Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department permits (1) Ministers, (2) Special advisers and (3) officials to use (a) Chat GPT, (b) Google Gemini, (c) Claude, (d) Deepseek and (e) Grok as part of their official duties.
Answered by Sarah Jones - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Government is committed to harnessing the benefits of artificial intelligence to improve the productivity of the Civil Service and the quality of public services.
Departments provide officials, Ministers and special advisers with access to secure, enterprise-grade generative AI tools that have been assured to the appropriate security standards and approved for official use. Ministers, special advisers and officials may only use generative AI tools that their department has approved for official use. The use of publicly available or consumer versions of generative AI tools, including those named in the Question, for official business is not permitted unless a department has specifically assured and approved that tool.
Approved enterprise tools are configured so that departmental data is held securely and is not used to train publicly available AI models. The use of generative AI across government is governed by the cross-government Generative AI Framework for HMG and the AI Playbook for the UK Government, which set out the principles for the safe, responsible and effective use of these tools.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if her Department permits civil servants employed in the UK to work from overseas on a regular basis.
Answered by Sarah Jones - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office has a clear policy on International Remote Working (IRW), which is only permitted in very limited circumstances, either on compassionate grounds for up to four weeks where an employee has a seriously ill relative abroad, or to enable an employee to accompany their spouse/partner on a Diplomatic or other Government posting abroad. No other IRW is permitted.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department uses AI tools to help determine asylum decisions.
Answered by Alex Norris - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office is investing in innovative techniques, including AI, to explore how we can improve productivity and continue to maintain order in the asylum system. AI technology does not make decisions on Asylum applications, instead, it helps analyse data and provides insightful information that can further inform choices. These tools are used in line with the ‘human in the loop’ principle. The Home Office does not currently use AI software to transcribe asylum interviews or other components of the asylum decision making process.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how much her Department has spent on advertising on podcasts in each of the last three years.
Answered by Sarah Jones - Minister of State (Home Office)
This information is not held in the requested format.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, when her Department plans to undertake a consultation on banning the sale of crossbows.
Answered by Sarah Jones - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Government response to the call for evidence on crossbow controls conducted by the Home Office from 14 February to 9 April 2024 was published on 19 March this year. This set out the Government’s intention to introduce a new licensing scheme for existing crossbow owners and also a prohibition on sales of crossbows. We will be consulting on the details of that licensing scheme and the prohibition on sales in due course.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, when her Department will announce details of a licensing scheme for existing crossbow owners.
Answered by Sarah Jones - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Government response to the call for evidence on crossbow controls conducted by the Home Office from 14 February to 9 April 2024 was published on 19 March this year. This set out the Government’s intention to introduce a new licensing scheme for existing crossbow owners and also a prohibition on sales of crossbows. We will be consulting on the details of that licensing scheme and the prohibition on sales in due course.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people have been convicted of creating or posting material online which promotes small boats crossings or services to facilitate illegal migration.
Answered by Alex Norris - Minister of State (Home Office)
The online advertising of unlawful immigration services offence is one of a suite of measures in the Border Security Asylum and Immigration Act 2025 designed to work together to tackle organised immigration crime. The offence seeks to make it harder for vile smugglers to operate by criminalising a critical component of their business model – through disrupting their online operations and ability to connect with migrants. It enables law enforcement to intervene more easily, without needing to link the online post to a specific instance of unlawful immigration.
The Home Office works closely with its law enforcement partners to ensure they have the funding, tools, and expertise they need to tackle organised immigration crime, including its facilitation online. This investment supports more officers, and smarter intelligence gathering, helping agencies identify and stop these gangs no matter who they are or where they are. Utilising these capabilities, a significant amount of work is currently being undertaken by operational agencies to identify those responsible for creating or publishing this type of content, with the NCA having several active cases in development.
The Home Office and NCA also work collaboratively with social media companies to ensure swift removal of unlawful immigration content, with over 28,000 accounts, pages and posts, identified by the Home Office and NCA referred since 2024. This partnership also enables social media companies to utilise insights shared by the NCA to improve their content moderation and detection of unlawful immigration content. Additionally, the Online Safety Act places statutory duties which requires online services, including social media companies, to identify and mitigate the risk of illegal content on their platforms, including unlawful immigration material. In addition, online services are required to implement robust measures and reporting systems to ensure they can swiftly remove illegal content once identified.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that the identities of those convicted of animal abuse are available to the police when responding to call outs relating to domestic abuse.
Answered by Sarah Jones - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office ensures that police officers have access to comprehensive and up-to-date information for operational use.
The Police National Computer (PNC) and the Law Enforcement Data Service (LEDS) hold core operational data on individuals, including records of arrests, charges and convictions, and are accessible to officers at the point of need.
Where an individual has been arrested, charged, or convicted of animal abuse, this information will be recorded on these systems and will be available to the police as part of an individual’s offending history when attending any incident, including domestic abuse call outs.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people have been (a) intercepted and (b) arrested since January 2025 in relation to smuggling illegal migrants into the UK.
Answered by Alex Norris - Minister of State (Home Office)
Data on the number of detected individuals arriving via illegal routes to the UK is published on .GOV.UK at the following link: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6a05e3b7ee62840dba48a2c7/illegal-entry-routes-to-the-uk-dataset-mar-2026.xlsx.
In relation to arrests, data has been published on Organised Immigration Crime (OIC) disruptions. These include various forms of law enforcement action such as asset seizures, equipment seizures, revocation of licenses, arrests, convictions or sentences. Data on OIC disruptions is provided to the Home Office by the National Crime Agency and gathered from the Immigration Enforcement Criminal and Financial Investigations (CFI) team and Home Office Intelligence. This can be found at the following link: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/immigration-system-statistics-year-ending-march-2026/what-is-being-done-to-stop-organised-immigration-crime.
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people have been denied refugee status since 2023 as a result of being on the sex offenders register.
Answered by Alex Norris - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office estimates that the cost of locating, collating and extracting the information you have requested on individuals denied refugee status since 2023 because of them being convicted of a sexual offence with a notification requirement would exceed the appropriate limit.
We have a proud history of providing protection to those who need it; however, in line with the Refugee Convention, we will deny the benefits of protection status to those who commit particularly serious crimes and are a danger to the community, or those who are a threat to national security.
A ‘particularly serious crime’ is defined as being convicted by a final judgment and sentenced to a period of imprisonment of at least 12 months.
Under a measure introduced by the Border Security, Asylum and Immigration Act 2025, sexual offences which give rise to the notification requirement (the ‘sex offender register’) in Schedule 3 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 are also assumed to be ‘particularly serious’ for the purpose of applying Article 33(2) of the Refugee Convention, thereby allowing the UK to exclude those individuals from being granted asylum protections in the UK. The measure applies to convictions received on or after 2 February 2026.
We recognise the devastating impact of sexual violence on victims and our communities and are absolutely committed to tackling sexual offences, as well as halving violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade.