Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to (a) reduce online and phone scams and (b) improve the ease of reporting them.

The Government is deeply concerned by the growth in scale and complexity of online and phone scams. We are actively working with industry, regulators, law enforcement and consumer groups to crack down on these crimes and to protect victims.

Ofcom have adopted new rules relating to Call Line Identification (CLI), which means phone numbers used to perpetrate scams will be identified, filtered out and prevented from reaching the recipient.

As well as this, the Government has also now extended the Online Safety Bill to include fraudulent user-generated content. The draft bill can be found here: www.gov.uk/government/publications/draft-online-safety-bill.

We will publish a fraud action plan to further strengthen how we combat fraud after the 2021 Spending Review.

Reporting incidents of fraud helps us stop fraudsters and protect other people from becoming victims. We continue to ask the public to report fraud to the police through Action Fraud by phone on 0300 123 2040 or through their website: http://www.actionfraud.police.uk/report_fraud. Suspicious text messages can be reported to 7726 (which is free of charge) and suspicious emails to report@phishing.gov.uk.