Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether he has made an assessment of trends in the level of cyber crime in the West Midlands; and if he will make a statement.

The Home Office collects information from police forces on the number of police recorded offences that have been committed (in full or in part) online. These data will mostly comprise cyber-enabled offences. The latest data for England and Wales for the year to December 2017 are published at the link below:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinenglandandwalesexperimentaltables (Table E4)

These are experimental statistics and are only published at national (England and Wales) level while the Home Office works with forces to improve the data quality.

The Home Office collects additional police data on fraud and cybercrime via the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB). These data include both cyber-dependent and cyber-enabled offences. The latest data for England and Wales for the year to December 2017 are published at the link below:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinenglandandwalesappendixtables (Table A5)

Breakdowns of these data by both police force area and offence type are not held at the Home Office.

The cyber threats we face continue to grow in scale and sophistication. This is why the National Cyber Security Strategy 2016-2021 is supported by £1.9billion of transformational investment. We are continuing to invest in cyber capabilities within law enforcement at the national, regional and local levels, to ensure that law enforcement have the capabilities in place to go after the most sophisticated criminals. In particular, we will be supporting the national policing initiative to ensure that that every police force has a specialist Cyber Crime Unit. It is crucial that at the local level we provide an effective law enforcement response, support victims and give targeted prevention messages.