Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to continue with the immigration reforms introduced by the Home Secretary as part of the Plan for Change.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office’s Immigration White Paper, published on 12 May, set out proposed reforms to restore order, control and fairness to the legal migration system, reduce net migration, and promote economic growth.
On 1 July changes to the Immigration Rules were set out to deliver the first set of reforms:
Work is underway to deliver the wider measures announced in the White Paper with further updates to follow in due course. We will set out further measures around asylum and border security later this year.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure the effective implementation of the Foreign Influence Registration Scheme released on 1 July.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
On 1 July 2025, FIRS was officially launched. To ensure effective implementation, the Home Office has a Case Management Team recruited and trained to administer the scheme, a web portal that is fully operational and detailed published guidance available online. The Government is also continuing to engage with those who may need to register to ensure they understand the requirements during the grace period which ends on 1 October.
There will also be an annual report laid before Parliament on the operation of FIRS. This will include the number of registrations under the scheme, together with the number of people charged and prosecuted for failing to comply with the scheme’s requirements.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what analysis they have conducted on whether the current visa system is incentivising employers to recruit from overseas rather than invest in training UK-based workers.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office’s Immigration White Paper, published 12 May, looked in depth at the flaws in the previous Government’s visa system that had incentivised employers to recruit from overseas rather than investing in training UK-based workers and set out proposals for extensive reform of that system.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the prevalence of the underreporting of (1) domestic abuse, (2) sexual violence, and (3) hate crimes.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The best measure of Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG), including domestic abuse and sexual violence, is prevalence as reported through the CSEW because this is anonymous, includes crimes not reported to the police and is unaffected by changes in levels of reporting to the police or police recording practices.
The gap between police reports of domestic abuse and sexual violence and the number of victims and survivors estimated by the CSEW means there is a significant number of unidentified cases.
As part of our unprecedented mission to tackle the national emergency of VAWG we have worked with the ONS to develop a new combined metric to better capture the scale of these crimes for the first time.
For our forthcoming Strategy for tackling Violence Against Women and Girls we will use a broad suite of metrics to provide a more comprehensive understanding of VAWG across Government and society.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government, further to the remarks by Lord Hanson of Flint on 10 July (HL Deb col 1487), whether there have been any instances of the General Data Protection Regulation or other data protection legislation preventing the Home Office from removing foreign criminals from the UK.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The UK’s data protection legislation allows for personal data to be processed to pursue legitimate aims.
In particular, the international transfers regimes, which this Government recently improved through the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, allows for personal data to be transferred to third countries where that is necessary for important reasons of public interest, including for immigration control and law enforcement.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what proportion of reported shoplifting offences result in police attendance.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
Data published by the NPCC (Policing Retail Crime Action Plan shows early impact), from a dip sample of 1,500 shoplifting incidents in December 2023, show that police attended:
Our Safer Streets Summer Initiative will see increased police patrols and local action in over 500 town centres this summer. As part of our Safer Streets Mission, we are committed to restoring neighbourhood policing, and as a result of our £200 million investment, we will see an additional 3,000 neighbourhood officers and PCSOs on the beat in communities across the country this year.
In the Crime and Policing Bill, introduced to Parliament on 25 February, we brought a new offence of assaulting a retail worker to protect the hardworking and dedicated staff that work in stores. We are also repealing legislation which makes shop theft of and below £200 a summary-only offence, sending a clear message that any level of shop theft is illegal and will be taken seriously.
To help tackle retail crime, we will provide £5 million over the next three years to continue to fund a specialist analysis team within Opal, the national policing intelligence unit for serious organised acquisitive crime.
We will also invest £2 million over the next three years in the National Business Crime Centre which provides a resource for both police and businesses to learn, share and support each other to prevent and combat crime.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government how many incidents of shoplifting were recorded in each of the past five years; and how many resulted in a charge or summons.
Answered by Lord Hanson of Flint - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office collects and publishes information on the number of notifiable offences and their outcomes.
The table below show the volume of the shop theft offences outcomes recorded by the police in the years from 2020 to 2024 and how many of those resulted in a charge or summons.
Table 1: Shoplifting offences recorded by the police from 2020 to 2024, and those resulting in charge/summons, England and Wales [Note: 1] | |||
Calendar year (offence recorded) | Shoplifting offences | Charged/Summonsed | % |
2020 | 254,547 | 44,969 | 18% |
2021 | 256,198 | 39,353 | 15% |
2022 | 315,052 | 48,268 | 15% |
2023 | 429,873 | 72,144 | 17% |
2024 | 516,971 | 93,156 | 18% |
1. Figures for the period January to March 2020 exclude Greater Manchester police (GMP) | |||
as they were unable to provide full data to the Home Office Data Hub (HODH) in this period. | |||
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Cabinet Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the impact of the levels of immigration in the last year on employment rates among UK-born workers.
Answered by Baroness Anderson of Stoke-on-Trent - Baroness in Waiting (HM Household) (Whip)
The information requested falls under the remit of the UK Statistics Authority.
Please see the letter attached from the National Statistician and Chief Executive of the UK Statistics Authority.
Emma Rourke | Acting National Statistician
The Lord Davies of Gower
House of Lords
London
SW1A 0PW
16 July 2025
Dear Lord Davies of Gower,
As Acting National Statistician, I am responding to your Parliamentary Question asking what assessment has been made of the impact of the levels of immigration in the last year on employment rates among UK-born workers (HL9326).
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) estimates the employment rates of people born in the UK and people not born in the UK from the Labour Force Survey (LFS), which is a survey of people resident in households in the UK.
According to LFS estimates, the employment rate for people born in the UK for the three-month period January to March 2025 was 74.6%. This was 0.2 percentage points higher than the equivalent employment rate one year earlier. Meanwhile, the employment rate for people born outside of the UK increased by 1.7 percentage points to 76.6% over the same period.
As the LFS does not collect information on the length of time people born outside of the UK have been residents, it is not possible to provide estimates of the employment rate for recent immigrants.
The ongoing challenges with response rates, response levels and weighting approach mean that labour market statistics based on the LFS are subject to increased volatility and are considered ’official statistics in development’ until further review.
Yours sincerely,
Emma Rourke
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the regulatory challenges facing small and medium-sized enterprises involved in the development and deployment of sustainable aviation fuel, and what plans they have to simplify relevant processes.
Answered by Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill - Minister of State (Department for Transport)
There are a number of steps we are taking to support enterprises of all sizes to contribute to SAF targets. We aim to minimise regulatory burdens when designing our policies.
We are encouraging the use of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in the UK through the SAF mandate, which obligates fuel suppliers to supply a proportion of SAF in their fuel. To minimise the impact on small or micro businesses from being obligated, the minimum threshold for registering with the SAF mandate scheme and being set an obligation is 15.9 terajoules of aviation fuel, or 450,000 litres, per annum. This minimises unnecessary administrative burdens with negligible impact on GHG emissions reductions.
We are supporting the production and development of UK supplies of SAF through the Advanced Fuels Fund (AFF). Applicants were invited to apply for funding in 2025 with no restriction on the size of the project. Previous rounds have supported a range of proposals from demonstration to commercial scale. The Spending Review 2025 will continue support for the production of sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) in the UK to 2029/30.
In addition to providing grant funding under the AFF, our SAF Bill currently before the House, will deliver a SAF Revenue Certainty Mechanism. This mechanism will help unlock investment in UK SAF production and grow this emerging sector.
Our SAF Clearing House also supports SAF producers through the testing process – a grant funding window is currently open to applications.
We keep our policies under review to ensure they are not creating unnecessary regulatory burdens.
Asked by: Lord Davies of Gower (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask His Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of the impact of licensing requirements on small and medium-sized enterprises in the aviation sector; and what steps they are taking to streamline regulatory processes for both labour mobility and innovative and low-emission technologies.
Answered by Lord Hendy of Richmond Hill - Minister of State (Department for Transport)
The Government’s New approach to ensure regulators and regulation support growth, which launched in March, has introduced a host of initiatives to streamline regulatory processes across aviation and all other sectors. These include committing to cut the administrative costs of regulation to businesses, whether small, medium sized or large, by 25% by the end of the Parliament.
Government is funding the Civil Aviation Authority to deliver this for innovation and low emission aviation technologies through: the Future of Flight Programme that is developing the regulatory framework to enable innovative aviation technology, such as electric Vertical Take-off and Landing aircraft (eVTOL) and Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (e.g. drones); and the Hydrogen Regulatory Challenge to support its engagement with innovators on the development of the regulatory framework for this technology.
The Government and the Civil Aviation Authority are also taking steps to streamline the regulatory processes for people working in the sector, including by bringing in a digitised process for commercial pilot licence applications to speed up and deliver admin savings for up to 6,500 pilots every year.