Written questions by McMurdock.

What steps she is taking to encourage employers to hire young people.

As part of the “Get Britain Working” White Paper the government announced that we will launch a new Youth Guarantee for all young people in England aged 18-21 to ensure that they have access to further learning, help to get a job or an apprenticeship. As a first step from spring 2025, the government will launch Youth Guarantee Trailblazers in eight mayoral authorities across England. We will work closely with mayoral authorities to support the design of the Trailblazers, including engagement with local employers. We will use the learning from these Trailblazers to inform the future design and development of the Youth Guarantee as it rolls-out across the rest of England. The Youth Guarantee is part of the UK Government’s Back to Work Plan alongside a new national jobs and careers service to help get more people into work, work, health and skills plans for the economically inactive, and the launch of Skills England to open new opportunities for young people. We will work in partnership with organisations and businesses at the national and local level to offer exciting and engaging opportunities to young people. This could include apprenticeships, work experience, training courses or employability programmes. The Government is also reforming the apprenticeships offer into a more flexible growth and skills offer, aligned to the industrial strategy. The Department for Education is working to introduce new foundation apprenticeships for young people, as well as shorter duration apprenticeships, in targeted sectors. These will help more people learn new high-quality skills at work, fuel innovation in businesses across the country, and provide high-quality entry pathways for young people. As the HR department for the Government’s growth mission, the Department for Work and Pensions job is to work with businesses to meet their recruitment needs. The Ministerial team and officials work closely with colleagues across government to help employers, including those in sectors crucial to growth, address their staffing needs and break down barriers to opportunity across the country. The Secretary of State recently announced that the department is transforming its service for employers by hosting summits with employers and stakeholder representatives across sectors crucial to growth; boosting the number of training programmes in crucial sectors on offer at Jobcentres; serving employers through a dedicated team with highly experienced experts to provide recruitment support; providing an account manager for employers to get more information about how Job Centres Plus can help; and commissioning Sir Charlie Mayfield to lead an independent review into the role of employers in reducing health-related inactivity and promoting healthy and inclusive workplaces – which is already underway.

What steps she is taking to support young people aged 16-24 who are not in education, employment or training.

As part of our plan to Get Britain Working, we will launch a new Youth Guarantee for all young people aged 18-21 in England to ensure that they can access quality training opportunities, an apprenticeship or help to find work. The Youth Guarantee will build upon and enhance existing entitlements and provisions with the aim of tackling the rising number of young people who are not participating in education, employment or training. The Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education are working closely with the eight Mayoral Strategic Authorities in England set to receive grant funding to deliver the Youth Guarantee Trailblazers announced in the Get Britain Working White Paper from Spring 2025. We will use the learning from these Trailblazers to inform the future design and development of the Youth Guarantee as it rolls-out across the rest of England. DWP currently provides young people aged 16-24 with labour market support through an extensive range of interventions at a national and local level. This includes flexible provision driven by local need, nationwide employment programmes and support delivered by work coaches based in our Jobcentres and in local communities working alongside partners.

Communities and Local Government, with reference to the written ministerial statement of 10 February 2025 on Homeowners next steps, HCWS427, what her planned timeline is for digitalising property data and transactions.

The government committed to two projects to digitalise the home buying and selling process, including opening up local authority data and developing common data standards. These will be launched in the spring.

When she plans to start releasing annual statements on prison capacity.

The first annual statement on prison capacity was published on 11 December 2024. This can be found on the government website: Annual Statement on Prison Capacity: 2024 - GOV.UK.

Innovation and Technology, whether he plans to introduce regulations to prevent the sharing of scam content on social media platforms.

Government takes the issue of fraudulent content on social media platforms seriously – which is why fraud is listed as a priority offence in the Online Safety Act.In-scope services, including social media platforms, will have to take steps to prevent fraudulent content appearing on their platforms and to swiftly remove such content if it does. The largest services (categorised services) must also take action to tackle paid-for fraudulent adverts.Ofcom has robust powers to take enforcement action where companies fail to meet their duties, including issuing fines of up to 10% of qualifying worldwide revenue.

What steps she is taking with telecommunications providers to help prevent fraud through (a) scam calls and (b) text messages.

This Government is working extremely closely with industry, regulators, law enforcement and consumer groups to close the vulnerabilities that criminals exploit in telecoms networks to stop scams reaching people. The Government and Industry are currently developing a second Telecommunications Fraud Charter to build on previous voluntary action taken by the country’s biggest Telecoms companies. This new Charter will go further in encouraging companies to identify, prevent, and disrupt high volume telecoms fraud.In addition to this, we are also pursuing legislation that aims to ban ‘SIM farms’, which are technical devices which allow criminals to send scam texts to thousands of people at the same time. Additionally, this Government is working with Ofcom to stop more cases of number ‘spoofing’, where scammers impersonate UK numbers to persuade people that they are speaking to banks, telephone companies or other legitimate businesses.

What steps she is taking to achieve the construction of 14,000 additional prison places by 2031.

This Government will build the prison places that the previous Government promised but failed to deliver because of their inability to stand up to their own backbenches.We are investing over £2.3 billion in prison building this year and next. The Lord Chancellor set out plans for delivering 14,000 new prison places by 2031 in the 10-Year Prison Capacity Strategy, which includes the construction of four new prisons, as well as the expansion and refurbishment of the existing estate and temporary accommodation.HMP Millsike in Yorkshire is due to open in spring 2025 and will deliver c.1,500 places. Construction of a new c.1,700 place prison near the existing HMP Gartree in Leicestershire is on track to start in the summer, and outline planning permission is in place for a c.1,500 place prison in Buckinghamshire and a c.1,700 place prison in Lancashire. Additionally, new houseblocks at HMP Rye Hill and HMP Fosse Way are due to complete during the course of 2025, providing c.700 places between them. We also continue to roll out hundreds more Rapid Deployment Cells across the estate. We are working with suppliers to deliver these places as quickly as possible.

What assessment she has made of the long-term impact of (a) early release schemes and (b) other emergency prison measures.

In July 2024, the Lord Chancellor took decisive action to avoid imminent gridlock across the Criminal Justice System (CJS) by changing the automatic release point for those serving eligible Standard Determinate Sentences (SDS) from 50% to 40%. The measure will be reviewed 18 months after its implementation in September 2024. This allowed us to end the previous Government’s End of Custody Supervised Licence scheme.When implementing the SDS measure, we took every possible step to mitigate risk including an 8-week implementation period, clear offence exclusions, and collaboration with partners across the CJS. We are committed to publishing transparency data on the number of SDS40-affected releases. We have already published data for day one of Tranches 1 and 2 on 7 November 2024 and are considering how routinely publishing SDS40 data best fits with our regular Accredited Official Statistics.Whilst the SDS change provided the intended medium-term relief to the system, this was never expected to be a silver bullet. To put prison capacity on a sustainable footing in the long-term, the Lord Chancellor announced the Independent Review into Sentencing, alongside a series of prison capacity measures to ensure we have sufficient capacity in the lead-up to the Review’s recommendations. This included reforming our recall practices to target the unsustainable growth in the recall population since the pandemic and an extension of the maximum period offenders can spend on Home Detention Curfew from 6 – 12 months. MoJ remains dedicated to working with its agencies and stakeholders to continuously evaluate and where necessary improve the HDC scheme.We will continue to monitor the longer-term impacts as they develop.

What steps she is taking to ensure the recruitment of prison officers stays in line with planned expansion of prison capacity.

We know that sufficient and skilled frontline staffing is fundamental to delivering safe, secure, and rehabilitative prison regimes. We remain committed to ensuring prisons are sufficiently resourced and that we retain and build levels of experience, both of which are fundamental to delivering quality outcomes in prisons.As of 30 September 2024, there are 23,571 Band 3-5 prison officers in post, and nationally across establishments we are at 99.5% of our Target Staffing Figure (when using hours adjusted FTE). Our current national resourcing context is much stronger in comparison to September 2022, when there were 21,617 FTE Band 3-5 prison officers in post.All prison expansion projects, whether new prisons or smaller builds, are factored into our staffing forecasts to ensure we recruit on time and build up the experience needed to continue to deliver safe and secure regimes. HMPPS works closely with our partners to ensure that there is capacity across other workforce groups in prisons, including for educational and health posts.

Communities and Local Government, when she plans to publish the long-term housing strategy; and what key objectives will be included to provide long-term certainty to the housing market.

The government intend to publish a long-term housing strategy later this year.

Innovation and Technology, what discussions he has had with social media companies on the role of their platforms in perpetrators committing online fraud.

The government is committed to tackling online fraud, as demonstrated through the strong duties in the Online Safety Act to protect users from this content.In addition, the Joint Fraud Taskforce is a partnership between government, the private sector and law enforcement to tackle fraud collectively. Minutes of the taskforce’s meetings are published on gov.uk

What assessment she has made of the potential merits of making changes to military compensation so that it is not considered as income for the purposes of calculating means-tested benefits.

I refer the honourable member to the answer given on 5 December 2024 to question UIN 16635.

Communities and Local Government, what discussions she has had with local authority (a) officers and (b) elected representatives on the cancellation of the local elections in Thurrock, and if she will publish the record of those discussions.

The Secretary of State has not had discussions with this local authority on the cancellation of the local elections.

What steps her Department is taking to ensure the independence of the courts from external influence from (a) UN bodies and (b) non-governmental organisations when enacting immigration law.

As the Prime Minister has said, it is Parliament that enacts the law on immigration, and it is Government that makes the policy (Official Report, column 249). It is an enduring strength of our democracy that when judges apply the law, they decide cases impartially, independently, and free from any external or political influence or pressure. There is a robust appellate system to deal with matters arising from a decision.

If she will make an assessment of the potential merits of bringing forward legislative proposals to require courts to abide by domestic law over (a) policies promoted by UN agencies and (b) non-legally binding international agreements.

As the Prime Minister has said, it is Parliament that enacts the law on immigration, and it is Government that makes the policy (Official Report, column 249). It is an enduring strength of our democracy that when judges apply the law, they decide cases impartially, independently, and free from any external or political influence or pressure. There is a robust appellate system to deal with matters arising from a decision.

Whether she plans to deport the migrants arrested for working illegally in raids in January 2025.

I refer the Hon Member to the Answer I gave on 14 February to Question 30090.

If she will take steps to ensure that biological males who identify as female are not housed in women’s prisons.

We take the allocation of transgender prisoners very seriously. It is right that there are safeguards in place to protect the safety of vulnerable women, and well over 90% of transgender women in custody are held in men’s prisons.Transgender women who have committed sexual or violent offences, or who retain birth genitalia, will not be held in general women’s estate, other than on an exceptional basis where experts have a high level of confidence that they pose a low risk to other prisoners.

Whether his Department has made an assessment of the potential impact of the Global Compact for Migration on (a) demands for NHS services and (b) the provision of healthcare for migrants.

The term 'migrants' encompasses a diverse group of individuals, including authorised and unauthorised migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers, each with varying legal statuses that impact their entitlement to healthcare services in the United Kingdom. The Department has not made a formal assessment of the potential impact of the Global Compact for Migration on the provision of healthcare for migrants.The National Health Service in England is a residency-based system and free at the point of use for those ordinarily resident. Overseas visitors are required to pay for NHS services, where chargeable, unless otherwise exempt. Exemptions from NHS charges include refugees and asylum seekers. Some NHS services are free to all, including primary care, accident and emergency services, and the diagnosis or treatment of infectious diseases.

What assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration on (a) UK immigration laws and (b) legal challenges to border control policies.

The Global Compact for Migration, prepared under the auspices of the United Nations, aims to foster international cooperation on migration in a comprehensive way. The Global Compact reaffirms the sovereign right of States to determine their national migration policy and their prerogative to govern migration within their jurisdiction, in conformity with international law.An effective well-managed migration system is a fundamental part of the UK’s approach to ensuring the security and control of our borders and the UK remains committed to working with partners to address shared challenges.

What information her Department holds on the number of times courts have cited (a) the UN Global Compact for Migration and (b) other non-binding international agreements in rulings on asylum and immigration cases in the last three years.

The Ministry of Justice does not have policies in relation to asylum and immigration, responsibility for which sits with the Home Secretary. Nor does the Ministry of Justice consider or hold any data on the number of times in which the UN Global Compact for Migration or other non-binding international agreements have been cited in court rulings.