Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how many (a) laptops and PCs, (b) mobile phones and (c) other technological devices issued by his Department were reported (i) lost, (ii) stolen and (iii) damaged in each year since 2019.

The following table includes the number of lost or stolen devices in the Ministry of Defence in the last five years.

All Departmental IT is fully security encrypted.

The departmental security unit records and investigates each reported loss from the Department. If appropriate, the police are invited to undertake further inquiries.

Any mobile device reported as lost is immediately and remotely deactivated, and the contents are deleted. The user account on any laptop reported as lost is immediately and remotely locked.

It should be noted that these figures only account for lost and stolen devices as damaged devices aren’t classed as a security issue. We do not differentiate between lost and stolen devices and treat both the same for security reasons. Individual departments hold information on the number of devices damaged and therefore this is not information that we hold centrally and to gather it would be at a disproportionate cost.