Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many full-time equivalent staff have been employed by the National Crime Agency to tackle economic crime in each of the last three years.

In terms of the operational response, the Agency has a wide range of capabilities and functions that operate across different threat areas including economic crime. We are unable to provide a figure for the number of full-time equivalent staff who have been employed by the National Crime Agency (NCA) to tackle economic crime for the past three years as many units contribute to the efforts in different and varying amounts.

However, we are able to report on the number of staff within the Economic Crime Command which includes the National Economic Crime Centre (NECC) and the UK Financial Intelligence Unit (UKFIU).

The following table contains the approximate number of full time equivalent (FTE) staff for the Economic Crime Command, UK Financial Intelligence Unit and NECC since 2018. This is therefore a partial figure that does not reflect, for example, officers in Intelligence and Investigations Commands who conduct work in this threat area.

An important element of tackling economic crime and illicit finance is by denying criminals the benefit of their crimes. This disrupts organised crime groups and illicit finance flows and on this we have achieved some significant successes. The NCA’s success in denying criminal assets over the same three years totals £646.5m, which could have derived from any serious and organised crime threat. This demonstrates one element of our impact across all illicit finance for which we have readily available data.