Question to the Home Office:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what supplementary budgets and resources are being provided to Action Fraud and the Suspicious Email Reporting Service to handle incidents of impersonation and fraud relating to the NHS test and trace service, and to support effective action against the perpetrators.

Reporting fraud and suspicious emails forms part of the core business of Action Fraud (AF) and the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) respectively.

Whilst there is a risk that the number of fraud reports increases, we believe that AF’s services are sufficiently equipped to respond to these effectively from within their existing resources. We will work closely with City of London Police (owners of the Action Fraud service) to ensure that this still remains the case as the service is expanded.

With regard to any increase in reports to SERS, it is an automated system designed to triage and – if found to be malicious - act upon reports of suspicious emails. As an automated service it can scale accordingly, without the requirement for supplementary budget or resource. In the six weeks since its launch, it has received and automatically acted upon over 670,000 reports.

The Home Office, NCSC, City of London Police and other stakeholders are already working closely with the Department for Health and Social Care to ensure that the service is delivered in a way which minimises the risk of fraud.