Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she will make an assessment of the potential merits of establishing ring-fenced funding for taking criminal enforcement measures against professional enablers of economic crimes.

Professional enablers are a critical facilitator of serious and organised crime, particularly in helping criminals and corrupt elites move and hide their illicit funds across the world, including in the UK.

The National Economic Crime Centre launched a cross-system strategy to tackle the serious and organised crime threat posed by professional enablers earlier this year. This sets out a series of actions for the public and private sectors to strengthen the UK’s response to professional enablers and includes commitments to enhance collective understanding, improve public-private data sharing, make better use of powers and intervention tools, and develop joint disruption strategies to tackle the threat.

Criminal justice interventions and regulatory interventions are essential to driving a response. Professional enabler cases are often longer and more protracted than other cases.

While we recognise the potential benefits of ring-fencing funding, we must ensure that our approach to funding remains sufficiently agile to tackle this increasingly complex threat. A critical component of this is the Economic Crime (Anti-Money Laundering) Levy, which provides sustainable, long-term funding to combat economic crime, helping law enforcement agencies pursue criminals and their enablers. This funding, paired with other targeted investment, enables the delivery of key outcomes to protect the UK’s national security whilst supporting economic growth.