Asked by: Siobhain McDonagh (Labour - Mitcham and Morden)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of security measures in place for the Police National Computer.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
Number of outages affecting the PNC, breakdown below. Partial PNC outages are included in the breakdown. Therefore, elements of the PNC service may have been available during the outage period.
Outages on the same day have been counted as separate instances.
Year | Number of outages - Planned | Number of outages - Unplanned |
2015 | 22 | 48 |
2016 | 10 | 18 |
2017 | 9 | 17 |
2018 | 13 | 12 |
2019 | 4 | 1 |
2020 | 7 | 12 |
2021 | 11 | 18 |
2022 | 14 | 13 |
2023 | 17 | 18 |
*2024 | 4 | 6 |
Total | 111 | 163 |
* Outages for 2024 are reported up to 31st March 2024.
Regular Security IT Health Checks/Audits are undertaken on PNC with actions to manage, mitigate or resolve vulnerabilities progressed to enhance the security of the system. The PNC is security assured by the Police Digital Service on behalf of Policing and in line with HO policy.
PNC has a number of back up servers for resilience and mirroring to provide a Disaster Recovery capability from a secondary site. There are numerous back up servers at the primary site and also at the DR site providing several layers of back up for the operation of the PNC
****NOTE - providing detail on the numbers of actual servers increases the operational risk to PNC.
Asked by: Siobhain McDonagh (Labour - Mitcham and Morden)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many outages have affected the Police National Computer in each year since 2015.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
Number of outages affecting the PNC, breakdown below. Partial PNC outages are included in the breakdown. Therefore, elements of the PNC service may have been available during the outage period.
Outages on the same day have been counted as separate instances.
Year | Number of outages - Planned | Number of outages - Unplanned |
2015 | 22 | 48 |
2016 | 10 | 18 |
2017 | 9 | 17 |
2018 | 13 | 12 |
2019 | 4 | 1 |
2020 | 7 | 12 |
2021 | 11 | 18 |
2022 | 14 | 13 |
2023 | 17 | 18 |
*2024 | 4 | 6 |
Total | 111 | 163 |
* Outages for 2024 are reported up to 31st March 2024.
Regular Security IT Health Checks/Audits are undertaken on PNC with actions to manage, mitigate or resolve vulnerabilities progressed to enhance the security of the system. The PNC is security assured by the Police Digital Service on behalf of Policing and in line with HO policy.
PNC has a number of back up servers for resilience and mirroring to provide a Disaster Recovery capability from a secondary site. There are numerous back up servers at the primary site and also at the DR site providing several layers of back up for the operation of the PNC
****NOTE - providing detail on the numbers of actual servers increases the operational risk to PNC.
Asked by: Siobhain McDonagh (Labour - Mitcham and Morden)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many back-up servers are in operation for the Police National Computer.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
Number of outages affecting the PNC, breakdown below. Partial PNC outages are included in the breakdown. Therefore, elements of the PNC service may have been available during the outage period.
Outages on the same day have been counted as separate instances.
Year | Number of outages - Planned | Number of outages - Unplanned |
2015 | 22 | 48 |
2016 | 10 | 18 |
2017 | 9 | 17 |
2018 | 13 | 12 |
2019 | 4 | 1 |
2020 | 7 | 12 |
2021 | 11 | 18 |
2022 | 14 | 13 |
2023 | 17 | 18 |
*2024 | 4 | 6 |
Total | 111 | 163 |
* Outages for 2024 are reported up to 31st March 2024.
Regular Security IT Health Checks/Audits are undertaken on PNC with actions to manage, mitigate or resolve vulnerabilities progressed to enhance the security of the system. The PNC is security assured by the Police Digital Service on behalf of Policing and in line with HO policy.
PNC has a number of back up servers for resilience and mirroring to provide a Disaster Recovery capability from a secondary site. There are numerous back up servers at the primary site and also at the DR site providing several layers of back up for the operation of the PNC
****NOTE - providing detail on the numbers of actual servers increases the operational risk to PNC.
Asked by: Siobhain McDonagh (Labour - Mitcham and Morden)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if he will list the companies that are licensed to supply tasers to police forces in the UK.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office approves less lethal weapons for police use following extensive technical and medical assessments. Decisions about the selection and purchase of approved less lethal weapons are primarily for chief officers.
The only company currently approved to supply Conductive Energy Devices (CEDs) to UK police forces is Axon Enterprise.
Asked by: Siobhain McDonagh (Labour - Mitcham and Morden)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 6 March 2024 to Question 15819 on UK Border Force: Corruption, if he will provide a breakdown of the allegations and referrals received by the Border Force Joint Anti-Corruption Intelligence Team by type in 2023.
Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
As the public rightly expect, we demand the highest standards from our Border Force officers and have measures in place to prevent and tackle corruption. There were 204 allegations and referrals received by Border Force Joint Anti-Corruption Intelligence Team in 2023, broken down as follows:
Type of allegation/referral | Number of allegations/referrals |
Conspiracy Cross Border Offences | 54 |
Crime | 42 |
Vulnerable | 22 |
Risk from associates | 21 |
Local management issues | 44 |
Not Border Force | 6 |
Assist key partner | 15 |
Asked by: Siobhain McDonagh (Labour - Mitcham and Morden)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many investigations have been undertaken by his Department's professional standards unit in each year since 2015, broken down into the categories of (a) immigration, borders and citizenship, (b) policing and (c) counter-terrorism.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The requested information is not centrally held, and complying with this request would incur a disproportionate cost to the department.
Asked by: Siobhain McDonagh (Labour - Mitcham and Morden)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people from Rwanda were granted asylum on (a) human rights and (b) other grounds in each year since 2010.
Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
The UK has a proud history of providing protection to those who need it, in accordance with our international obligations under the Refugee Convention and the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Those who need protection are normally granted refugee status or humanitarian protection.
The Home Office publishes data on asylum in the ‘Immigration System Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on asylum decisions by nationality are published in table Asy_D02 of the ‘Asylum Applications, Decisions and Resettlement detailed datasets’. Information on how to use the dataset can be found in the ‘Notes’ page of the workbook. The latest data relates to 2023.
All asylum and human rights claims lodged from within the UK and admitted to the UK asylum system, including those seeking asylum from Rwanda, are carefully considered on their individual merits in accordance with our international obligations, and against the background of relevant case law, policy guidance and the latest available country of origin information.
Asked by: Siobhain McDonagh (Labour - Mitcham and Morden)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many foreign national offenders were (a) subject to deportation action and (b) living in the community by the length of time since the end of their custodial sentence as of 1 March 2024.
Answered by Michael Tomlinson - Minister of State (Minister for Illegal Migration)
The Home Office does publish statistics on foreign national offenders (FNOs) subject to deportation action and living in the community by the length of time since the end of their custodial sentence. This is available from Table FNO_08 in: Immigration Enforcement data: Q4 2023 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk). The latest data is published to September 2022.
Asked by: Siobhain McDonagh (Labour - Mitcham and Morden)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 28 February 2024 to Question 15272 on Aviation: Passengers, if he will estimate the number of general aviation flights that landed in the UK without providing advance passenger information in each year since 2015.
Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
Given our commitment to protecting the UK from harm, I remain unable to share figures which can reveal operational practices that could be exploited to evade border controls.
Asked by: Siobhain McDonagh (Labour - Mitcham and Morden)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many times a member of the Armed Forces was referred to Prevent in each year since 2018.
Answered by Tom Tugendhat - Minister of State (Home Office) (Security)
The Home Office publishes data on Prevent referrals in the annual Individuals referred to and supported through the Prevent Programme statistics - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk)
This includes publishing a breakdown of the ‘Sector of referral of those referred’. Table 1 provides a yearly breakdown of the number of referrals from ‘Other’ sectors. ‘Other’ sectors includes military, government (includes Home Office Enforcement and HMRC), or other private sectors of employment. At this time we are unable to disaggregate the military component for the full time series.