Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what plans her Department has in place to safeguard monuments in Whitehall and Parliament Square from vandalism and damage during protests and demonstrations.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The police have comprehensive powers to deal with individuals who vandalise or damage our cultural monuments. It is a criminal offence for a person, without lawful excuse, to intentionally or recklessly destroy or damage any property belonging to another. The police have a duty to protect the public by detecting and preventing crime, including offences of this nature.
The use of these powers is an operational matter for the Metropolitan Police Service. They have deployed significant resources to recent protests and we have seen them take action to prevent vandalism as part of their response to protests in this area. Ministers are unable to intervene in operational decisions of this nature, as to do so would undermine their operational independence.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what percentage of retail theft reports have resulted in a charge in each of the last 10 years.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The latest Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimates showed that on a like for like basis crime has fallen by 56% since 2010.
Retail crime, including shoplifting and violence and abuse, is not acceptable and the Government takes this issue very seriously. I expect police to take a zero-tolerance approach to it.
Whilst the downward trend in charge rates is concerning, I welcome the 29% increase in charges for shop lifting offences in the latest statistics.
The Home Office routinely publish statistics on crimes recorded and charges and is the latest information can be accessed via the links below:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-recorded-crime-open-data-tables
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she has had discussions with her counterpart in Japan on the effectiveness of that country's policies to reduce illegal immigration.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
On 16 October 2023, the Home Secretary had a meeting with her counterpart, Minister Matsumura, Chairperson of the National Public Safety Commission.
Whilst formal responsibility for migration sits within the Justice Ministry’s competence in Japan, their discussion acknowledged the global challenge posed by illegal migration, and the Home Secretary looked forward to further engagement with partners on this matter at the G7 Interior and Security Ministers’ meeting in Japan in December.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department plans to use artificial intelligence to help (a) predict and (b) prevent violent attacks involving (i) machetes and (ii) zombie knives.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office is working across government and with operational partners to develop our understanding of the threats and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence. The Home Office has already convened and will be convening further meetings to identify the best opportunities to use artificial intelligence to prevent and detect crime of various types. The use of artificial intelligence to predict and prevent serious violence is an operational matter for Chief Constables.
Knife crime is below its pre-pandemic level and the Home Office is investing over £110m to tackle serious violence in 2023/24. This includes:
We are also banning certain types of large knives (such as zombie style knives and machetes), giving the police more powers to seize dangerous weapons, creating a new offence of possession of a bladed weapon with an intent to harm, and increasing sentences for those who import, manufacture or sell dangerous weapons to under 18s.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she has had recent discussions with her French counterpart on the potential merits of preventing small boats from crossing the Channel by intercepting them mid-journey.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The Home Secretary and I engage regularly with our French counterparts on the issue of small boat crossings.
Our joint work with France saw nearly 33,000 crossings prevented in 2022, 40% more than in 2021, and so far in 2023 a further 15,000 migrants have failed to reach our shores on small boats. Alongside this, since July 2020, the UK-France Joint Intelligence Cell (JIC) and French law enforcement partners have dismantled 82 organised crime groups linked to small boats. In 2022 alone, the JIC and French law enforcement partners secured the arrest of around 400 people smugglers.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department plans to use artificial intelligence to help (a) predict and (b) prevent incidents of (i) rape and (ii) other sexual assaults.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
Rape and sexual violence are devastating crimes that can have a long-lasting impact on victims. Protecting women and girls from violence and supporting victims and survivors of sexual violence is a key priority for this Government.
The Home Office is working across government and with operational partners to develop our understanding of the threats and opportunities presented by artificial intelligence. The Home Office is also actively exploring and investigating options to use AI to both prevent and detect crime, including rape and sexual assault.
To help improve the police response to these crimes, we invested £9.4 million (2021-23) in Operation Soteria to develop a new National Operating Model for the investigation of rape. Frontline policing and academics across 19 forces were bought together to test new tools and techniques which form this new approach, and all forces in England and Wales are now implementing it.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many migrants who have entered the UK via small boat crossings are currently housed in accommodation within West Yorkshire whilst their asylum claims are being processed.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The Home Office has a statutory obligation to provide accommodation and other support to asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute while their application for asylum is being considered.
The Home Office publishes data on asylum seekers in receipt of support in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on the number of asylum seekers in receipt of support by local authority are published in tables Asy_D11 of the asylum and resettlement detailed datasets. Information on how to use the datasets can be found in the ‘Notes’ page of the workbooks. Data is published on a quarterly basis, the latest information was published 23 September 2022.
The Home Office do not publish statistics which disaggregate those claiming asylum support who entered the United Kingdom via channel crossings. This information is not held in a reportable format and would require a manual search of records which would incur a disproportionate cost.
Official statistics published by the Home Office are kept under review in line with the code of practice for statistics, taking into account a number of factors including user needs, as well as quality and availability of data.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department has taken to reduce the number of criminal offences involving the use of drugs committed in West Yorkshire.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
This Government’s ten-year Drug Strategy, From Harm to Hope, sets out a whole system approach to reduce drug-related crime through its three priorities: breaking drug supply chains; delivering a world-class treatment and recovery system; and achieving a significant reduction in demand for illicit drugs.
The Home Office is investing £300 million over three years to mobilise a robust and innovative end-to-end plan which attacks every phase of the supply chain, and the Department for Health and Social Care a further £780 million over three years to rebuild drug treatment and recovery services.
Combating Drugs Partnerships have been set up to cover every local area across England and offer a new blueprint for local accountability. Treatment helps reduce crime and local authorities in West Yorkshire have been allocated over £7.3 million for 2022/23 to improve services in line with the ambitions of the drugs strategy.
Project ADDER, which is supporting the delivery of the strategy outcomes, trail-blazes a whole-system response to drive down drug related offending, drug deaths and drug use in 13 sites across England and Wales. In total, Wakefield’s Project ADDER funding allocation will be £1,670,000 for 2022/23, which includes both health and enforcement funding.
We have also published a white paper, ‘Swift, Certain, Tough: New Consequences for Drug Possession’ that proposes tougher, escalating penalties for so-called recreational drug users who drive the demand for drugs and fuel criminal markets.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps her Department has taken to reduce the number of violent crimes committed in West Yorkshire.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Government is determined to drive down serious violence. We are doing this through a twin-track approach which combines tough enforcement action with support for those most at risk; so that we can stop young people from becoming trapped in the cycle of violence in the first place.
Since 2019, the Home Office has invested £170m into the development of 20 Violence Reduction Units (VRUs) in the areas worst affected by serious violence, which includes establishing a VRU in West Yorkshire. VRUs bring together local partners and deliver a range of early intervention and prevention programmes to divert young people away from a life of crime. Since 2019, the West Yorkshire VRU has received c.16m to support delivery of violence reduction activity, including £5.9m in this financial year. The VRU was also successful in bidding for an additional £450k to work alongside the police to deliver targeted youth work to high-risk young people at the point of arrest.
As at 30 September 2022, West Yorkshire Police has recruited 744 additional uplift officers against a total three year allocation of 852 officers.
The deployment of officers is an operational decision for Chief Constables.
Asked by: Andrea Jenkyns (Conservative - Morley and Outwood)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to tackle hoax calls to the emergency services.
Answered by Kit Malthouse
Making hoax and / or nuisance calls to the emergency services is a criminal offence that carries a fine or even a jail sentence. Additional measures are in place, for example Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) proactively monitor hoax/nuisance emergency calls and have processes in place to contact customers to educate them about the impact their behaviour has and to insist that the customer stop making hoax calls. All calls to the emergency services are recorded and the number can be traced, even if withheld, and an emergency authority can contact the MNO to request they contact their customer with this educational approach. Emergency services may also request an MNO to disconnect the account of the hoax/nuisance caller. However, any decision is for the emergency authority to take.