Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Independent - Gorton and Denton)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many times their Department has accepted in full the position of the Parliamentary Ombudsman’s (a) findings and (b) recommendations on (i) issuing an apology and (ii) other forms of redress in the last 10 years.
Answered by Diana Johnson - Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
The Government does not centrally keep records of or track all the findings and recommendations made by the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Independent - Gorton and Denton)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many organisations that are currently proscribed were prescribed for reasons that did not include that organisation (a) committing, (b) enabling or (c) encouraging (i) serious acts of violence against a person or (ii) any other form of endangerment to people's lives.
Answered by Dan Jarvis - Minister of State (Cabinet Office)
The list of proscribed organisations and the reasons for their proscription can be found on GOV.UK, as well as in the Explanatory Memorandums for the Statutory Instruments that have listed proscribed organisations under schedule 2 of the Terrorism Act 2000.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Independent - Gorton and Denton)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will publish guidance on the circumstances in which police forces should consider the possibility of domestic abuse when responding to incidents that involve (a) kinship carers and (b) the wider family of the child they care for.
Answered by Jess Phillips - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Home Office)
The statutory definition of domestic abuse, contained within the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, captures a wide range of relationships and applies to kinship carers where they are related to a perpetrator.
The Government will consider kinship carers when updating wider statutory guidance on domestic abuse to ensure all victims get the response they deserve.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Independent - Gorton and Denton)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will take legislative steps to extend the definition of domestic abuse to include abuse of kinship carers by people in the wider family of the child that they care for.
Answered by Jess Phillips - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Home Office)
The Home Office does not currently have plans to extend the definition of domestic abuse.
The statutory definition of domestic abuse, contained within the Domestic Abuse Act 2021, captures a wide range of relationships and applies to kinship carers where they are related to a perpetrator.
The Department for Education published a new Kinship Care statutory guidance for local authorities in October 2024. This sets out the support and services local authorities should provide to children living in kinship care and to kinship carers. The guidance also includes a definition of "kinship carer" to create a common understanding of who they are.
The Government is delivering over 140 peer support groups across England, available for all kinship carers to access alongside a wider package of training and support.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Independent - Gorton and Denton)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to his Department’s press release entitled New tech partnership to stop the boats, published on 6 August 2023, when the Online Capability Centre became operational.
Answered by Michael Tomlinson
Following the announcement by the Prime Minister of the new tech partnership to stop the boats on 6 August 2023, the Home Office and National Crime Agency (NCA) have strengthened the voluntary partnership with social media companies, Meta, YouTube, X/Twitter, to accelerate action to tackle people smuggling content online. We continue to explore further options, such as a ‘hackathon’ model to develop our innovative approach to break the business model of people smugglers advertising their services online.
To date we have successfully removed 98% of content flagged to social media companies, with over 9000 posts, pages and accounts removed since November 2021.
The Online Communications Centre (previously known as the Online Capability Centre) has been operational since October 2023 and with expertise in policy, investigations and intelligence and with access to a range of niche capabilities in tackling the online threat. We cannot comment on individual numbers of officers in classified roles.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Independent - Gorton and Denton)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to his Department’s press release entitled New tech partnership to stop the boats, published on 6 August 2023, how many (a) posts, (b) pages and (c) accounts have been (i) removed and (ii) suspended as a result of the partnership with social media companies.
Answered by Michael Tomlinson
Following the announcement by the Prime Minister of the new tech partnership to stop the boats on 6 August 2023, the Home Office and National Crime Agency (NCA) have strengthened the voluntary partnership with social media companies, Meta, YouTube, X/Twitter, to accelerate action to tackle people smuggling content online. We continue to explore further options, such as a ‘hackathon’ model to develop our innovative approach to break the business model of people smugglers advertising their services online.
To date we have successfully removed 98% of content flagged to social media companies, with over 9000 posts, pages and accounts removed since November 2021.
The Online Communications Centre (previously known as the Online Capability Centre) has been operational since October 2023 and with expertise in policy, investigations and intelligence and with access to a range of niche capabilities in tackling the online threat. We cannot comment on individual numbers of officers in classified roles.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Independent - Gorton and Denton)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to his Department’s press release entitled New tech partnership to stop the boats, published on 6 August 2023, when the hackathon event took place.
Answered by Michael Tomlinson
Following the announcement by the Prime Minister of the new tech partnership to stop the boats on 6 August 2023, the Home Office and National Crime Agency (NCA) have strengthened the voluntary partnership with social media companies, Meta, YouTube, X/Twitter, to accelerate action to tackle people smuggling content online. We continue to explore further options, such as a ‘hackathon’ model to develop our innovative approach to break the business model of people smugglers advertising their services online.
To date we have successfully removed 98% of content flagged to social media companies, with over 9000 posts, pages and accounts removed since November 2021.
The Online Communications Centre (previously known as the Online Capability Centre) has been operational since October 2023 and with expertise in policy, investigations and intelligence and with access to a range of niche capabilities in tackling the online threat. We cannot comment on individual numbers of officers in classified roles.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Independent - Gorton and Denton)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to his Department’s press release entitled New tech partnership to stop the boats, published on 6 August 2023, with which social media companies his Department is in partnership.
Answered by Michael Tomlinson
Following the announcement by the Prime Minister of the new tech partnership to stop the boats on 6 August 2023, the Home Office and National Crime Agency (NCA) have strengthened the voluntary partnership with social media companies, Meta, YouTube, X/Twitter, to accelerate action to tackle people smuggling content online. We continue to explore further options, such as a ‘hackathon’ model to develop our innovative approach to break the business model of people smugglers advertising their services online.
To date we have successfully removed 98% of content flagged to social media companies, with over 9000 posts, pages and accounts removed since November 2021.
The Online Communications Centre (previously known as the Online Capability Centre) has been operational since October 2023 and with expertise in policy, investigations and intelligence and with access to a range of niche capabilities in tackling the online threat. We cannot comment on individual numbers of officers in classified roles.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Independent - Gorton and Denton)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many staff are currently employed at the Online Capability Centre.
Answered by Michael Tomlinson
Following the announcement by the Prime Minister of the new tech partnership to stop the boats on 6 August 2023, the Home Office and National Crime Agency (NCA) have strengthened the voluntary partnership with social media companies, Meta, YouTube, X/Twitter, to accelerate action to tackle people smuggling content online. We continue to explore further options, such as a ‘hackathon’ model to develop our innovative approach to break the business model of people smugglers advertising their services online.
To date we have successfully removed 98% of content flagged to social media companies, with over 9000 posts, pages and accounts removed since November 2021.
The Online Communications Centre (previously known as the Online Capability Centre) has been operational since October 2023 and with expertise in policy, investigations and intelligence and with access to a range of niche capabilities in tackling the online threat. We cannot comment on individual numbers of officers in classified roles.
Asked by: Andrew Gwynne (Independent - Gorton and Denton)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether he has made an assessment of the adequacy of the time taken for care providers to receive Certificates of Sponsorship for (a) overseas and (b) senior care workers.
Answered by Tom Pursglove
The Defined Certificate of Sponsorship process for carers and senior carers from overseas is the same and frequently requires an assessment to establish whether or not the sponsor is able to offer a genuine vacancy. This usually requires the sponsor to submit additional documentation, while the timeframes involved are adequate for the purposes of preventing the exploitation of proposed migrant workers.