Question to the Attorney General:

To ask the Attorney General, what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of steps taken by the Serious Fraud Office to increase the number of cases it prosecutes.

In its role as a specialist law enforcement agency tackling the top level of serious or complex fraud, bribery and corruption, the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is prosecuting eight cases within the 2022-23 financial year. These involve more than 20 individuals, charged with criminality worth over £550m.

Given this specialist role, as well as the scale and complexity of the cases it takes on, the focus of the SFO is less on increasing the number of cases it takes on, but rather increasing its capacity through the use of technology, reducing manual errors and delivering this year’s trials effectively.

Driving this, the SFO received a funding uplift in the 2021 Spending Review which included £4.4m over three years to invest in technology. This will complement the wider work that it is doing to reduce case lengths and ensure the tools it uses to investigate and prosecute fraudsters match the evolving methods used by these criminals.