Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she has made an assessment of the level of interference in the trade union movement by (a) Russia, (b) North Korea and (c) Iran.

The Government’s first duty is to protect our national security and keep our country safe. We keep potential threats to the UK under constant review and, where necessary, we use all the tools at our disposal to mitigate these threats.

The UK has a strong record of responding robustly to state threats. Alongside our existing operational response, new legislation has been brought in through the National Security Act 2023 to deal with the range of modern state threats, including foreign interference. The Act includes a Foreign Interference Offence, which contributes to the toolkit available to law enforcement and the intelligence agencies to disrupt foreign interference activity, protect the British public and address the evolving threat to our national security.

As a matter of long-standing policy, the Government does not comment on the detail of matters of national security or on individual cases. This Government is committed to tackling the threat of foreign interference, wherever it originates.