Tag: Parliamentary Question

Norman Lamb – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Norman Lamb on 2016-06-20.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the timetable is for (a) collection and (b) publication of data on the ethnicity and age of targets, location and outcome of taser use by the police.

Mike Penning

Data is not recorded centrally on the number of times the police have deployed Taser devices on psychiatric wards. A Taser record is completed by police officers each time a Taser is used. However, this record does not currently show the detailed geographical or type of location.

Police Use of Taser statistics are published by the Home Office and most recently on 28 April 2016. These provide a snapshot of Taser use.

We have been very clear that the public need greater transparency and that is why the Home Secretary asked Chief Constable David Shaw to lead an in-depth review of the publication of Taser data and other use of force by police officers.

The review recommended that the police record and publish the ethnicity, age, location and outcome of all serious use of force by police officers, including physical restraint and Taser. Pathfinder forces started to collect this data from April this year, and it is anticipated that the collection will form part of the 2017-18 Home Office Annual Data Return.

A copy of Chief Constable David Shaw’s review will be placed in the House library. The review contained no data on the number of times the police have used Taser in mental health settings.

01/01/2023
Lord Tanlaw – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Tanlaw on 2016-09-05.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they plan to change the meaning of the acronym GMT from Greenwich Mean Time to Greenwich Meridian Time.

Baroness Neville-Rolfe

We consider that any attempt to change the meaning of the acronym GMT is likely to result in confusion.

01/01/2023
David Burrowes – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by David Burrowes on 2016-10-20.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many claims were stockpiled (a) before and (b) after the Upper Tribunal ruling of 17 March 2016 on the unlawful and discriminatory use of the past presence test.

Penny Mordaunt

No claims were stockpiled before the Upper Tribunal ruling of 17 March 2016, 40 Disability Living Allowance claims were stockpiled after the ruling.

Section 27 of the Social Security Act 1998 provides that, where the Upper Tribunal decides on a social security appeal that the Secretary of State has made an error of law in his original decision and other claims subsequently fall to be decided by the Secretary of State, the judgment generally is not to be applied in relation to any period that predates the Upper Tribunal’s decision (s.27(3)). This statutory rule does not apply to the person who brought the original appeal, to people who have already lodged an appeal against a decision or who are still in time to do so, or to people whose case the Secretary of State has stockpiled (or whose appeal he has stayed) pending the judgment under section 25 of the Act.

01/01/2023

Maria Eagle – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Defence

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Maria Eagle on 2015-11-09.

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how much his Department spent (a) in real terms and (b) as a share of departmental spending on (i) temporary agency staff, (ii) consultants, (iii) non-payroll staff, (iv) administration and (v) marketing and advertising for each year since 2010-11.

Michael Fallon

This information is not held in the format requested and could be provided only at disproportionate cost. I can, however, provide an analysis of non-permanent staff and the Ministry of Defence’s Administration Costs.

Financial Year	Budget Element	Outturn (£ million)	Outturn (Percentage of Total Departmental Expenditure Limit)
2010-11	Contingent Labour	46.9	0.12%
	Advisory Consultancy	23.5	0.06%
	Other Non-Permanent Staff (1)	316.8	0.80%
	Administration Costs (2)	2,026.0	5.13% (3)
2011-12	Contingent Labour	49.2	0.13%
	Advisory Consultancy	18.3	0.05%
	Other Non-Permanent Staff (1)	315.1	0.85%
	Administration Costs (2)	2,691.9	7.24% (3)
2012-13	Contingent Labour	50.3	0.15%
	Advisory Consultancy	44.5	0.13%
	Other Non-Permanent Staff (1)	270.7	0.79%
	Administration Costs (2)	2,178.9	6.36% (3)
2013-14	Contingent Labour	99.3	0.29%
	Advisory Consultancy	90.4	0.26%
	Other Non-Permanent Staff (1)	219.5	0.64%
	Administration Costs (2)	2,129.2	6.16%
2014-15	Contingent Labour	118.7	0.35%
	Advisory Consultancy	91.2	0.27%
	Other Non-Permanent Staff (1)	332.5	0.97%
	Administration Costs (2)	1,473.7	4.29% (3)

Notes:

(1) Comprising: fee earners, manpower support, technical support and casual staff.

(2) HM Treasury define Administration Budgets as covering costs other than the costs of direct frontline service provision; for example, activities such as the provision of policy advice and business support services. Administration costs therefore usually include expenditure on employee costs, accommodation, office services, contracted-out services and relevant depreciation. From financial 2011-12 the Department and HM Treasury agreed that Administration Budgets would in future only include the costs of civilian staff (excluding health-care professionals and staff working in operational areas) and the cost of Advisory Consultancy; the Armed Forces were excluded from this revised Administration Cost Regime as were the MOD’s Arms Length Bodies. The scope of Administration Costs was updated in 2014-15 to include military administration costs and exclude civilian costs where they relate directly to programme or frontline service delivery.

(3) Elements of expenditure on Contingent Labour, Advisory Consultancy and other non-permanent staff are also included in the MOD’s Administration Costs and there is therefore some duplication with other statistics provided in the table.

01/01/2023

Steven Paterson – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Ministry of Defence

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Steven Paterson on 2015-12-08.

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how much his Department has spent on ensuring the Trident nuclear weapon system from cyber-attacks in each of the last three years; and how much he plans to spend in each of the next five years.

Mr Philip Dunne

The Ministry of Defence audits the integrity of the UK’s nuclear deterrent regularly for all threats and hazards and acts to ensure that it maintains the highest possible standards. The Strategic Defence and Security Review acknowledges the growing cyber threat and the importance of investing in cyber security across all of our capabilities. The Government has invested £860 million in new technology and capabilities since 2011 and will invest £1.9 billion over the next five years in protecting the UK from cyber attack and developing our sovereign capabilities in cyberspace. Our approach to protecting Defence capabilities against and mitigating the impact of cyber attacks spans technical, organisational, procedural and physical measures benefiting many different systems and networks, and investment is integrated across these measures. Submarines operate in isolation by design, and this contributes to their cyber resilience. I will not discuss further details for reasons of safeguarding national security.

01/01/2023
Stephen Timms – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Stephen Timms on 2016-01-13.

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what the estimated cost is of payments of universal credit to (a) people already in receipt of universal credit on 1 April 2016 and (b) other claimants in 2016-17.

Priti Patel

The information requested is not available.

01/01/2023
Lord Hylton – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Hylton on 2016-02-04.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what special education programmes are being provided for those Iraqis and Syrians who have reached the UK since 2012, broken down into those for (1) children, (2) young people, and (3) adults.

Lord Bates

Asylum seekers and those granted refugee status or humanitarian protection have access to free state schooling. Those granted refugee status have immediate access to student support for higher education courses.

Local authorities in England are responsible for providing additional educational support, such as English language training.

Where schools need to provide additional support for English as an Additional Language (EAL) pupils the funding arrangements enable local authorities to allocate a proportion of their funding to schools on the basis of the number of pupils in each school who have EAL and who have been in the school system for a maximum of three years.

01/01/2023
Gareth Thomas – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Gareth Thomas on 2016-03-02.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what her policy is on UK membership of the UN 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol; and if she will make a statement.

James Brokenshire

The UK has a proud record of providing protection to those who need it and will continue to do so, in accordance with our obligations as a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol.

As the Home Secretary said in her speech to the Conservative Party conference, in the longer term we want to work with other countries in the EU and the UN to look at the international definitions of asylum and refugee status.

01/01/2023
Lord Tebbit – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Tebbit on 2016-03-23.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the possible role of the contraceptive chemical E22, which is resistant to water purification techniques, in the increase in number of freshwater and coastal water fish bearing both male and female sexual organs.

Lord Gardiner of Kimble

In the UK, environmental regulators, scientific experts and the water industry have been researching the link between the synthetic steroid, 17α-ethinyloestradiol (EE2, used in human oral contraception) and fish populations to understand the role of endocrine disrupting chemicals on the reproductive physiology of fish. Most work has focused on EE2 which has been measured in some of our rivers and downstream of sewage treatment works (STWs); this matches findings in other countries.

Based on scientific evidence from the UK and in Europe, there is reasonable certainty that very low concentrations of EE2 can cause feminisation (intersex condition) in male fish. The incidence of intersex seems to relate to the size of the STWs and the dilution ability of receiving waters. In the UK, fish inhabit comparatively small-sized rivers where limited dilution of EE2 occurs. Conventional STWs can remove EE2 from sewage, but not to the very low levels of less than one nanogramme per litre (ng/L) where no endocrine disrupting effects are predicted. In some cases the impact on fish populations remains unclear, and some affected populations appear to be self-sustaining.

In 2014, EE2 was included on the European Commission’s ‘watch list’ under the Water Framework Directive to gather information on its occurrence in surface waters across the European Union. Data will be reported by the UK and other Member States, and reviewed by the Commission throughout 2017 to assess whether this pharmaceutical is to be prioritised for monitoring and control and is to be included in future versions of the Directive.

01/01/2023
Richard Burden – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Transport

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Richard Burden on 2016-05-04.

To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how many UK-registered offshore supply vessels (OSVs) have been laid up in Aberdeen port since January 2015; and what the average period of inactivity was for UK-registered OSVs (a) at that port and (b) in total during that period.

Mr Robert Goodwill

According to commercial world fleet data sourced from IHS Global Limited, there were two UK registered offshore vessels with a ‘laid-up’ status on 31 December 2015.

We do not have any further data available for use on laid-up vessels since this time. The data is not in a format from which inactivity periods are readily obtainable.

According to online vessel search engines, the last known ship positions for the two UK registered offshore vessels that were laid-up at the end of 2015 were Port Elizabeth (South Africa) on 24 August 2015 and Elefsis (near the Athens port of Piraeus, Greece) on 19 September 2015.

01/01/2023