Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many incidents of fraud were referred to Action Fraud in each year since 2016 inclusive.

The Home Office collects information on the number of fraud offences that the National Fraud Investigation Bureau (NFIB) refer to police forces for investigation and on the number of fraud outcomes recorded by the police. This data is published annually as part of the Home Office’s ‘Crime Outcomes in England and Wales’ publication. The latest available data for the year ending March 2022 can be found be here: Crime outcomes in England and Wales 2021 to 2022 - GOV.UK (www.gov.uk).

Current official statistics for England and Wales by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) do include fraud but to allow analysis of long-term trends, a headline measure excluding fraud is also captured. Policing, including crime statistics, is devolved in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

The table below shows the number of fraud reports directly reported into Action Fraud since 2016:

This does not include UK Finance and Cifas data, only crimes that were directly reported into Action Fraud.