Home Office consultation on economic crime information sharing - Which? response

Summary

Which? welcomes this opportunity to respond to the Home Office’s consultation on economic crime information sharing. Fraud, a category of economic crime, is the UK’s most widely-reported crime, with an estimated 4.4 million incidents in the year ending December 2025, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales. This means that fraud accounts for approximately 46% of all crime in England and Wales. UK Finance estimates that, in 2024, consumers lost £1.17 billion to fraud. Fraud also causes major financial and psychological harm to consumers. The best way to mitigate this harm is to prevent fraud from happening in the first place. Information sharing between different parts of the private sector and between the private sector and the public sector is an important component of fraud prevention. However, information sharing is currently fragmented and inconsistent, due to perceived legal barriers, as well as technical barriers, commercial barriers, and issues of data quality. The best way to address these barriers is for the government to make participation in data sharing schemes mandatory. There are also a number of specific interventions which the government can make to address issues with data sharing, including expanding the scope of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act and being proactive in sharing its own data.