Question to the Attorney General:

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

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.

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.