Under-achievement never looks good. It indicates a failure to meet expectations and a need to play catch up.
So the government will not have enjoyed the publication of the latest figures relating to the prosecution of fraud.
According to KPMG’s Fraud Barometer, which tracks cases involving £100,000 or more, there were 226 fraud cases heard in the courts in 2023. This is up a little from the 2022 total of 221, but it is way down from the 2021 figure of 298.
Putting it more bluntly, the number of high-value cases actually making it to courts has not risen in line with the sharp increase in fraud. This is a fairly stark example of a need to play catch up.
It has to be a worry that at a time when fraud is on the rise, the prosecution of it does not appear to be keeping pace.
The Home Office’s own figures state that more than 40 per cent of all crime in England and Wales involves fraud. According to the Office of National Statistics, it was the most common crime type between April 2022 and March 2023, when there were an estimated 3.5mn incidents of fraud.
Tellingly, a 2023 Public Accounts Committee report said that although the committee had called for urgent action in 2017 to tackle fraud, things are getting worse.
Britain appears to be trying to fight its fraud epidemic with one hand behind its back.It stated that the year to June 2022 saw incidents of fraud or attempted fraud up 12 per cent on the 2017 total, while the number of charges and summonses for fraud had dropped, and less than 1 per cent of cases received by Action Fraud were resulting in a criminal justice outcome.
The prosecution of fraud remains, to put it politely, a challenge. The fact that the KPMG statistics also show that it is the government itself that is the largest loser to fraud may be viewed by some as a form of cause and effect – karma for a failure to tackle the task it faces.
Yet this may be putting the case too simply. Despite its increasingly high profile, fraud reportedly receives less than 1 per cent of police resources. There are also huge backlogs when it comes to cases coming to court for trial.
Britain appears to be trying to fight its fraud epidemic with one hand behind its back. If it is going to have any chance of success there will need to be a large-scale increase in the resources put into both enforcement and the criminal justice system, to put right a situation that has developed as a result of under-investment over decades.
Fraud has become an increasingly common occurrence. Those who carry it out are managing to find evermore new and sophisticated ways of achieving their goals – fairly safe in the knowledge that those who are supposed to prevent them doing this and hold them to account are not making similar progress.
The government could, with some justification, point to last year’s announcement of its anti-fraud strategy. This included a raft of measures aimed at improving protection of the public from fraudsters, a new national fraud squad with more than 400 new specialist investigators, and what was called "making fraud a priority for the police".
The then home secretary Suella Braverman talked of the “plan to stop fraud at source and pursue those responsible wherever they are in the world’’. But it is unlikely that such people, wherever they are, are quaking in their fraudulently-obtained boots.
Those committing fraud have been much quicker out of the blocks than those who should be catching them.Thanks to the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, there is now the "failure to prevent fraud" offence, which puts the onus on companies to ensure nobody working for them commits fraud.
The act also gives the Serious Fraud Office extra investigation powers.
Such moves may give some modest cause for optimism in the future. But in the here and now, the picture appears bleak.
Those committing fraud have been much quicker out of the blocks than those who should be catching them.
The would-be catchers may be hoping for a modern-day criminal equivalent of the tortoise and the hare story. But at this point, the chances of the authorities catching up look very slender indeed.
Niall Hearty is a partner at Rahman Ravelli
