Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make an assessment of the potential impact of illegal cross-Channel migration on the safety of women and girls living in the UK.

The Government’s Plan for Change sets out our ambition to secure borders and control immigration. We have introduced the Border Security Asylum and Immigration Bill which will give law enforcement counter terror-style powers to identify and disrupt people smuggling gangs. It will introduce a new measure whereby those who commit sexual offences which give rise to the notification requirement in Schedule 3 of the Sexual offences Act 2023 will be excluded from being granted asylum protections in the UK.

We recognise the devastating impact of sexual violence on victims and our communities and are absolutely committed to tackling sexual offences with a manifesto mission to halve violence against women and girls (VAWG) in a decade. We will deliver a cross-government transformative approach to relentlessly pursue all VAWG perpetrators in this country, under-pinned by a new strategy which we aim to publish in the autumn.