argyrotsipi/train-dataset huggingface dataset:
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Social Welfare
Victoria Grace Ford (Conservative, Centre-right): We have provided unprecedented support to the early years sector throughout the pandemic, through the block-buying childcare places, furlough and other schemes. We are monitoring the current situation really closely and will continue to review it if further measures are needed. For example, where education and childcare settings have an unmet need for PPE, they can access it via their local authority or local resilience forums. We will continue to keep supporting our early years sector.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Social Welfare
Victoria Grace Ford (Conservative, Centre-right): Independent and semi-independent provision can be the right choice for older children who are ready for this where it is high quality and meets their needs. It can enable them to develop their independence as they transition into adult life. However, we are absolutely clear that we need to do more to ensure that the quality of this provision is consistently good, and that this type of provision is simply not appropriate for children under the age of 16 who should be placed in children’s homes or foster care. We have consulted on introducing national quality standards and we will publish the Government’s response to the consultation in due course.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Pauline Elizabeth Latham (Conservative, Centre-right): I am sure that, like me, my hon. Friend has received a lot of ill-informed and abusive emails and posts on social media about the school lunches. I am pleased that the Department has established a hotline for complaints about the lunch parcels. I am absolutely certain that most schools are providing good quality parcels for children. Please will she confirm how many complaints about food parcels the newly established hotline has received?
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Victoria Grace Ford (Conservative, Centre-right): DFE helplines have been giving support to schools and others on a wide range of matters. On Wednesday morning, after seeing some of the photos of unacceptable parcels, we announced that parents could call the DFE if they had a problem with a lunch parcel, but that they should try to resolve it with the school first. There are around 1.4 million children on free school meals. By the end of last week, we had received a total of seven calls in relation to unacceptable lunch parcels. Each has been fully investigated. We expect high-quality lunch parcels for our children.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Nicolas John Gibb (Conservative, Centre-right): Ensuring that no child suffers a loss to their education or damage to their long-term prospects as a consequence of the pandemic is a key priority of education policy. That is why we have secured £1 billion of catch-up funding from the Treasury; £350 million of that is for the national tutoring programme, and £650 million is being distributed to all schools across the country on the basis of £80 per pupil and £240 per pupil in special school settings. That money can be used to target the children who most need to catch up.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Theresa Anne Villiers (Conservative, Centre-right): A headteacher in my constituency has been in touch to express real concern about Ofsted assessing schools when there are no agreed standards or established precedents that relate to education in lockdown, so may I urge the Schools Minister to engage closely with headteachers and Ofsted to ensure that any assessment process is fair to schools as they operate now, and reflects the hugely difficult circumstances to which they have been subjected?
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Nicolas John Gibb (Conservative, Centre-right): Formal Ofsted inspections have been suspended until the summer term. What is happening is that Ofsted is engaged in monitoring visits for schools rated "inadequate" or "requires improvement", and having discussions about the quality of the curriculum and the challenges that schools are facing with remote education. We have set out clear expectations for what we expect schools to do with regard to remote education, including the fact that at key stage 1 there should be three hours of remote education, at key stage 2 four hours, and at key stages 3 and 4 five hours a day.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Gavin Alexander Williamson (Conservative, Centre-right): We are very much looking forward to the APPG being rechristened the Turing APPG, hopefully in the not-too-distant future. I can confirm that the Minister for Universities, my hon. Friend the Member for Chippenham (Michelle Donelan), would be delighted to meet the hon. Lady and her colleagues on the all-party parliamentary group to see what more can be done to expand these truly great opportunities for all young people right across the United Kingdom to see the world and to learn from the experience of studying in so many institutions right across the globe.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Matthew Alexander Vickers (Conservative, Centre-right): Stockton South has some of the best teachers in the country, and they are working hard to ensure that youngsters who might lack the support and resources that they need at home are not left behind as a result of school closures. What is my right hon. Friend doing to ensure that when schools reopen, deprived youngsters can catch up and still reach their full potential?
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Gavin Alexander Williamson (Conservative, Centre-right): I echo my hon. Friend’s thanks to all teachers in Stockton South, and not only for the amazing work they did last term, but for what they are continuing to do. He is absolutely right to highlight children from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. That is why our covid catch-up fund is so incredibly important in helping them to catch up, and why our roll-out of 1.3 million laptops right across the country is so important in helping to support schools. The best thing that we can do is see all schools return at the earliest possible date, with children benefiting from being back in the classroom and learning directly from their teachers.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Gavin Alexander Williamson (Conservative, Centre-right): We will always look at how best we can support students. We have announced an additional £20 million of hardship funding for students, to be administered through universities in England, and we will continue to keep that under review.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Abimbola Afolami (Conservative, Centre-right): Many students have suffered as a result of inadequate teaching and pastoral care at their universities, in addition to unfair costs for accommodation that they are not even allowed to stay in. What action will my right hon. Friend take to ensure that the Government are a voice for students, that they stand up for students and that they allow them to be compensated in some way by their universities when those universities fail them and let them down?
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Gavin Alexander Williamson (Conservative, Centre-right): There can be no excuses when universities are not offering the type of remote teaching and educational support that is expected. That is why it is so critical that, where that remote teaching and support is not happening, students’ rights are upheld. We saw at the tail end of last year that students’ rights were upheld and universities had to redress that. That is the right approach. We recognise how important it is to support students, which is why we will continue to look at how best we can support them through programmes such as the hardship fund.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Victoria Grace Ford (Conservative, Centre-right): We are in continual contact with Public Health England, through the Department, and we also meet early years representatives. I have been touring special schools virtually throughout. Our early years are vital years of education for the youngest, which they cannot get back, our special schools provide vital support for young people with disabilities, and alternative provision settings are vital for our most vulnerable. All those settings are usually smaller than other settings, which is why they have less of an impact on community transmission —it should be remembered that we closed schools to reduce community transmission—and why PHE continues to advise us that closing them is not needed to bring down the R number.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Education
Victoria Grace Ford (Conservative, Centre-right): We have kept our schools open to those with the most severe special needs and disabilities and those with an education, health and care plan. We continue to back up and support local authorities to improve their special educational needs and disabilities provision, to make sure that those young people who need an EHC plan can get one as soon as possible. We are working with councils all across the country.
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Social Welfare
Lucy Allan (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank my right hon. Friend the Education Secretary for bringing forward the independent review of children’s social care. I am hugely grateful that this important manifesto commitment did not find itself on the back burner given all the other challenges we face. Will my right hon. Friend tell the House what he expects the review to achieve for those children in care or on the fringes of care?
Topical Questions — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Social Welfare
Gavin Alexander Williamson (Conservative, Centre-right): This is something everyone in this House feels incredibly passionately about. I know through seeing at first hand, coming from a family with parents who fostered for many years, how important it is to get high-quality children’s social care right in this country. I want a real revolution to come out of this report, and I am incredibly pleased that Josh MacAlister has taken on this role to deliver the changes that I think Members on both sides of the House want. I have said quite clearly that I do not want him to hold back in tackling difficult issues. I want to see change, improvement and children’s lives transformed. By working on a cross-party basis, I believe that that is what we can deliver.
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Law and Crime
John Alan Redwood (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the Minister, the Home Secretary and the police leadership around the country for the very professional way in which they have responded to a most unfortunate error, an error that none of them wanted or made personally. Will he give us a little bit more encouragement, however, because is it not the case that there are now many good ways to retrieve data that has been wrongly deleted? Might we be looking at a remedy for this in a few weeks’ time, when the computer experts have finished their job?
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Law and Crime
Christopher Laurie Malthouse (Conservative, Centre-right): My right hon. Friend is absolutely right that the initial assessment was some optimism about the ability to recover this data, not least because it is held in a number of areas. We will not have the full picture until we get to the end of this week, once we have analysed the report and, of course, looked at the data that we should have deleted but have not because of this error. However, he is quite right that we should be optimistic about that and recognise that all is not lost. There are other ways that this data can be cross-checked, in particular as part of a police investigation. We are working with our policing partners to ensure that they make full use of that, so that they can proceed as usual with their investigations.
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Law and Crime
Christopher Laurie Malthouse (Conservative, Centre-right): On the hon. and learned Lady’s two substantive questions, this had absolutely nothing to do with SIS II—the Schengen information system. These were, as I said earlier, deletions in line with our legal obligations not to hold data for people who are not of continuing interest to the police, under legislation that was enacted by this House some years ago. On the conversations with police forces, obviously the National Police Chiefs Council lead has cascaded throughout policing the information required to put in place mitigations. We will also, of course, co-operate as closely as possible, and I will be keeping my opposite number in the Scottish Government informed As to the sentiments expressed by the hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds) and the hon. and learned Lady about the Home Secretary, I can only apologise that they are facing someone who is an inferior to their own status, but they will understand that the Home Secretary has an enormous draw upon her duties. She takes her duties in this House extremely seriously—there is no doubt about it—but I have been much more, I guess, embedded with this over the last few months, as one would expect for a Minister of State who is standing by his Home Secretary, doing her bidding.
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Law and Crime
Scott Lloyd Benton (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the Minister for providing the House with more detail on this unfortunate issue. Can he confirm that the police have a full understanding of what has happened and that appropriate measures will be taken to ensure that it is not repeated?
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Law and Crime
Christopher Laurie Malthouse (Conservative, Centre-right): That is absolutely right. I understand that the police were informed, along with the senior levels of the Home Office, on the Monday after the incident occurred, and they are part of the Gold group command that is dealing with the incident. As hon. Members will have seen from the letter that was leaked to The Times—the detailed letter that was sent round policing—the NPCC lead on this matter is very much at the table, working with us to ensure that we rectify it as soon as possible.
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Law and Crime
Christopher Laurie Malthouse (Conservative, Centre-right): With a large database of something like 13 million records, it is routine to use mini-programs that run on the database to deal with data. As I understand it, this new coding was put in place as a weeding request from policing itself. Obviously, to ensure that this does not reoccur, one of the questions that we will have to answer is: what went wrong not only in the writing of the code that introduced this error but in the quality and system checking that then sat behind it? Once we have gone through the exercise of ensuring that we have rectified this as much as we can, that will be exactly the kind of lesson that we learn There have been concerns about the process of replacing the police national computer and the police national database, but over the last few months, the Home Secretary and I have worked hard to put reset processes in place around that project. I am confident that we are now on a better footing to move forward to a brighter future for police technology.
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Social Welfare
Andrew Griffith (Conservative, Centre-right): This incident is not without precedent—the Minister will recall that in 2007, 25 million child benefit records were lost. Can he confirm that everything possible will be done to remedy this and to learn whatever lessons need to be learned?
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Government Operations
Christopher Laurie Malthouse (Conservative, Centre-right): My hon. Friend is right that, over the years, there have been a number of issues around governmental handling of data. It is a large and complex issue, and we are dealing with huge amounts of data that are very difficult to handle. He can be assured, and I hope the rest of the House will be, that we are working flat out to get on top of this problem and to rectify it. The first stage of our plan has gone well. The second stage is under way, and I expect to report better progress to the House in due course.
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Law and Crime
Christopher Laurie Malthouse (Conservative, Centre-right): I was not necessarily in post at that point, so I do not know whether there was ministerial involvement in that particular decision. I can tell the right hon. Gentleman that we have been working quite hard over the last year or so to get the technology projects in the Home Office—the national law enforcement data programme and the new communications network for the police—back on track. They have had their fair share of problems—that is no national secret—but I am confident that things are in a better position now than they were before While I understand the issues claimed in The Times today around the police national computer, it is worth pointing out that this issue had nothing to do with the state or otherwise of the hardware and software of the police national computer. It was pure human error in coding and was not necessarily a reflection of the age of that system. We are committed to putting in place a brand-new system. That project is now back on track after a reset, and I am confident that over the next two or three years, we will see a significant change in the way UK policing uses technology.
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Law and Crime
Christopher Laurie Malthouse (Conservative, Centre-right): Yes. It is the hope of all Government Members that Opposition Members will work constructively with us. I had a very constructive briefing over the weekend with the hon. Member for Torfaen (Nick Thomas-Symonds); the shadow Policing Minister, the hon. Member for Croydon Central (Sarah Jones); and the Chair of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper). We are committed to as much transparency as the House requires, because with a large, complex database, when human error is introduced, these kinds of issue need to be exposed so that we can all learn from them, whatever situation, political or otherwise, we are in.
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Law and Crime
Christopher Laurie Malthouse (Conservative, Centre-right): The hon. Gentleman again casts aspersions on the Home Secretary, who is one of the hardest-working politicians I have come across in my 20-odd years in politics, and I think it is deeply unfair to make that claim. As he knows, it is perfectly usual for Ministers of State to take urgent questions or indeed make statements in this House, and we are doing no different from what a Government that he supported did in the past We will know the full extent of the impact of this issue over the next few days, as our plan swings into action, and we are working very closely with police forces across the country, through the National Police Chiefs Council, to make sure that any operational impact is obviated or mitigated.
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Law and Crime
Robert James MacGillivray Neill (Conservative, Centre-right): I thank the Minister for his statement and for what I know is his personal commitment to resolving this matter. He will appreciate that offences are sometimes continued, which may be for lack of evidence, but that material that is retained may subsequently become valuable if it can be cross-checked in the event of arrests for subsequent offences. Will he make sure that obtaining a back-up of such material, which can be of importance to future prosecutions or investigations, is a top priority, and that all the other related criminal justice agencies will be kept fully informed of progress on this matter?
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Law and Crime
Christopher Laurie Malthouse (Conservative, Centre-right): In his usual succinct way, my hon. Friend puts his finger on the button of the issue. We are working very hard at the moment, as I say, to scope exactly what has happened and make sure we can retrieve exactly the sort of data that he refers to from the various other databases on which it is held—both at force and indeed at national level, or even, for example, at forensic provider level. There is some optimism that we may be able to do that, although we will not know for certain until later this week Having said that, as my hon. Friend will know from his very distinguished career at the Bar, the police have a number of other databases and sources of information from which they can seek corroborating evidence or otherwise through an investigation, and as I said before, we are working closely with them to make sure that those mitigations are in place while we get this problem sorted out.
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Law and Crime
Christopher Laurie Malthouse (Conservative, Centre-right): It is worth stressing, as I said before, that this data loss relates to people who have been subject to no further action from the police, and any biometric data—DNA, fingerprint or otherwise—that may have been deleted from the police national computer relates only to that offence for which no further action has been taken. At the moment—I am trying to be candid with the hon. Gentleman, as he urged me to be—I cannot give him an exact picture of what the downstream impact is, but it is worth pointing out that the police national computer is not the only place in which records such as the DNA records he refers to are held. We obviously have a separate DNA database, and then forensic providers who provide those samples also have their own DNA databases, and there is obviously intelligence that remains on the police national database as opposed to the police national computer. However, our primary effort at the moment is to scope the scale of the issue, and then to seek the rectification that both he and I would be keen to see.
Police National Computer — House of Commons, 2021-01-18
Topic: Technology
Christopher Laurie Malthouse (Conservative, Centre-right): I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his question. I can assure him that we are doing everything we possibly can. We have a very dedicated engineering team who have been working flat out since the incident occurred, including over the weekend, to seek rectification. As soon as I have more information about phase 2, I will make it known to the House through whatever channel is agreed with Mr Speaker.