Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many staff are currently employed at the Online Capability Centre.

Following the announcement by the Prime Minister of the new tech partnership to stop the boats on 6 August 2023, the Home Office and National Crime Agency (NCA) have strengthened the voluntary partnership with social media companies, Meta, YouTube, X/Twitter, to accelerate action to tackle people smuggling content online. We continue to explore further options, such as a ‘hackathon’ model to develop our innovative approach to break the business model of people smugglers advertising their services online.

To date we have successfully removed 98% of content flagged to social media companies, with over 9000 posts, pages and accounts removed since November 2021.

The Online Communications Centre (previously known as the Online Capability Centre) has been operational since October 2023 and with expertise in policy, investigations and intelligence and with access to a range of niche capabilities in tackling the online threat. We cannot comment on individual numbers of officers in classified roles.