Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people have been victims of identity theft in each of the past five years; and what steps she is taking to reduce the prevalence of identity theft.

The Home Office do not hold the information requested. The use of another person’s identification details (or the use of false identification details), often referred to identity theft, is not itself an offence in law.

Most instances of ‘Identity Theft’ come to light when victims’ details are used fraudulently to obtain goods, services or money using credit arrangements or loans. Figures on these offences are collated by the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) and are published quarterly by the Office for National Statistics in the bulletin Crime in England and Wales in Table A5: The latest available data can be found in table A5:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/crimeandjustice/datasets/crimeinenglandandwalesappendixtables

The Government is concerned about the harms caused by crimes enabled by the theft of an identity and is taking a number of steps to counter identity-based crimes:

• Action Fraud, the Government-supported fraud reporting centre, provides advice for individuals and businesses on steps they can take to protect themselves from identity crime;
• Action Fraud is also engaged in a number of public campaigns to raise awareness of the risk of identity theft across the public and private sectors to both individuals and businesses;
• The Government is using the Joint Fraud Taskforce to bring banks and law enforcement together to work collectively to protect the public and businesses from fraud;
• And the Government is also committed to extending the Verify platform so that people have one single, common and safe way of verifying themselves online to all parts of government by 2020 and making it more widely available, so that people can safely verify their identity to access non-government services such as banking.