The UK should use the billions recovered by law enforcement through fines and confiscations to create a ‘central economic crime fighting fund’ to support agencies which are ‘under-resourced, over-stretched, and out-gunned’, according to a new report.

The National Crime Agency (NCA) has estimated that the UK loses around £290bn every year to fraud and money laundering, which combined equates to nearly 15% of GDP.

However, anti-corruption charity Spotlight on Corruption estimates the average amount spent each year on law enforcement agencies to be just £852m, equivalent to just 0.09% of total government spending or 0.042% of GDP.

The Serious Fraud Office, HM Revenue & Customs, the Crown Prosecution Service and the NCA raised around £3.9bn through fines, confiscation, forfeiture and civil recovery orders between 2016 and 2021, Spotlight on Corruption said in a report published yesterday.

The CPS, for example, recovered assets worth £568m through its proceeds of crime unit in the last five years, which is ‘eleven times more than its £51.7m budget for the same period’.

If that £3.9bn total was reinvested back into the agencies, Spotlight on Corruption estimated that ‘overall enforcement spending could have been provisionally increased by an additional £748m per year – an approximate increase of 93% on current funding levels’.

But despite bringing in considerable revenue, ‘law enforcement budgets at core agencies tasked with fighting economic crime continue to suffer from real-term cuts and short-term budget allocations rather than sustained investment’, it added.

The report said: ‘Existing government proposals for funding law enforcement are not sufficient to drive the transformational change needed to keep pace with what the government recognises as a severe and growing threat. If the UK is to tackle economic crime effectively, far greater ambition about the scale of public investment needed is required.’

Spotlight on Corruption also called for ‘a coherent strategy for protecting the public purse in economic crime law enforcement actions’, which would include the development of ‘an enforceable model litigant code for lawyers to prevent the use of stalling and spurious tactics that waste court time and drain public resources’, and working with judges ‘to ensure better judicial management of cases to strike out abusive litigation tactics’.