Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will commit to (a) establishing secure and (b) increasing funding for the National Wildlife Crime Unit as recommended by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime's report entitled, Wildlife and Forest Crime Analytic Toolkit Report: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, published in August 2021.

The National Wildlife Crime Unit (NWCU) helps prevent and detect wildlife crime, by obtaining and disseminating intelligence, undertaking analysis which highlights local or national threats and directly assisting law enforcement in their investigations.

Since 2016, the Home Office has provided £136,000 annually to the National Wildlife Crime Unit to bolster work preventing wildlife crime both domestically and internationally.

From August 2021 the Home Office will provide additional funding to the NWCU to tackle money laundering related to the International Wildlife Trade (IWT), aligning directly to G7 commitments to intensify the combating of illicit finance from IWT. This is intended to be a three-year project. Funding will be made available via the Home Office spending review settlement.