Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he is taking to ensure that children are safe from online grooming.

We have prioritised child sexual abuse as a national threat and are helping the police to respond to the changing demand with a £460 million increase in overall funding in 2018/19. This will help transform the law enforcement response and empower police forces to apply their best skills and expertise to tackle the problem. In September, the Home Secretary announced an additional £21 million increase over the next 18 months for law enforcement and the intelligence agencies which includes further funding of the Regional Organised Crime Units (ROCUs) to target online grooming of children.

The Government has also significantly increased resources to the National Crime Agency (NCA) leading to a near doubling of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command (CEOP)investigative capability, and the Joint Operations Team, a collaborative venture between the NCA and GCHQ launched in 2015, which is targeting the most sophisticated online offenders.

The Home Secretary has made a call to industry to raise their response to the horrifying scale of online child sexual abuse; and made clear there would be no ‘no-go areas’ of inquiry into the offline grooming, abuse and exploitation of children.

In November, engineers from some of the world’s biggest tech firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Snap and Twitter, worked for 2 days at a Hackathon in the United States co-hosted by the Home Secretary and Microsoft, which tasked industry experts to come up with tools to identify online child grooming. A prototype tool has been developed that can be used to automatically flag potential conversations taking place between child groomers and children which will be licensed free of charge to smaller and medium-sized technology companies worldwide.

Collaborative working between Police forces and the NCA is resulting in around 400 arrests each month for online CSEA offences, and the safe-guarding of around 500 children each month.