Question to the Home Office:

To ask His Majesty's Government, in the context of any handover of responsibility for counter-extremism work from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to the Home Office, which department will have responsibility for (1) cross-Government engagement principles, (2) establishing an extremism-specific due diligence tool, (3) blasphemy-related extremism, and (4) religiously motivated hate crime.

The Home Office work on countering extremism, and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government continues to lead work on strengthening community cohesion with local councils. It is vital that the two programmes on cohesion and extremism work in parallel.

On the definition of extremism, I refer Lord Godson to the Answer provided by the Security Minister on 22 January to Question UIN 23874, and to the Urgent Question response provided by the Security Minister on 28 January.