For the Home Office, the EU Settlement Scheme represents both a major challenge and a great opportunity.

On a practical level, the challenge is to process the applications to the Scheme that it receives from the estimated 3.5 million EU citizens living in the UK and ensure that each applicant is granted either settled status or pre-settled status in line with their rights. However, against a climate of mistrust of its intentions and its competence, it is not lost on the Home Office that the Scheme is also an opportunity to demonstrate what it is capable of achieving with the right resources, appropriate input from other government departments and ministerial support for a new (“looking to grant”) approach.

The draft EU Withdrawal Agreement referred to the creation of a new Independent Monitoring Authority to monitor the Scheme and investigate alleged breaches. Ahead of this, the government acknowledged that monitoring of the Scheme falls within my remit. Since the Scheme has been developed and rolled out in phases and will run at least until the end of 2020, my intention is to carry out a number of inspections of it.

In the first of these, I examined the progress the Home Office had made in designing and testing the Scheme, focusing on the Private Beta 2 (PB2) phase that ran between November and December 2018. I looked specifically at governance of the Project, at staffing, and at the learning the Home Office had gained from its testing, including from the trialling of the ‘EU Exit: ID Document Check app’ and from the inclusion in PB2 of a small cohort of vulnerable applicants. I also looked at internal and external communications in relation to the Scheme.

The inspection found areas for improvement and my report, submitted at the beginning of March, made seven recommendations, all of which the Home Office has now accepted. At the time of this inspection the Scheme had still to launch and therefore to be properly tested, however it is important to note that compared with many other areas of BICS, where systems and staff resources appear under constant strain, forcing them to be largely reactive and to juggle different demands, the EU Settlement Scheme stood out as having been afforded the preparation time, resources and organisational priority to succeed, and morale amongst the staff working on the Scheme, many of them new to the Home Office, was high. Maintaining this when the Scheme becomes ‘business as usual’ and workloads become more challenging will be crucial and a number of the recommendations go to this point.

The Scheme went ‘live’ on 30 March 2019, since when the rate of applications received has grown substantially. I therefore plan to carry out a further inspection of the Scheme beginning later this month.

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The Prime Minister welcomed Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir of Iceland to Downing Street for the first time on Thursday morning, building on their meeting at the Northern Future Forum in Oslo in October.

The leaders reiterated their shared ambition to continue close cooperation between the UK and Iceland after Brexit. The Prime Minister thanked Prime Minister Jakobsdóttir for formalising our mutual commitment through continuity agreements. She also gave an update on the UK’s exit from the EU and talks with the Opposition to find a way forward that Parliament can support.

The Prime Minister welcomed Iceland’s forthcoming chairmanship of the Arctic Council and looked forward to working closely on shared environmental priorities, including reducing plastic pollution.

They also spoke about the importance of improving cybersecurity and progress on tackling online harms and modern slavery.

Cyber crime has a number of definitions but will usually involve attacks on, or through, computer systems and networks. It often includes theft of data or disruption of systems to enable further crime.

Dependant on the nature of these crimes, trustees, staff, volunteers and beneficiaries of charities may be adversely affected. Negative publicity could also impact on public trust and confidence in not only the charity affected, but the sector as a whole.

The government Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2019 revealed that over two thirds of high income charities had recorded a cyber breach or attack in 2018. Of those charities affected, the vast majority (over 80%) had experienced a phishing attack, which are fraudulent emails.

With the cost of a breach ranging from £300 to £100,000, charity managers cannot afford to ignore the growing threat posed by cyber crime, in all its forms.

The good news is that advice and guidance is widely available to help you take the right steps to protect your charity.

How you can protect your charity

All charities should be vigilant to the threat of cyber crime and make sure appropriate defences are in place, including raising awareness with their staff and volunteers.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has produced a useful guide on how to protect from cyber crimes. It also explains how charities can become accredited under the government Cyber Essentials Scheme.

Cyber Security: Small Charity Guide.

For larger charities, detailed advice for trustee boards on improving cyber security is available in the NCSC’s new Boards Toolkit.

HM Government also provides timely advice and guidance through its Cyber Aware website.

How to report cyber crime and fraud

If your charity has fallen victim to cyber crime, or any other type of fraud, you should report it to Action Fraud by calling 0300 123 2040, or by visiting the Action Fraud website.

Charities should also report fraud to the Charity Commission as a serious incident.

We require prompt, full and frank disclosure of incidents. Serious incident reporting helps us to assess the volume and impact of incidents within charities, and to understand the risks facing the sector as a whole.

Where appropriate, we can also provide timely advice and guidance, either to assist individual charities and get them back on track, or to warn the wider sector about prevalent threats.

Notes

The Charity Commission, the independent regulator of charities in England and Wales, is issuing this alert to charities as regulatory advice under section 15(2) of the Charities Act 2011.

Our £1bn reform programme will transform the way justice is delivered to make it easier and quicker for people to access our services. Over 100,000 people have now used digital services to apply for probate, divorce or make an online civil money claim.

To mark this milestone, Richard Goodman, HMCTS Change Director hosted an in-conversation session between the organisation’s Chief Executive Susan Acland-Hood and legal academic Professor Richard Susskind.

During the recorded session, which you can listen to as a podcast, the conversation covered the future for digital courts, looked back at the recent international forum on online courts which Susan and Professor Susskind co-hosted, and considered how the HMCTS reform programme has so far applied its guiding principle – to build a justice system that places people at its heart.

A transcript of the podcast is available (PDF, 475KB, 8 pages)

Speaking during the conversation, Susan commented:

It’s really important that we offer people different routes to justice for different types of problem – thinking about this from a human being’s point of view means working out what’s going to work best for people in different circumstances.

Professor Susskind added:

All of us have an opportunity to make the most of technology – not to neglect the human element – but to wonder whether there may be different and better ways of complementing traditional service.