Asked by: Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of a freelance visa for the creative industries.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
We are taking account of the needs and interests of the creative sector and others in our future immigration system, details of which will be published in our forthcoming White Paper. We are looking to develop a system that works for all sectors.
Asked by: Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if he will make an assessment of the potential merits of imposing a regulatory requirement on social media platforms to invest in preventative measures to identify online grooming on social networking sites.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
In September, the Home Secretary made a speech setting out clear asks of industry, including stopping online child grooming and he made it clear that industry needed to do much more to respond to this evolving threat.
We are already working with social media companies so we can protect users and change user behaviour online. While several of the tech giants have taken important and positive steps to make their platforms safer, the performance of internet companies overall has been very mixed.
Earlier this month, the Home Secretary co-hosted the Microsoft led Hackathon in America, where he met with leading industry stakeholders to identify robust ways to tackle and prevent child sexual abuse on the internet. It was a well attended and positive event which saw all areas of the technological industries coming together in cooperation with Government in seeking to build and implement tools to take charge against this threat. A prototype tool was developed at the Hackathon that can be used to automatically flag potential conversations taking place between child groomers and children, which will be licensed free of charge to smaller and medium-sized technology companies worldwide.
We have already committed to legislate and will set out our plans in the forthcoming Online Harms White Paper. How far we legislate will be informed by the industry response.This winter we will publish a White Paper, setting out new laws to tackle the full range of online harms and set clear responsibilities for tech companies to keep UK citizens safe. Until now, the Government has primarily encouraged internet companies to take action on a voluntary basis. There has been considerable progress through this approach, however, it has been slower in some areas than oth-ers and there is more to do. This is why we are now considering options around statutory intervention.
The Government has heard stakeholder calls for an Internet Regulator and we must carefully consider all the options to address existing and emerging issues relating to online safety, including what legislation will be necessary and whether a regulator is needed.
Asked by: Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment he has made of the effectiveness of social media platforms approaches to tackling grooming and online sexual abuse.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
In September, the Home Secretary made a speech setting out clear asks of industry, including stopping online child grooming and he made it clear that industry needed to do much more to respond to this evolving threat.
We are already working with social media companies so we can protect users and change user behaviour online. While several of the tech giants have taken important and positive steps to make their platforms safer, the performance of internet companies overall has been very mixed.
Earlier this month, the Home Secretary co-hosted the Microsoft led Hackathon in America, where he met with leading industry stakeholders to identify robust ways to tackle and prevent child sexual abuse on the internet. It was a well attended and positive event which saw all areas of the technological industries coming together in cooperation with Government in seeking to build and implement tools to take charge against this threat. A prototype tool was developed at the Hackathon that can be used to automatically flag potential conversations taking place between child groomers and children, which will be licensed free of charge to smaller and medium-sized technology companies worldwide.
We have already committed to legislate and will set out our plans in the forthcoming Online Harms White Paper. How far we legislate will be informed by the industry response.This winter we will publish a White Paper, setting out new laws to tackle the full range of online harms and set clear responsibilities for tech companies to keep UK citizens safe. Until now, the Government has primarily encouraged internet companies to take action on a voluntary basis. There has been considerable progress through this approach, however, it has been slower in some areas than oth-ers and there is more to do. This is why we are now considering options around statutory intervention.
The Government has heard stakeholder calls for an Internet Regulator and we must carefully consider all the options to address existing and emerging issues relating to online safety, including what legislation will be necessary and whether a regulator is needed.
Asked by: Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps he is taking to ensure that children are safe from online grooming.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
We have prioritised child sexual abuse as a national threat and are helping the police to respond to the changing demand with a £460 million increase in overall funding in 2018/19. This will help transform the law enforcement response and empower police forces to apply their best skills and expertise to tackle the problem. In September, the Home Secretary announced an additional £21 million increase over the next 18 months for law enforcement and the intelligence agencies which includes further funding of the Regional Organised Crime Units (ROCUs) to target online grooming of children.
The Government has also significantly increased resources to the National Crime Agency (NCA) leading to a near doubling of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Command (CEOP)investigative capability, and the Joint Operations Team, a collaborative venture between the NCA and GCHQ launched in 2015, which is targeting the most sophisticated online offenders.
The Home Secretary has made a call to industry to raise their response to the horrifying scale of online child sexual abuse; and made clear there would be no ‘no-go areas’ of inquiry into the offline grooming, abuse and exploitation of children.
In November, engineers from some of the world’s biggest tech firms, including Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Snap and Twitter, worked for 2 days at a Hackathon in the United States co-hosted by the Home Secretary and Microsoft, which tasked industry experts to come up with tools to identify online child grooming. A prototype tool has been developed that can be used to automatically flag potential conversations taking place between child groomers and children which will be licensed free of charge to smaller and medium-sized technology companies worldwide.
Collaborative working between Police forces and the NCA is resulting in around 400 arrests each month for online CSEA offences, and the safe-guarding of around 500 children each month.
Asked by: Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the timetable is for his Department to respond to its consultation on the draft Domestic Violence and Abuse Bill; and what the timetable is for further steps to be taken in relation to that Bill.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
On 8 March we launched a 12 week public consultation on proposals for a landmark domestic abuse Bill and a supporting package of practical action to transform the response to domestic abuse. The consultation closed on 31 May. Over 3,200 responses to the consultation were received. The responses to the consultation are being considered and a draft Bill will be published later this session.
Asked by: Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the timetable is for his Department to respond to its consultation on the draft Domestic Violence and Abuse Bill; and what the timetable is for further steps to be taken in relation to that Bill.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs
On 8 March we launched a 12 week public consultation on proposals for a landmark domestic abuse Bill and a supporting package of practical action to transform the response to domestic abuse. The consultation closed on 31 May. Over 3,200 responses to the consultation were received. The responses to the consultation are being considered and a draft Bill will be published later this session.
Asked by: Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many refugees have been resettled under the Syrian Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme.
Answered by Brandon Lewis
The Home Office is committed to publishing data in an orderly way as part of the regular quarterly Immigration Statistics, in line with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. Latest statistics published on 24 August 2017 confirmed that a total of 8,535 vulnerable people have been resettled since the start of the scheme.
The statistics are available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/immigration-statistics-quarterly-release
Asked by: Lord Vaizey of Didcot (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what progress has been made on the implementation of the Dubs amendment to bring unaccompanied child refuges in Europe into the UK.
Answered by Robert Goodwill
In 2016, we transferred over 900 unaccompanied asylum-seeking children to the UK from Europe, including more than 750 from France as part of the UK’s support for the Calais camp clearance. Approximately 200 of these children met the criteria for section 67 of the Immigration Act.
More eligible children will be transferred from Europe, in line with the terms of the Immigration Act, in the coming months and we will continue to meet our obligations under the Dublin Regulation. In addition to our long standing secondee in Italy, we have seconded an expert to Greece who has been working closely with UNHCR, IOM and the Greek authorities to identify potentially eligible children under section 67 of the Immigration Act and support transfers under the Dublin Regulation.