Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, will her department make an updated assessment of the annual cost to the UK economy of serious and organised crime.

The Home Office has an updated assessment of the cost of Serious and Organised Crime. Officials are currently reviewing the findings and considering the appropriate next steps, including options and timing for publication.

In the interim, the department continues to draw on a range of evidence, including previous official estimates, which underline the significant harm serious and organised crime causes to the UK economy.

The most recent published assessment of the social and economic costs of organised crime to the UK is the estimate presented in the previous Government’s SOC strategy 2023-2028 Serious and organised crime strategy 2023 to 2028 - GOV.UK, which places the cost at approximately £47 billion in 2023/24 prices. This figure is derived from the last underlying assessment conducted for FY 2015 to 2016, which estimated costs at around £37 billion based on Home Office ‘Understanding Organised Crime Estimating the scale and the social and economic costs’, and was subsequently inflated using the November 2023 HMT GDP Deflator. We continue to keep this area under active review, including how best to reflect improvements in evidence and methodology across threat areas.

Since the most recent publication, the Home Office has been actively developing and refining cost methodologies across key threats, including contact child sexual abuse (The economic and social cost of contact child sexual abuse), modern slavery (Economic and social costs of modern slavery - GOV.UK), drugs (Dame Carol Black's Independent Drugs Review) and fraud, (Economic and social cost of fraud 2023 to 2024 - GOV.UK). These updated methodologies have strengthened the evidence base and improved the accuracy of our cost estimates for individual threats.