Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to track people working for hostile states in the UK.

As a matter of long-standing policy, we do not comment on the detail of security and intelligence issues.

The government’s first duty is to protect our national security and keep our country safe. We keep potential threats to the UK under constant review and, where necessary, we use all the tools at our disposal to mitigate these threats.

The UK has a strong record of responding robustly to state threats and our intelligence and law enforcement agencies are at the forefront of these efforts. Alongside our existing operational response, new legislation has been brought in through the National Security Act 2023 to deal with the range of modern state threats and make the UK a harder target for those state which seek to conduct hostile acts against the UK, including espionage, interference in our political system, and sabotage.