Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many cases of fraud were reported to Action Fraud by each police force in each year from 2010.

The way in which fraud offences are reported and subsequently recorded has changed in recent years. From April 2011 Action Fraud began gradually taking over the recording of fraud offences on behalf of individual police forces, completing in March 2013. Action Fraud is the UK’s national fraud and cybercrime reporting centre. The transfer to Action Fraud was rolled out at different times for different forces, therefore the year ending March 2014 was the first full year where all fraud offences previously reported to the police were recorded by Action Fraud. Due to this change caution should be applied when comparing data over this transitional period and with earlier years.

The number of fraud offences by police force area is only available for the years ending March 2010 to March 2013, when victims of fraud were still able to report to their local police force. These data are published on GOV.UK in the ‘Police recorded crime open data Police Force Area tables’ at this website: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/police-recorded-crime-open-data-tables. The table attached provides information on the number of fraud offences recorded by each police force in England and Wales between the years ending March 2010 and March 2013.

Since Action Fraud took over responsibility for recording fraud offences, victims reported fraud centrally to Action Fraud, therefore data from the year ending March 2014 is only available at national level and not by police force area. The Home Office collects this data via the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB). These data, which are published by the ONS, are available in Table A4 of the ‘Crime in England and Wales: Appendix tables’ at this website:

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