Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to reduce the time taken to examine electronic devices in suspected child sexual exploitation cases.

The approach taken by police forces into the examination of digital devices in suspected child sexual exploitation cases is an operational matter for Chief Officers.

All police forces and the National Crime Agency (NCA) are connected to the Child Abuse Image Database (CAID) that was launched in 2014 by the then Prime Minister. CAID provides law enforcement agencies with effective tools to search seized devices for indecent images of children (IIOC), reduce the time taken to identify such images and increase the ability to identify victims. Recently, the NCA’s Child Exploitation & Online Protection (CEOP) Command were able to use CAID to review one of their largest ever seizures within 6 weeks. Based on the case size, before CAID this would have taken a minimum of 6 months to review.