Asked by: Andrew Jones (Conservative - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps her Department has taken to reduce, refine and replace the use of animals in research.
Answered by Baroness Featherstone
In 2010, the coalition government made a commitment to work to reduce the use of animals in scientific research and a delivery plan has been published. The plan shows how alternative methods can deliver fast, high-quality research that
also boosts economic growth.
Since the Plan was published, a wealth of significant new research and knowledge dissemination on the 3Rs - Replacement, Refinement and Reduction - has been completed. It includes the launch of the first products from the National Centre for Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs) open innovation programme CRACK IT, a £4 million
competition run by Innovate UK and the NC3Rs to fund the commercialisation of non-animal technologies.
There is also the publication of important new studies on veterinary and human vaccine testing by Defra and Public Health England which have identified scope to reduce the numbers of animals used in developing vaccines. New joint working by the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the Home Office has additionally produced refined testing models to reduce animal
suffering.
We have taken major steps to encourage greater international adoption of 3Rs techniques, including a ground-breaking programme of knowledge-sharing with regulators and life science associations in China led by the Animals in Science Regulation Unit. In addition, we have published collaborative research across the global life sciences sector led by the NC3Rs and the UK’s Medicines and
Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency to minimise the use of recovery animals in pharmaceutical development.
Asked by: Andrew Jones (Conservative - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent steps she has taken to improve the efficiency of the asylum system.
Answered by James Brokenshire
The Home Office have a number of Asylum Improvement projects underway. We are reviewing asylum processes to provide a better experience for our customers such as moving administrative tasks from the asylum interview into the screening process or revising decision letters to make them more user-friendly for customers.
We are also implementing a number of pilot initiatives to modernise our case working processes including exploring the use of Summary Notes within our asylum interviews. At the same time we are looking to invest in technology to automatically obtain a transcript of an asylum interview. This should improve the efficiency of our interviewing process and reduce the need for our customers to have lengthy interviews regarding their claim whilst we are also looking to expand on the use of video conferencing equipment to build greater flexibility into the asylum case working process and to realise potential savings. We are seeking to digitalise our work where possible, removing the need for paper-based files so our work can be moved around the country to meet service demands.
We have also made improvements to our decision making processing times. We aim to decide all straightforward asylum claims within six months. We recognise that asylum cases are often complex and require our full and thorough consideration, meaning that some decisions will take longer than six months. Those cases that do take longer than six months are actively managed to ensure they are concluded as promptly as possible.
We have significantly improved our suite of guidance on considering asylum claims, including key instructions on asylum interviews and assessing credibility. We have streamlined processes by reducing the volume of paperwork required and cutting duplication in the asylum process, including improvements to the way in which decisions are explained to applicants in correspondence to make it easier to understand. These changes are designed to support caseworkers to improve decision quality and efficiency to ensure we grant protection where it is needed whilst refusing unfounded claims more quickly, whilst also ensuring a more customer focused approach.
Asked by: Andrew Jones (Conservative - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many pieces of unlawful terrorist material have been taken off the internet since 2010; how many hate preachers have been excluded from the UK since 2010; how many organisations have been proscribed in the UK since 2010; how many (a) British citizenships have been revoked and (b) passports have been removed for terrorism-related reasons since 2010; and how many arrests the police have made for terrorism-related offences since 2010.
Answered by James Brokenshire
The Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit has secured the removal of more than 75,000 pieces of terrorist-related content since 2010.
Since January 2010, 91 hate preachers have been excluded from the UK. Since May 2010, this Government have excluded 88 hate preachers from the UK. The Home
Secretary has the power to exclude an individual if she considers that his or her presence in the UK is not conducive to the public good or if their exclusion is justified on public policy or public security grounds. Coming to the UK is a privilege that we refuse to extend to those who seek to subvert our shared values.
19 organisations have been proscribed since May 2010.
Since 2010 there have been 28 deprivation decisions taken on the basis that such action would be ‘conducive to the public good.
On 25 April 2013, the Government redefined the public interest criteria to refuse or withdraw a passport in a Written Ministerial Statement to Parliament. Since the Secretary of State’s statement in April 2013, the Royal Prerogative was used 6 times in 2013 and 24 times in 2014. The Royal Prerogative was not exercised on these grounds in the period 2010-2012.
Since (April) 2010, over 800 people have been arrested for terrorism-related offences. Of these more than 220 have been charged and over 150 successfully prosecuted.
Asked by: Andrew Jones (Conservative - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department has made an estimate of potential savings from mergers of police forces.
Answered by Mike Penning
The Government has not made any estimate as to the potential savings from merging police forces. It is not necessary for forces to merge in order to
become more efficient. Chief constables and police and crime commissioners are demonstrating that they can collaborate in order to make efficiency savings
without sacrificing the local accountability and identity of their forces. A programme of force mergers would also impose significant transition and reorganisation costs on the police.
Asked by: Andrew Jones (Conservative - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many foreign national offenders have been removed from the UK since 2010; and how many foreign national offenders are in the process of being removed from the UK under new powers in the Immigration Act 2014.
Answered by James Brokenshire
We have removed more than 23,000 foreign national offenders from the UK since 2010.
Between July 2014 to December 2014, 2,337 had their cases processed under the new powers of the Immigration Act 2014.
Asked by: Andrew Jones (Conservative - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many full-time equivalent neighbourhood police officers there were in March 2010.
Answered by Mike Penning
There were 15,670 full-time equivalent police officers within the neighbourhoods function as at 31 March 2010, which represents 10.9% of the total number of police officers in England and Wales.
Asked by: Andrew Jones (Conservative - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what estimate his Department has made of the number of workless households in social housing.
Answered by Mark Harper - Secretary of State for Transport
The latest available data shows that there were 1.4 million workless households in the social rented sector. This is a reduction of 102,000 from the previous year and follows a continual downward trend over this Parliament.
This is the largest fall in the percentage of workless households in the social rented sector since comparable records began.
Full details can be found at:
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/lmac/working-and-workless-households/2014/index.html
Asked by: Andrew Jones (Conservative - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, what steps he is taking to increase women's participation in sport and physical activity.
Answered by Helen Grant
The number of women regularly participating in sport is up by over 588,800 since we won the Olympic bid in 2005 and has increased by 62,800 in the last year alone. However the gap between men's and women's participation is still too large. We have an independent group advising us on how best to address this, from encouraging participation through the ‘This Girl Can’ campaign launched this week, to increasing media coverage and sponsorship, and getting more women into leadership positions.
Asked by: Andrew Jones (Conservative - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question
To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what estimate he has made of the proportion of energy production accounted for by micro-generation in the next three years.
Answered by Matt Hancock
Installations of electricity microgeneration technologies (<50kW) are supported by Feed-In Tariffs (FITs). The FITs scheme was launched in April 2010. Under FITs the latest available estimated generation figures for microgeneration technologies are 2.7 TWh in 2014/15. We have not published any projections for FITs further into the future.
Installations of microgeneration heat technologies (<45kW) are supported by the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI). The domestic RHI scheme launched in April 2014. Our estimates of the amount of heat that will be generated from installations under domestic RHI are 0.1TWh 2014/15 and 0.4TWh in 2015/16 (a small number of installations may be larger than 45kW).
We do not produce microgeneration projections for the non-domestic RHI as the scheme is primarily aimed at larger installations, though there will be some energy produced at the microgeneration scale.
Asked by: Andrew Jones (Conservative - Harrogate and Knaresborough)
Question to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities:
To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, what proportion of the funding provided to local government by central government was ring-fenced in each of the last three years.
Answered by Kris Hopkins
A recent National Audit Office report on Local Government Funding stated that, adjusting for recent changes in local government duties as far as possible, due to changes made by DCLG since 2010 the share of ringfenced revenue funding fell from 7 per cent to less than 1 per cent. This figure has remained at less than one percent for the last three years.