Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what estimate she has made of the amount of money lost to fraud conducted (a) through phone calls, (b) by text message and (c) online in (i) 2018, (ii) 2019, (iii) 2020 and (iv) 2021.

Estimates for total monetary fraud losses to specific fraud channels is not held centrally by the Home Office. According to the Crime Survey for England and Wales, from year ending March 2017 to year ending March 2020, median losses for all fraud, regardless of the type or channel, where a victim has experienced a monetary loss are as follows:

Information on the number of police staff dedicated specifically to working on cases of scams conducted online and through telephones is not held centrally by the Home Office.

More broadly, the Home Office collects and publishes data on the size of the police workforce in England and Wales on a biannual basis in the ‘Police workforce, England and Wales’ statistical bulletin, available here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/police-workforce-england-and-wales

Information on the number of police officers, police staff and Police Community Support Officers by function is published annually in tables F1, F2 and F3 accompanying the police workforce statistics as at 31 March. These include the number of police staff working under function 7c – Investigations (Economic Crime).