are not used to launder the proceeds of corruption.

Answered by Dan Jarvis - Minister of State (Home Office)

The Crown Dependencies are separate, self-governing jurisdictions responsible for their own domestic affairs, including financial services regulation. The Ministry of Justice is responsible for managing the UK’s constitutional relationship with the Crown Dependencies but all UK Government departments are responsible for their respective policy areas towards the Crown Dependencies and engage directly with them. The Home Office leads on illicit finance liaison with the Crown Dependencies for the UK Government.

Corruption and illicit finance threaten global security, harm democracy, hamper economic growth and prosperity, slow development, and harm victims. The UK Government is committed to working together with international financial centres, including the Crown Dependencies and the Overseas Territories, to help tackle corruption and money laundering.

The Crown Dependencies (the Bailiwick of Jersey, the Bailiwick of Guernsey including Alderney, and the Isle of Man) have company beneficial ownership registers and they share data from these with UK law enforcement via the Exchange of Notes arrangements.

Publicly accessible company beneficial ownership registers are a critical tool for tackling illicit finance, making it more challenging for illicit actors to hide funds and launder the proceeds of corruption. The Home Office continues to work with the Crown Dependencies to help improve their beneficial ownership transparency and welcomes the commitments the Crown Dependencies have made for greater corporate transparency; the Crown Dependencies are working towards implementing legitimate interest access to their registers, including access for media and civil society.

However, this Government is committed to tackling illicit finance and expects this to be an interim step to public registers. I look forward to meeting with the Crown Dependencies in 2025 to discuss this ongoing agenda.

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she plans to take to ensure UK law enforcement authorities use criminal measures against professional enablers of economic crime who have exploited Crown Dependencies.

Answered by Dan Jarvis - Minister of State (Home Office)

Professional enablers are a critical facilitator of serious and organised crime.

As part of the Economic Crime Plan 2, the National Economic Crime Centre launched a cross-system strategy to tackle the threat posed by professional enablers to the UK earlier this year.

This sets out a series of actions for the public and private sectors including commitments to enhance collective understanding, improve information sharing, make better use of powers and intervention tools, and develop joint disruption strategies to tackle the threat. One of the key objectives is for law enforcement and supervisory bodies to deliver impactful disruptions and use the full range of intervention opportunities, including criminal justice outcomes, to achieve this. We expect the strategy to start delivering results in 2025.

The Crown Dependencies are separate, self-governing jurisdictions responsible for their own domestic affairs and whose law enforcement agencies are responsible for tackling criminality that occurs in their jurisdictions. The Home Office works closely with the Crown Dependencies to strengthen their transparency requirements to reduce the threat of professional enablers and companies laundering money in the Crown Dependencies.

No description available

This inquiry will explore the extent and effectiveness of the UK’s soft power in what is an increasingly challenging global environment. The inquiry will consider the UK’s unique soft power strengths and ask how the UK might best measure and actualise the benefits it accrues from its soft power. This inquiry will also scrutinise the work of the Government’s new Soft Power Council and any subsequent strategy to strengthen UK soft power.

Submit Evidence (by 24 Feb 2025)

Misinformation and disinformation campaigns are increasingly weaponised by hostile state and non-state actors and this inquiry will seek to understand which actors are primarily responsible, and which channels and technologies are being used. It will seek to map motivations, sources and locations of the most pressing disinformation threats to democracy, and to understand the impact of artificial intelligence. The inquiry will examine how the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) can work with allies and multilateral organisations to combat the spread of disinformation that seeks to undermine democratic values and institutions. The inquiry will also ask how the Government can coordinate its counter-disinformation work across departments and best work with private organisations. This inquiry will take a regional approach by examining disinformation campaigns within Europe, the Americas, Indo-Pacific and Africa, to understand how the UK can better counter disinformation from malign actors.