Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the Written Statement by the Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury on 5 November (HCWS188), what is the status of the Home Office's Cerberus Project in relation to using safety and security declarations to target Border Force activity.

Safety & Security declarations are a key dataset that will enhance Home Office capability to protect the border. We have already undertaken a discovery exercise on the operationalisation of this data for the purposes of detecting high risk movements of goods. On the basis of that discovery our approach in 2025 will be to:

• Use the existing HMRC Safety & Security Great Britain (S&S GB) system to risk assess EU traffic using the new EU S&S data. This will commence as soon as data is available on 31 January 2025.
• Build new risking capability to exploit the data within our CERBERUS Border Risking Data Analytics system. This work will commence in Q4 24-25 and continue throughout the SR period. It will ensure that we make the best use of S&S data by fusing it with wider border data and intelligence. Our 2025 priority is the roll off (RoRo) ferry mode where we see the greatest threat and largest operational dividend.

The Home Office already uses Rest of the World S&S data to risk RoW traffic.