Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, when her Department first appointed a Director of Official Development Assistance, and what the (a) salary and (b) job description is for that position.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
Currently the Home Office does not have a dedicated Director of Official Development Assistance (ODA). The ODA work falls under the remit of the International Directorate, and the International Director.
A new role of Director of Official Development Assistance has been created, and the vacancy is live on the Civil Service jobs website. The closing deadline for this application is 17th June.
The role is to build and lead a new ODA Directorate for the Home Office and enact transformative change to focus the Department’s activities on strategic upstream interventions.
Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many (a) flights of private non-scheduled aircraft and (b) individuals, including crew members, landed at UK airfields from 1 January 2020 to 18 May 2020; how many and what proportion of those flights were categorised as (i) private / general aviation, (ii) cargo, (iii) military and (iv) other; and what the five most common points of departure were for those flights.
Answered by James Brokenshire
I have been asked by the Department for Transport to respond to this question
Monitoring of flight traffic conducted by Eurocontrol shows that between 01 January 2020 and 30 April 2020 there were 14,225 aircraft arrivals at UK airports. An estimated categorisation of these aircraft arrivals based on Eurocontrol’s identification rules are provided in the table below. This data source does not provide information about the aircrafts’ point of departure or information about passengers or crew on board.
Aircraft category | Estimated proportion |
Tradition Scheduled | 27% |
Low Cost | 16% |
Charter | 9% |
Business Aviation | 25% |
All-Cargo | 10% |
Military | 3% |
Other | 9% |
Information on passenger numbers are officially collected by the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) and received from applicable UK airports in adherence to statistical regulation (EC) 437/2003 on statistical returns in respect of the carriage of passengers, freight and mail by air. However, this data collection relates to commercial aircraft movements only.
Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many (a) UK Border Force and (b) UK Visas and Immigration staff have (i) had to self-isolate due to presenting symptoms and (ii) have tested positive for covid-19 in each week since 1 January 2020.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The attached table shows at column C the number of Border Force and UK Visas and Immigration employees who have been recorded as beginning a period of sickness absence due to COVID-19 symptoms.
Column D shows the number of employees recorded as beginning a period of isolation at home on paid special leave either because a member of their household has COVID-19 symptoms or because the employee themselves is vulnerable / extremely vulnerable to infection.
We do not hold data centrally on those employees who have mild symptoms and are well enough to continue to work from home, or who are isolating at home but are able to work from home and therefore do not need to take paid special leave.
We do not hold data centrally on the outcomes of COVID-19 testing of our employees.
Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many (a) masks, (b) visors, (c) pairs of gloves and (d) other items of personal protective equipment were provided to (i) UK Border Force and (ii) UK Visas and Immigration staff for use in preventing the spread of covid-19 in each week since 1 January 2020.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
Detailed Border Force record keeping commenced from 12th February when Public Health England (PHE) guidance for First Responders changed. Over 850,000 individual items of PPE have been provided to Border Force officers.
Border Force have also supplied a significant number of additional protective items/measures such as hand sanitizer & wipes which is not classed as PPE.
Since 1st March 2020 over 44,000 individual items of PPE have been provided to UKVI staff in customer facing roles along with thousands of protective measures such as hand sanitiser/antibacterial wipes. UKVI also currently have over 22,000 individual items of PPE on order.
Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the evidence provided to the Science and Technology Committee on 13 March, on what date advice from scientific modellers was first provided to (a) COBR, (b) the Prime Minister, (c) the Secretary of State for Health and (d) the Secretary of State for Transport on the likely incidence of covid-19 infection among travellers arriving at the UK Border; and on what dates any subsequent revision of those models was provided.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The modelling in question was done by SAGE. The Home Office cannot provide information on when SAGE advised (a) COBR, (b) the Prime Minister, (c) the Secretary of State for Health and (d) the Secretary of State for Transport.
Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, on what dates SAGE provided advice to Ministers on the potential effect of introducing restrictions at the UK borders on the spread of covid-19 in the UK.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office Chief Scientific Adviser is a participant in SAGE and regularly updates Home Office ministers on all aspects of SAGE relating to their departmental interests.
Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, on what date SAGE first discussed the potential effect of introducing restrictions at the UK borders on the (a) rate of covid-19 infections in the UK and (b) ability of the NHS to respond to that rate; and whether SAGE reported the conclusions of those discussion to her.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office Chief Scientific Adviser is a participant in SAGE and regularly updates Home Office ministers on all aspects of SAGE relating to their departmental interests.
Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, with reference to the evidence provided by the Chief Scientific Adviser to the Home Office to the Science and Technology Committee on 13 May 2020, if she will publish the full provisional management information on the number of arrivals at the UK border from 23 March 2020 to 13 May 2020.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The Home Office is due to publish the next quarterly Immigration Statistics on 21 May. In addition, an ad hoc statistical release ‘Statistics relating to Covid-19 and the immigration system, May 2020’ will be published on the 28 May.
Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the (a) proportion and (b) number of people likely to have covid-19 that arrived in the UK from (i) Wuhan, China and (ii) Lombardy, Italy in each month since 1 January 2020.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
On 23 March, SAGE advised that the effect of closing borders would have a negligible effect on spread of COVID-19, based on the fact that numbers of cases arriving from other countries were estimated to be insignificant in comparison with domestic cases, comprising approximately 0.5% of total domestic cases. The Home Office and SAGE have been keeping these figures under review. The numbers of passengers arriving in the UK are extremely small, and as such, there is uncertainty in any estimate at such a low level; however, we are confident that the percentage remains under 0.5% of total domestic cases.
Asked by: Stephen Doughty (Labour (Co-op) - Cardiff South and Penarth)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will publish the provisional management information on the number of arrivals at the UK border from 23 March to 5 May 2020.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
The next Quarterly Immigration Statistics will be published on 21st May and Home Office statisticians are considering the additional information that can be provided as part of this national statistics publication, including data relating to the impact of Covid-19.