Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent assessment she has made of trends in the level of fraud in (a) Coventry, (b) the West Midlands and (c) England in each of the last two years.

The Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimates there were 5.2m fraud incidents in England and Wales in the Year Ending December 2021, a 41% increase compared with the year ending December 2019. Due to the move to the Telephone Crime Survey, the 2020 dataset is not considered comparable. Instead, the ONS provide a 2019 adjusted dataset to compare 2021 with.

The published data can be found here:

Crime in England and Wales: Appendix tables - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)

Crime in England and Wales: Police Force Area data tables - Office for National Statistics (ons.gov.uk)

Fraud offences reported to the police are recorded and collected by the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) from Action Fraud and two industry bodies, Cifas and UK Finance.

The table below provides a breakdown of reports referred to National Fraud Intelligence Bureau by Action Fraud of fraud and computer misuse offences in England and the West Midlands for the last 2 years. The figures are based on victims' postcodes.