Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate he has made of the cost to the public purse of the purchase of algorithms used by his Department in each of the last five years.

This is important technology that is in use across the department’s areas of responsibility, including Policing, Counter-Terror and National Security, Serious Organised Crime and Borders, Immigration and Citizenship Services.

This is also emerging technology and so usage has ramped up significantly over the last 5 years.

Pulling together a spending profile across the various uses over the previous 5 years would be labour intensive and time-consuming and so we are unable to answer of grounds of disproportionate cost.