Asked by: Jack Lopresti (Conservative - Filton and Bradley Stoke)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps his Department is taking to help support victims of antisemitism.
Answered by Tom Tugendhat - Minister of State (Home Office) (Security)
We’re committed to tackling the scourge of antisemitism and are providing £18m for protective security funding for the Jewish community in 2023/24 – this figure will be maintained in 2024/25.
The Government is providing £7m to support schools and universities to tackle antisemitism, and funds both an online reporting portal to make it easier for victims to report crimes and a hub which supports local forces in tackling online hate crime.
Asked by: Jack Lopresti (Conservative - Filton and Bradley Stoke)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department has plans to enable potential hosts under the Homes for Ukraine scheme to submit family-wide visa applications to house refugee families rather than multiple individual applications for each member of the family being hosted.
Answered by Kevin Foster
Under the Homes For Ukraine scheme, application forms must be completed for each family member, including one application per child. This is to ensure the appropriate security and safeguarding checks can be undertaken.
The Home Office is continually making efforts to simplify the application process for Ukrainian refugees, and it keeps this under regular review.
Asked by: Jack Lopresti (Conservative - Filton and Bradley Stoke)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what plans her Department has to grant frontier worker status to people (a) presently working in the UK, (b) who can prove a previous employment history at a UK employer and (c) who will be working on strategically important projects in the UK defence and infrastructure sectors.
Answered by Kevin Foster
The Citizens’ Rights Agreements protect those EU, EEA and Swiss citizens who were frontier workers in the UK by the end of the transition period at 11pm on 31 December 2020 and who continue to be so.
The UK’s frontier worker permit scheme, which has been open to applications since 10 December 2020, allows those protected frontier workers to obtain a permit, free of charge, as evidence of their right to continue entering the UK as a frontier worker after 30 June 2021.
There is no deadline by which protected frontier workers must apply for a permit, though it has been mandatory for non-Irish frontier workers to hold a frontier worker permit to enter the UK for work from 1 July 2021.
Where an overseas worker is not protected by the Citizens’ Rights Agreements, the new points-based immigration system provides routes for skilled workers and specialist services suppliers. Such work visas are typically issued within three weeks, making the UK system one of the fastest visa services in the world.
Asked by: Jack Lopresti (Conservative - Filton and Bradley Stoke)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what plans her Department has to reinstate face to face interviews for asylum and refugee applications.
Answered by Kevin Foster
We recommenced face to face substantive interviews on 21 September 2020.
Asked by: Jack Lopresti (Conservative - Filton and Bradley Stoke)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what plans her Department has to ensure that the Violence Against Women and Girls strategy 2021-2024 will be embedded in wider Government policy.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
Tackling Violence against Women and Girls (VAWG) remains a key priority of this Government and we will be publishing a new Cross-Government Tackling Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy in the Spring. To inform the new strategy, we launched a Call for Evidence on 10 December, inviting responses from the public, organisations that provide support to victims and survivors, frontline professionals, and academics.
Tackling VAWG is everyone’s business and requires a cross-departmental approach to help prevent these crimes from taking place, support victims, and better target perpetrators. The Government is committed to working across departments to develop the upcoming Tackling VAWG Strategy 2021-2024.
Asked by: Jack Lopresti (Conservative - Filton and Bradley Stoke)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that asylum seekers are housed in temporary accommodation that is local to their point of entry.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
In order for the Home Office to fulfil their statutory obligation to accommodate asylum seekers who would otherwise be destitute, asylum accommodation is provided on a no choice basis and accommodation may not be provided near to the point of entry.
Asked by: Jack Lopresti (Conservative - Filton and Bradley Stoke)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how much land (a) her Department, (b) its agencies and (c) its non-departmental public bodies owns in (i) England and (ii) the South West;, and how much of that land has been identified as being surplus to requirements.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
The UK Government is a significant landowner. The current Government Estate Strategy sets out the Government's vision to create an efficient, fit-for-purpose and sustainable estate whose performance matches the best of the private sector. As a Government we are delivering this vision, ensuring that the estate is fit for purpose, is frequently reviewed and aligned to the Estate Strategy, and is managed in an efficient and effective way.
Of the total land the Home Office holds in England, 8.6 hectares is currently declared as surplus, none of which are in the South West. These figures include agencies and non-departmental public bodies.
Details of the department's surplus land holdings are published on the register of surplus land: https://data.gov.uk/dataset/epimstransparency
Asked by: Jack Lopresti (Conservative - Filton and Bradley Stoke)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, which criteria are applied by UK Visas and Immigration staff when judging a visa application to be non-straightforward; and what service standards govern the (a) processing of such applications and (b) updating the applicant on the status and progress of their application.
Answered by Caroline Nokes
Visa applications are considered to be complex when an Entry Clearance Officer determines that additional information is required in order for a decision to be made.
There are no set standards for processing non-straightforward (identified as complex) by the caseworker. However, if an application is complex and expected to take longer than the standard processing timescale, UKVI will write to the customer within the standard processing time and explain what will happen next
The published information on processing times for visa applications is published as part of the Migration Transparency data, available at https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/migration-transparency-data#uk-visas-and-immigration
Asked by: Jack Lopresti (Conservative - Filton and Bradley Stoke)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answers of 21 December 2017 to Question 120441 on Police: Road Traffic Offences and Question 120442 on Fire and Rescue Services: Road Traffic Offences, if she will take steps to begin the centralised collection of that data.
Answered by Nick Hurd
There are no plans to collect this information centrally.
Asked by: Jack Lopresti (Conservative - Filton and Bradley Stoke)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many police officers have been (a) charged, (b) convicted and (c) given a custodial or suspended custodial sentence for (i) careless driving and (ii) dangerous driving arising from actions performed as part of their policing duties in each of the last five years.
Answered by Nick Hurd
The Home Office does not hold the information requested centrally.