The Department continues to monitor the progress of the museums resuming online sales to Northern Ireland, and is supporting the institutions with this where necessary.

Officials have engaged with the senior leadership of the V&A and the Science Museum Group in recent weeks on this issue. Both museums are exploring options to resume deliveries to Northern Ireland.

The Victoria and Albert Museum have indicated that they are aiming to resume online sales to Northern Ireland by the end of the financial year 2026/27. The Science Museum Group has not yet shared a target date, but is exploring options to re-open ecommerce sales in Northern Ireland.

DCMS officials are in touch with the Science Museum Group and the Victoria and Albert Museum to discuss the ongoing steps they are taking to resume online sales to Northern Ireland.

The Royal Mint engaged the relevant law enforcement agencies as part of the fraud incident detailed in their Annual Report and Accounts for 2022-23. These investigations are confidential and as such, we cannot comment on whether the transactions were traceable or the location of the perpetrators of the fraud.

As outlined in The Royal Mint Trading Fund’s Annual Reports and Accounts for 2022-23, an external fraud incident occurred impacting The Royal Mint. A small number of fraudulent transactions were made on the Royal Mint’s website. The incident did not impact Royal Mint customers details and there was no risk to customer data.

The Royal Mint continually make changes to their anti-fraud procedures, reflecting the dynamic nature of the external fraud landscape.

As shareholder of The Royal Mint, HM Treasury are regularly updated on risk controls and have been supporting the strengthening of these processes and procedures.

The department does not gather statistics on the number of people seeking help for gambling-related harms generally or online gambling in particular. However, the National Gambling Support Network (NGSN) provides support and treatment for the majority of people presenting for help for gambling-related harms, and their annual statistics (for 2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23) can provide insight on those seeking help for online gambling in each of the last five years.

I refer the Hon Member to the answer I gave to Question UIN 5938 on 14 December 2023.

The investigation by law enforcement agencies into an external fraud incident impacting the Royal Mint website remains ongoing. Therefore, I am unable to provide further detail at this time.

The incident did not impact Royal Mint customers details and there was no risk to customer data.

The Armed Forces’ recruitment websites are updated continually, as required.

Royal Navy:

The website went live with a new mobile-first design in November 2023.

Army:

The website was significantly refreshed in February 2023.

Royal Air Force:

The website was significantly refreshed in August 2023.

The government recognises the important role the UK Safer Internet Centre delivers on online safety. This includes the operation of a public hotline for reporting and removing child sexual abuse material online and a helpline to support professionals working with children in the UK with any online safety issues young people in their care may face.

The government engages regularly with the UK Safer Internet Centre, and has previously provided it with funding to develop advice for schools on understanding, preventing and responding to cyberbullying, and an online safety toolkit to help schools deliver sessions about cyberbullying, peer pressure and sexting.

The Ministry of Justice publishes statistics on proceedings and outcomes for a range of offences relating to grooming including: sexual communication with a child; and meeting a child aged under 16 following sexual grooming. Offences relating to online grooming are not distinguished from all grooming offences in court data.

Data on these offences is published up to December 2019 and available in the Principal offence proceedings and outcomes by Home Office offence code data tool:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/888344/HO-code-tool-principal-offence-2019.xlsx

Filter ‘detailed offence’ for:

Or filter ‘offence’ for:

88A Sexual Grooming

The Government is committed to tackling child sexual exploitation and abuse wherever and however it occurs. There can be no safe space for paedophiles to operate either here or abroad and we will do all we can to keep children safe. We continue to work closely with law enforcement in the UK and international partners to close down online networks and bring offenders to justice. We announced in the 2019 Spending Round an investment of an £30 million to support UK law enforcement to bear down on child sexual exploitation and abuse.

The Government is working closely with the Netherlands to tackle online child sexual abuse material that is held in, and distributed from, the Netherlands and available in the UK. The Dutch approach to addressing the threat of online child sexual exploitation and abuse was outlined in a letter from their Ministry of Justice and Security to the European Union. This provided a useful platform for our engagement on how we can work together on this issue, identify areas of common interest, best practice and ways to coordinate our efforts to tackle the threat.

The Dutch hotline, EOKM, will also be working with the UK’s Internet Watch Foundation to combat the issue of child sexual abuse material. In 1996 when the Internet Watch Foundation was founded, the UK hosted 18% of the global total of online child sexual abuse content; in 2019 this figure was just 0.1%.

UK police have existing powers under section 72 and Schedule 2 of the Sexual Offences Act 2003 which provides for extra-territorial jurisdiction in relation to certain offences under the 2003 Act where the victim is under the age of 18 years old. We continue to look at what more we can do with our international partners giving due consideration to the findings of the “Children Outside the UK report’ published by the Independent Inquiry on Child Sexual Abuse in January 2020.

The Ministry of Justice publishes statistics on proceedings and outcomes for a range of offences relating to grooming, including where an adult meets or attempts to meet a child aged under 16 following grooming and causing or inciting a child to engage in sexual activity. Offences relating to online grooming are not distinguished from all grooming offences in court data, can be found under offence code 88a at the link below.

Data on these offences is published up to December 2017 and available in the Principal offence proceedings and outcomes by Home Office offence code data tool: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/738814/HO-Code-Tool-2017.xlsx.

Statistics for 2018 will be published on 16 May 2019.

Ministers and officials regularly meet with the major tech and social media companies to discuss their progress in tackling disinformation and other online harms. We will continue to have robust dialogue with the companies and press them to be transparent about the scale of the problem on their platforms and the steps they are taking to address it.

The National Crime Agency’s Thinkuknow education programme endeavours to help children and young people identify the risks they may face online, build resilience against the threat of child sexual abuse and exploitation and know where to seek further support, including where appropriate, reporting directly to the NCA.

The NCA’s performance is monitored quarterly through the NCA’s internal governance structure and overseen by the NCA Board. It is then reported directly to the Home Secretary. This performance reporting includes information on ThinkuKnow.

There was an external evaluation of ThinkuKnow in 2009. CEOP took on board the recommendations, and the NCA continues to develop its education tools and resources in conjunction with young people, as well as its Ambassador network.

Following the implementation of new ThinkuKnow resources for eight to ten year olds in November 2016, new resources for four to seven year olds will be launched in January 2019. These have been designed in line with best practice agreed with the PSHE association and have been developed following consultation with over 2000 parents, carers and professionals, and 25 sessions in 12 schools.

The UK Safer Internet Centre is a partnership that carries out a range of programmes in support of children's internet safety. These include a helpline to provide support to professionals working with children and young people with online safety issues; a hotline that provides an anonymous and safe place to report and remove child sexual abuse imagery and videos; and an Awareness Centre, which provides advice and support to children and young people, parents and carers, schools and the children's workforce.

Each year, the UK Safer Internet Centre coordinates Safer Internet Day across UK. This forms a key part of national online safety activity. An impact assessment report on Safer Internet Day 2018 showed that it had reached 45 percent of children and 30 percent of parents - and that as a result, 80 percent of these children felt more confident about what to do if they are worried about something online , and 74 percent of these parents had a conversation with their children about internet safety.

Information on prosecutions and convictions for hate crime, held by the Ministry of Justice, does not include details of whether an offence was committed through online activity.

On 26 July we published a comprehensive new cross-Government Hate Crime Action plan to drive forward action against hate crime. This includes education programmes to prevent hate incidents and measures to improve the police response and recording of hate crime. It also includes £2.4million for security at places of worship which are vulnerable to hate crime and £300,000 funding for community groups to tackle hate crime in innovative ways, including the potential to tackle hate crime online.