Asked by: Lewis Cocking (Conservative - Broxbourne)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to tackle financial scams.
Answered by Dan Jarvis - Minister of State (Home Office)
We are committed to working with law enforcement, industry, civil society and international partners to tackle financial scams. This includes blocking fraud at its source, disrupting it before it reaches the public, and providing preventative advice and support such as our “Stop! Think Fraud” campaign.
Further industry action includes potential legislative action to ban “SIM farms”, technical devices that allow criminals to send scam texts to thousands of people at the same time, and the Online Safety Act codes of practice which will come into effect in March.
In due course we will publish an expanded Fraud Strategy as set out in our manifesto, which will cover the full range of threats that our society faces from this crime.
Asked by: Lewis Cocking (Conservative - Broxbourne)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what progress she has made on ending the use of hotels to accommodate asylum seekers.
Answered by Angela Eagle - Minister of State (Home Office)
This government inherited an asylum system under exceptional strain, with tens of thousands of people stuck in limbo without any prospect of having their claims processed. At their peak use under the previous government, in the autumn of 2023, more than 400 asylum hotels were being leased by the Home Office, at a cost of almost £9 million a day.
We took immediate action to resolve that chaos by restarting asylum processing, establishing the new Border Security Command to tackle the people-smuggling gangs, cracking down on illegal working across the country, and increasing the return and removal of people with no right to be here.
Inevitably, due to the size of the backlog we inherited, the Home Office has been forced to continue with the use of hotels for the time being. But this is not a permanent solution, and the small increase in the number in use at the end of last year was just a temporary but necessary step to manage pressures in the system, which is now in the process of being reversed.
It remains our absolute commitment to end the use of hotels over time, as part of our reduction in overall asylum accommodation costs. In the interim, we are also continuing to increase our operational activity against smuggling gangs and illegal working, and we have increased returns to their highest level since 2018, with 16,400 people removed in the first six months this government was in charge.