Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people in the UK have been prosecuted for inviting support for Hezbollah since that organisation was fully proscribed.

The Government takes proscription offences seriously. On 1 March 2019, the proscription was extended to cover the Hizballah group in its entirety.

Data on arrests, charges and convictions for the section 12 Terrorism Act 2000 offence of inviting or expressing support for a proscribed organisation is grouped with other proscription offences (sections 11 and 13 of the Act) in the quarterly Home Office publication ‘Operation of Police Powers under the Terrorism Act 2000’. Data is not published on the specific proscribed organisation that the arrest, charge or conviction relates to. The most recent publication up to year ending June 2022, was published on 8 September 2022: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/operation-of-police-powers-under-the-terrorism-act-2000-quarterly-update-to-june-2022

The quarterly publications establish transparency by ensuring that data is publicly available on the use of police powers in a consistently categorised way. As with all crime statistics published by the Home Office, the data published in the Terrorism statistics are offence based, where police provide a count of the number of offences recorded. Data providers are not required to provide further detail on events leading to the arrest, as to do so would place a disproportionate burden on the organisations responsible.

This includes the National Counter-Terrorism Police Operations Centre, the Crown Prosecution Service’s Counter-Terrorism Division, the Metropolitan Police Service and the National Counter-Terrorism Policing Headquarters. As with all Official Statistics, we continually review outputs taking account of user needs.