Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps she is taking to reduce identity theft across the UK.

The Government is concerned about the harms caused by crimes enabled by the theft of an identity and is taking a number of steps to counter identity-based crimes:

• Action Fraud, the Government-supported fraud reporting centre, provides advice for individuals and businesses on steps they can take to protect themselves from identity crime;
• Action Fraud is also engaged in a number of public campaigns to raise awareness of the risk of identity theft across the public and private sectors to both individuals and businesses;
• The Government is using the Joint Fraud Taskforce to bring banks and law enforcement together to work collectively to protect the public and businesses from fraud;
• And the Government is also committed to extending the Verify platform so that people have one single, common and safe way of verifying themselves online to all parts of government by 2020 and making it more widely available, so that people can safely verify their identity to access non-government services such as banking.