The FT has noted this morning that:
A lack of resources for Britain's police and prosecutors has led the number of white-collar crime prosecutions to fall by almost a third since 2011, according to a leading law firm.
As they note:
While the Serious Fraud Office and the Financial Conduct Authority focus on the biggest and most complex financial crime cases, police forces and the Crown Prosecution Service deal with lower-level fraud. Both the police and the CPS have seen their budgets cut in recent years. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies think-tank, overall police budgets fell by 14 per cent between 2010-11 and 2014-15, while the CPS's budget has been slashed by a quarter since 2010.
In the circumstances it would hardly be surprising if the number of fraud cases that were pursued fell, but they have quite markedly:
Pinsent Masons, the law firm, said official figures showed the number of prosecutions for white-collar crime – including fraud, money laundering, cyber crime, bribery and insider trading – fell from 11,261 in 2011 to 7,786 last year, a drop of 31 per cent.
And this is against a background of such crime being on the incraese:
From 2012 to 2017, the number of cases reported to Action Fraud, the national fraud and cyber crime reporting centre overseen by the City of London Police, rose by more than a third, from 202,200 to 273,600. But the Action Fraud figures are likely to represent only a fraction of the overall level of fraud. The National Crime Agency has estimated that less than 20 per cent of fraud incidents are reported to the police.
So the result of austerity is that we let crime rise, society suffer and, of course, tax revenues decline.
You could not make the Tories up. Total fraud is now expected to amount to £190bn a year in the UK - more than the cost of the NHS - and the Tories cut the resources to tackle it. It's as if they wanted the country to fail.
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“and, of course, tax revenues decline.”
Tax revenues haven’t declined. They’ve gone up.
If “austerity” is measured as starting in 2010, tax revunes have increased since then from £144bn to £178bn. Tax revenues are now higher than they have ever been.
Hardly likely you don’t know this so the interesting question is – Why fill your blog full of lies, Richard?
Have you heard of inflation?
Or per capita measures?
Or propitious of GDP?
Or even taxable capacity?
I think your time here is over because a) you abuse data b) you abuse c) your arguments don’t stack
Paul Simons says:
“and, of course, tax revenues decline.”
Tax revenues haven’t declined. They’ve gone up.
If “austerity” is measured as starting in 2010, tax revunes have increased since then from £144bn to £178bn. Tax revenues are now higher than they have ever been.
@ Paul Simons: So according to your figures quoted above tax revenues increased by £34bn. That’s a 23.612% increase over eight years, which further works out at an average simple increase of 2.95%. Had I attempted to work out the yearly increases by compounding them then that 2.95% would be even lower.
Your figures sound more like an argument that tax revenues have stagnated or even decreased, even when you take into account very low official inflation over those 8 years.
You’ve pulled the usual Daily Mail, etc, stunt of quoting (probably) correct figures but with no proper explanation behind them. Instead, you’ve either relied on, or fallen for, that trick of letting people’s uninformed imaginations do the Mail’s work for them. That is, bandying around huge out of context figures and let the general public jump to the wrong conclusion.
For example, had you said that tax revenues increased by £34bn over 8 years then that doesn’t sound nearly as impressive as you actually saying, “tax revunes have increased since then from £144bn to £178bn. Tax revenues are now higher than they have ever been.”
Both say essentially the same thing but both also give entirely different pictures. Guess which one I think is the bovine manure one?
I put it to you that you are being disingenuous at best, downright dishonest at worst with those figures.
Also given that when George Osbourne increased VAT from 17.5p in the pound to 20p in the pound he increased VAT by nearly 15% (14.286% to be precise) I’m not surprised that this part of tax revenues increased, are you?
I don’t know for certain, but I strongly suspect that eye-watering increase in VAT (a highly regressive tax) easily off-set the lose of revenue from the increases of the Personal Tax Allowance the Coalition Government introduced from 2010.
If you also factor in that if you’re on very low wages, and partially reliant on benefits to keep a roof over your head, then for every pound increase in your wages form any source (including a rise in PTA) you’ll lose a pound in benefits (65p in the pound for Housing benefit.) So those much vaunted PTA increases benefited those who needed them the most the least, and vice versa, and the government were quids in on benefits savings. Talk about robbing poor peter to pay well off Paul!
Paul, some questions for you. Might you be one of those well-off Paul’s who’s actually benefited from ‘Austerity’? Is that why you seek to justify/excuse it in the face of all evidence against it? Does it make you feel better?
You ended by saying, “Hardly likely you don’t know this so the interesting question is — Why fill your blog full of lies, Richard?”
So not content with quoting out of context figures, you then have the bare faced cheek to accuse Mr Murphy of being an outright lier. That’s liable you idiot. Or is it slander? Can never remember the difference between the two.
Either way, the only two-faced, outright lier around here is you. I say two-faced because I don’t believe for one moment that you don’t understand how poor those take revenue figures you stated actually are. You just wanted to twist them for your own self-serving narrative.
Not just police cuts. As a small business we received a phone call requesting payment for something we hadn’t ordered. Obviously dodgy so I looked to report it to the OFT, to find it had been quietly closed years ago. Hardly worth police time so now low level attempted fraud is effectively not a crime.
I think it follows on from your other post today. I have written before in these threads that I consider regulation in Britain appears almost designed to fail; or we rely on the “fine”, that seems enormous to the voter-with-a-mortgage, but actually in such fields as Forex, even the hundreds-of-millions fine, splashed impressively across the press with triumphant righteousness, turns out to be a pittance in a multi-trillion daily international exchange circuit. Fines have slowly been reduced to a cost of doing business (variable cost+overhead+fine). The FCA publishes a regular fines list, all the way back to around 2013 (?), and then it was the (failed, discarded) FSA, who ran the Fines list before that. Furthermore, how often are the large provisions that have regularly been made by banks in the years following the crash, included provisions for fines (and not just UK fines)? It just goes on, and on, and on.
We have a long, long history of failed regulators in Britain. Can it be bad luck (so many times?), or is it just indifference? We should, perhaps advertise soft regulation as one the key attractions of London …….
This is constructive non compliance
We appear to be regulating
Actually we are not
if you get a telephone call from x people committing fraud you contact action fraud. This includes the phone calls from microsoft and your internet companies who seem to think they can see into your computer. Not all these calls come from the Uk making solving such crimes just a bit harder.
I always tell the https://ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint/ when I receive such a call as this enables them to monitor what is going on.
Thanks. I did do that as a second best option.
Seems there has never been a better time to operate outside the law –
https://economia.icaew.com/en/news/june-2018/insolvency-service-cracks-down-on-rogue-directors?utm_campaign=Members%20-%20ICAEW&utm_medium=email&utm_source=480692_economia_today_12June18&utm_content=Directors&dm_i=47WY,AAWK,KE8GA,14NKV,1
“Insolvency Service has managed to keep up the pressure on rogue directors, especially in high profile cases, but that more could be done if it had more staff and funding to investigate the most complex and time consuming cases.”
An entirely predictable consequence of Tory austerity – and they know it!
‘Total fraud is now expected to amount to £190bn a year”
Richard – what is the source of this information and how is it broken down?
The sources are in the links in the article
Thanks, but some of us can’t afford the FT subscription rates!
Sorry
It says:
According to the 2017 Annual Fraud Indicator, fraud costs the UK economy £190bn per year, with the private sector the worst affected, with an estimated loss of £140bn
Thank you Richard.