Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether he has made an assessment of the potential merits of requiring financial institutions to introduce a delay to processing payments linked to transactions that have been identified as potentially suspicious or fraudulent.

The Government is clear that fraud prevention is preferable to cure, and that more needs to be done to protect the public from this devastating crime.

As such, HM Treasury is actively investigating amending legislation to enable payment service providers (such as banks) to delay payments beyond the existing legislative timescales in limited, high-risk fraud scenarios, in order for enhanced customer engagement to take place. This could enable firms to take more of a ‘risk-based’ approach to payments processing.

The Government will also continue its broader work across Departments to tackle fraud at the source, and will shortly publish a comprehensive Fraud Strategy to detail our ongoing and upcoming actions.