Asked by: Vicky Foxcroft (Labour - Lewisham, Deptford)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, whether his Department holds information on the socio-economic background of people appointed to senior positions in his Department in the last five years.
Answered by Oliver Dowden - Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
Information on the socio-economic background of staff in my Department is not currently held.
More information about Government-wide plans to collect information on socio-economic background of civil servants was published in May 2018 and is available at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/socio-economic-background/socio-economic-background-seb .
Asked by: Vicky Foxcroft (Labour - Lewisham, Deptford)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, whether his Department has made a recent estimate of the number of people dismissed from employment as a result of developing a disability.
Answered by Chloe Smith
The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the Authority to reply.
Asked by: Vicky Foxcroft (Labour - Lewisham, Deptford)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet office, what steps he is taking to increase voter registration among under-registered groups.
Answered by Chloe Smith
Our inaugural National Democracy Week in July is going to be a UK-wide event, intended to increase democratic engagement among a wide range of under-registered groups. Last Wednesday we launched its website and a youth engagement toolkit for parliamentarians and later this year will recruit and train youth Democracy Ambassadors.
Asked by: Vicky Foxcroft (Labour - Lewisham, Deptford)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what estimate he has made of the number of people eligible to vote who were not on the electoral register in the last five general elections in (a) the UK and (b) Lewisham Deptford constituency.
Answered by Chris Skidmore
Information regarding the total number of unregistered people of voting age is not held by the Government. Only totals for the number of registered electors are held, and these can be accessed through the Office For National Statistics website. It should be noted, however, that registration levels have increased at every General Election since 2005, and the register used for the 2017 General Election was the largest in our history, standing at 46.9 million entries. This is undoubtedly due, in large part, to the introduction of the Government’s Register to Vote website, which has delivered great benefits to electors, making registering to vote simpler and more accessible than ever before.
It is the Government’s intention to build on this success by publishing a Democratic Engagement Plan in December, which will have the ambition of making the General Election in 2022 the most inclusive to date.
Asked by: Vicky Foxcroft (Labour - Lewisham, Deptford)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, if he will make an assessment of the merits of including housing associations in the list of bodies subject to freedom of information requests in response to the Grenfell Tower tragedy.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
Housing Associations do not meet the conditions for inclusion within Schedule 1 of the FOI Act. However the Government keeps the scope of the Act under constant review.
Asked by: Vicky Foxcroft (Labour - Lewisham, Deptford)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what contribution his Department is making to Government steps to reduce the incidence of serious youth violence.
Answered by Rob Wilson
Cabinet Office is committed to supporting young people from all backgrounds to make positive life choices and give back to their communities. In January 2016 Home Office published Ending Gang Violence and Exploitation which sets out how Cabinet Office programmes such as NCS and Step Up to Serve provide meaningful alternatives to gangs. Over 200,000 16-17 year olds have participated in NCS since 2011 and Step Up To Serve’s #iwill campaign aims to increase the number of 10-20 year olds participating in social action by 50% by 2020. These programmes have a powerful impact on young people at a formative time in their lives.
Asked by: Vicky Foxcroft (Labour - Lewisham, Deptford)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what steps he is taking to improve the morale of staff within the civil service.
Answered by Matt Hancock
It should be a source of pride that the Civil Service has successfully changed the way it operates and become more efficient - it is now delivering far more, for less, than it did before 2010. It is a tribute to the dedication and work of individual Civil Servants that job satisfaction remains high and wellbeing has increased.
Asked by: Vicky Foxcroft (Labour - Lewisham, Deptford)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, how many people have taken their own life in (a) Lewisham, Deptford constituency, (b) the London Borough of Lewisham and (c) Greater London in each of the last three years.
Answered by Rob Wilson
The information requested falls within the responsibility of the UK Statistics Authority. I have asked the Authority to reply.
Asked by: Vicky Foxcroft (Labour - Lewisham, Deptford)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what targets his Department has set for the electoral registration of young people; and whether his Department has plans to assess the potential merits of any auto-enrolment schemes for that purpose.
Answered by John Penrose
Individual Electoral Registration (IER) and online registration were introduced in Great Britain last year, replacing the outdated system of household registration. Online registration has proved popular: over three quarters of the 9.6 million applications to register to vote made since June 2014 have been submitted online. Since June 2014, over 2.2 million applications have been received from 16-24 year olds.
The Government strongly supports the principle underlying IER, that people must make an individual application to register to vote, and is currently examining the results of prompted enrolment schemes such as the one recently undertaken at Sheffield University, to see if they have wider application.
Asked by: Vicky Foxcroft (Labour - Lewisham, Deptford)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, what steps he is taking to increase electoral registration in (a) London and (b) the rest of the UK.
Answered by John Penrose
Over £14 million has been invested over the last two financial years to support the cost of activities aimed at increasing the levels of voter registration, including in the run up to the General Election.
The Electoral Commission (EC) published on 18 June an analysis of the electoral registers used for the elections on 7 May. It showed that the numbers of entries on these registers had increased by 1% compared with the last ones published prior to the introduction of Individual Electoral Registration. The Government will keep under review its approach to electoral registration in light of the EC’s report and its findings.