Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how much funding from the public purse his Department has allocated to the National Crime Agency specialist unit for investigating child sexual abuse online in the last 12 months.

It has been the longstanding policy of successive Governments not to reveal specific details of the budgets or spending of the intelligence agencies.

However, a recent NCA and NPCC joint bid to the Police Transformation Fund (PTF) secured £2.2 million for an immediate uplift to work to tackle online child sexual exploitation. This will fund a significant expansion of the Joint Operations Team (JOT). Furthermore, in his speech at the NSPCC in September, the Home Secretary announced an extra £21m investment in law enforcement and intelligence agencies over the next 18 months to enable a focus on reducing the volume of offending and pursuing the most hardened and dangerous abusers, which also includes further funding for the JOT.

The JOT is a jointly managed National Crime Agency (NCA) and GCHQ capability, drawing on the experience and knowledge of the NCA and the high end capabilities and tradecraft of GCHQ to investigate and disrupt online Child Sexual Exploitation and Abuse.
Working collaboratively provides a very powerful operating model. The JOT has supported the NCA in bringing offenders such as Dr Matthew Falder the university lecturer who committed 137 offences to justice. He was sentenced to 32 years imprisonment following their investigation.