As Andy Burnham promises to deliver renewal and local prosperity for ordinary people, tackling illicit wealth should be high up on the new Prime Minister’s agenda. From hollowed-out high streets to inflated property prices, dirty money is distorting local economies, fuelling inequality and harming communities across the country.
Putting Londongrad to the Makerfield test
As a global financial centre, London has long come under scrutiny as a safe haven for dirty money. The influx of Russian oligarch wealth – and the complacency around its implications for our national security – has intensified this focus on ‘Londongrad’. But the reality is that the UK’s dirty money problem extends beyond the mansions of ‘Moscow-on-Thames’. The influx of dirty money into our economy scars local communities and high streets right across the country.
The first successful ‘McMafia’ order – touted as a tool for targeting the unexplained wealth of foreign political elites – led to Leeds businessman Mansoor ‘Manni’ Hussain having to surrender over £10 million in suspected proceeds of organised crime. While setting their sights on Manni’s empire of 45 properties, the authorities told the court that the real harm lay in “his wider role … standing at the centre of a network of organised crime as a designated ‘cleanskin’” – that is, someone who has no serious criminal convictions to his name but provides “a money laundering service” that facilitates organised crime “on a large scale”.
Meanwhile, local dirty money flows are almost always connected to global networks: one of the biggest money laundering operations in UK history saw £200 million in criminal cash laundered through a Bradford-based jeweller Fowler Oldfield which was then sold on as untraceable gold in Dubai. And it’s worth remembering that behind every dirty pound is a criminal profiting from the devastating harms they wreak across often struggling communities.
Even the industrial-scale scam centres run out of Southeast Asia have a direct impact on ordinary people in the UK who are lured into parting with their money through fake romantic relationships. In just the last year, over 10,000 individual victims of romance fraud across the UK have lost an average of £9,500 – a collective cost of over £102 million before even considering that only 14% of all fraud is reported. The ease with which the proceeds of these frauds – and the forced labour which fuels them – can be laundered back into the UK only adds insult to injury.
Burnham’s vision to “make our high streets the symbols of Britain’s renaissance” is an opportunity to tackle the locally-felt harms of illicit finance. Criminal profits do not just pay for millionaire mansions – the influx of dirty money inflates local property prices in a way that can leave honest businesses struggling to keep up with rentals while their neighbours on the high street dodge tax.
The “double life” of Billy Black – a criminal who claimed to have earned less than £2,000 as the manager of a second-hand shop while in fact using the profits of his drug dealing to build a £28 million property empire across Greater Manchester – is a powerful illustration of the unfairness that fuels division and distrust in local communities.
Cleaning up the £1 billion in cash laundered each year on the high street will not be achieved by targeting migrant entrepreneurs or piecemeal funding for law enforcement. It requires a community-based approach that includes and empowers local people in collaborative problem-solving, recognising that these high street harms are just a window onto Britain’s £100 billion laundromat.
A cross-government agenda for a cross-country problem
Responsibility for tackling corruption and economic crime is spread across multiple departments including the Home Office, the Foreign Office and the Treasury. This means that real impact can only be achieved through a strong cross-government agenda powered by senior political ownership, with the private sector and civil society as vital partners.
Here are five immediate priorities for the new Prime Minister and his Cabinet to tackle the UK’s dirty money problem.
1. Champion ambitious implementation of the new Anti-Corruption Strategy
The new UK Anti-Corruption Strategy launched in December 2025 makes a welcome and wide-ranging set of 123 commitments backed by three government departments. Yet the Strategy lacks clear timelines and relies too heavily on future reviews or undertakings to explore action – a criticism often voiced about the Starmer government’s consultation-heavy approach. This leaves implementation of the Strategy vulnerable to competing and changing ministerial priorities rather than concerted and coordinated implementation of concrete deliverables.
One of Burnham’s first steps to inject ambition into delivery of this Strategy should be to re-confirm the Prime Minister’s Anti-Corruption Champion. Baroness Margaret Hodge is a formidable campaigner who is widely respected for building cross-party consensus on dirty money. With Burnham’s backing, she is well-placed to drive progress on this agenda across government and across sectors.
2. Step up UK leadership on corruption through the Illicit Finance Summit
Burnham and his cabinet also walk into a ready-made opportunity to deliver on the international stage, with the UK set to host an Illicit Finance Summit in December 2026. Delivering commitments from both the Labour manifesto and the Anti-Corruption Strategy, the Summit offers a rare chance to build a diverse coalition of allies and international financial centres to spur progress on a problem that can only be solved together. And it comes at a time when there has been a clear backsliding in global anti-corruption norms, which poses a fundamental threat to democracy and development in both the global north and the global south.
The groundwork has already been laid, but the UK government will not be able to land a successful Summit on autopilot. Clear political vision and effective leadership from the Foreign Secretary will be vital to leverage the UK’s convening power and leave a lasting legacy in the global fight against corrupt and criminal wealth. With bold ambition and buy-in from across Whitehall, the Summit can kickstart an arc of leadership on illicit finance which can be sustained through the UK’s presidency of the G20 and the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) as well as its role as co-chair of the Open Government Partnership.
3. Crack down on the enablers of dirty money
One of the biggest accountability gaps – and biggest opportunities for impact – lies with the white-collar enablers of dirty money. From banks and crypto exchanges to lawyers and estate agents, criminals rely on witting and unwitting professionals to move, hide and spend ill-gotten gains. Yet even when criminals get caught, enforcement action against their professional enablers is vanishingly rare.
With the UK’s track record on money laundering soon to be scrutinised by the FATF, decisive action is needed. This includes pressing ahead at pace with the Treasury’s plans to make the Financial Conduct Authority an anti-money laundering super-regulator for the professional services, and driving criminal investigations through the new Enablers Coordinator in the National Crime Agency.
The government also needs to take a much tougher stance on tech companies – making them contribute to financing the fight against fraud and holding them criminally liable where they fail to prevent fraud on their platforms.
4. Remove criminal justice barriers to tackling complex dirty money cases
The new Justice Secretary inherits a criminal justice system buckling under the strain of increasing caseloads after more than a decade of under-investment. Economic crime cases contribute disproportionately to the 80,000-case backlog in the Crown Courts: while they make up just 1.8% of cases, they account for 9% of the backlog, and the average serious fraud case takes twice as long as an ordinary case to progress through the system.
This challenge is also an opportunity, as targeted interventions to speed up economic crime cases could have an outsized impact and ease pressure on the wider criminal justice system. The City of London’s £600 million investment in 18 new courts at Salisbury Square is a golden opportunity to pilot an economic crime court centre with specialist judges. But the benefits of economic crime specialism should also be felt across the country, starting by rolling out the protocol pioneered at Southwark Crown Court to other cities such as Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds.
The government also needs to change the incentives which leave economic crime cases at the back of the courtroom queue. Increasing the leniency for early guilty pleas, using plea agreements more proactively, and incentivising whistleblowers to come forward with ‘smoking gun’ evidence would together really shift the dial on delays in economic crime cases.
5. Ramp up the recovery and reinvestment of criminal assets
Motivated by financial gain, fraudsters and other white-collar criminals often care more about keeping their profits than keeping out of prison. Stripping them of ill-gotten gains is therefore crucial for deterring economic crime, compensating victims and repairing community trust.
Investing in the fight against dirty money is not only a moral imperative for any government that cares about fairness and financial integrity; it also makes financial sense given the returns often exceed the investment. Yet our research shows that only 28% of criminal assets frozen by law enforcement are permanently recovered, leaving major gains untapped.
With a new Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery Strategy under development, the government has an opportunity to boost resourcing and incentives for asset recovery. This can be achieved through the creation of an economic crime fighting fund, which would reinvest a greater share of fines and recovered assets back into law enforcement. Turning the criminal business model on its head, this virtuous circle of reinvestment would see corrupt elites and white-collar criminals help pay for the fight against dirty money.
By incentivising asset recovery through reinvestment and social re-use, the government can put criminal assets to work for local communities across the country. Greater Manchester Police has shown this potential, with eight local community groups and charities recently receiving more than £100,000 after its Economic and Cyber Crime Unit recovered over £17 million in just one year.
Clean foundations for good growth in every postcode
For a government that is serious about delivering for ordinary people, tackling corruption and illicit finance must not be seen as a luxury or a distraction from the ‘real priorities’.
It is about laying clean foundations for “good growth in every postcode”, and championing anti-corruption norms on the world’s stage that underpin democracy and prosperity at home. It is about protecting the public purse from fraud and corruption as the government increases spending on defence and infrastructure. And ultimately it is about rebuilding public trust that those who cheat the system and break the rules will be held to account.
