Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent estimates her Department has made of the cost of fraud to the UK economy.

The most recent Annual Fraud Indicator published by the National Fraud Authority in 2013 estimated the loss to the UK economy from fraud to be £52 billion. We have made no later estimate of the cost of fraud to the UK economy. It is clear from other measures that fraud is a prevalent crime. The most recent figures published by the Office of National Statistics show that for the year ending September 2016 there were 3.6 million fraud offences. That is why the work of the Joint Fraud Taskforce which brings together the Government, Banks and Law Enforcement to develop a collective response to fraud is so important.