Fraud: Criminal Investigation

Attorney General written question – answered at on 28 February 2022.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Steve Reed Steve Reed Shadow Secretary of State for Justice

To ask the Attorney General, how many fraud cases have been discontinued in each of the last five years.

Photo of Alex Chalk Alex Chalk The Solicitor-General

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) does not maintain a central record of the number of cases of fraud which have been discontinued. This information could only be obtained by an examination of CPS case files, which would incur disproportionate cost.

While no data is held reporting the number of cases of fraud prosecuted, records are collated providing the number of defendants whose prosecution was completed where the case was marked as ‘Fraud and Forgery’.

During the last five years, the CPS has prosecuted 67,817 defendants for fraud and forgery offences and convictions have been obtained against 58,671 (86.5%) of these defendants.

The table below shows the number of defendants with cases marked as ‘Fraud and Forgery’ where the prosecution was dropped during each of the last five years.

2016-2017

2017-2018

2018-2019

2019-2020

2020-2021

Prosecutions Dropped

1,639

1,556

1,433

1,056

811

Data Source: CPS Case Management Information System

The Fraud and Forgery category includes offences created by the Fraud Act 2006, forgery or copying false instruments, bribery, money laundering, bankruptcy offences and cheating the public revenue. It is not possible to separately report prosecution outcomes by the individual offences allocated to this category.

Does this answer the above question?

Yes0 people think so

No0 people think not

Would you like to ask a question like this yourself? Use our Freedom of Information site.