Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how much and what proportion of the National Crime Agency's budget has been spent on tackling economic crime in each of the last three years.

The National Crime Agency (NCA)’s overall budget is distributed across the agency according to need and operational priority. As serious and organised crime threats change, the agency retains the ability to flex its resources to react. It is not possible to provide a breakdown of budget allocated to tackling economic crime as there are a number of agency wide capabilities and functions that all commands have access to. We are, however, able to provide the total expenditure by the National Economic Crime Centre (NECC) which provides a partial figure of expenditure for our overall response to tackling economic crime.

The NCA Annual Report and Accounts provide the following Gross Expenditure over the past three years:

2018/19 - Gross expenditure for the Prosperity Command - £22.0m (Note the NECC was formally launched on 31 October 2018, before which the NCA’s Prosperity Command fulfilled some of the same functions. In the 2019/20 Annual Report, an apportionment of £6.7m in 2018/19 was made for the NECC.)

2019/20 - Gross expenditure for the NECC - £30.0m

2020/21 – Gross expenditure for the NECC - £35.5m

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.