New data on key corruption and economic crime offences in Spotlight’s enforcement tracker has revealed big increases in prosecutions across the board in 2024-25. But looking beyond the headline numbers, what story does this data really tell us about the state of anti-corruption enforcement in England and Wales?
Domestic corruption enforcement surges
Misconduct in public office (MIPO) prosecutions rose by 104%, and convictions by 56% in 2024-25 compared to the previous year – a record-breaking spike coinciding with recent news headlines of high-profile MIPO investigations. This is the main offence for prosecuting corruption in the UK.
Abuse of position prosecutions – an offence that is also often used against corrupt activity – also rose by 43% in 2024-25 after hitting a 10 year low in 2023-24.
Recent police investigations into Peter Mandelson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor have brought the misconduct in public office offence back into focus. But flaws in the offence mean that the majority of prosecutions are of junior officials in the prison service and police forces. Only four senior public officials had ever been convicted for MIPO.
It also comes after the creation of a new Domestic Corruption Unit in the City of London Police in 2024, which has ramped up training on domestic corruption at both national and local level. Since getting a £15 million funding boost in December 2025, this specialist unit has been quick to flex its muscles with the arrest of the former head of the Police Federation of England and Wales on suspicion of corruption.
The government is seeking to put the current common law offence of misconduct in public office into statute through reforms in the Public Authorities (Accountability) Bill. But the Bill’s proposals contain serious flaws that will make it hard to use against the top brass in public life, such as MPs and senior figures in local government, and against central government contractors undertaking state functions.
The Bill has failed to implement key recommendations from the Law Commission – including that the new offence should be called a ‘corruption in public office’ offence. The government should take urgent steps to ensure the offence in the Bill is fit for purpose, and reflects the Law Commission’s recommendations.
Economic crime prosecutions also on the rise…
Our tracker shows that overall money laundering prosecutions increased by 37% in 2024-25 compared to the previous year. This uptick is very welcome, but it doesn’t tell us what kinds of money laundering the police have been targeting. Without more detailed statistics it is hard to tell whether this increase is from going after drug gangs on the high street, or tackling high end professionals who help them launder their money into the legitimate economy.
Fraud prosecutions meanwhile rose by 14% on the previous year. But fraud prosecutions still remain 72% below a record high in 2013-14, despite fraud sharply increasing since then and now making up 45% of all crime.
The increase in fraud has been largely driven by the way that criminals, often operating overseas, are exploiting new technologies like AI. This has also made investigations into fraud far more complex and resource-intensive, and means they often progress very slowly through the courts, contributing to the ever-increasing court backlog.
The Fraud Strategy, published earlier this year, announced a new Online Crime Centre. With fraud becoming an increasing area of focus for the Financial Action Task Force, which the UK will hold the Presidency of from July, the UK government is clearly starting to take the threat of fraud more seriously. But there is still a long way to go to reach the enforcement levels seen a decade ago.
It’s also important to note that much of the government’s focus on fraud relates to scams rather than public sector fraud, even though the NAO estimates that somewhere between £6 billion to £31 billion was lost to fraud and error in 202324 (not including tax and benefit fraud). As there is no ‘fraud against the government’ offence in the UK – unlike some of our allies in the US and Canada – it’s impossible to tell what criminal enforcement is being taken on this, if any.
…but white collar crime still overlooked
While these green shoots of enforcement activity against money laundering and fraud are welcome, it is almost certain that very few of the money laundering prosecutions are targeted at the white-collar professionals who act as lynchpins for laundering vast sums of dirty money.
While some recent law enforcement activity like the NCA’s Operation Destabilise targeted money laundering networks that reportedly helped “Russian oligarchs and elites to bypass sanctions”, other high profile enforcement activities like Operation Venetic (which has led to over 2400 convictions since 2021) and Operation Machinize have tended to focus on drug trafficking operations by organised criminals.
The tracker shows that convictions of regulated professionals for failing to disclose knowledge or suspicions of money laundering by their clients have fallen by 100% since 2013-14, with just two convictions in the last seven years. Meanwhile there has been just one corporate criminal conviction of a bank for money laundering in the UK – dating back to 2021. And our court monitoring programme which tracks major corruption cases in the UK has identified that prosecutions of professional enablers are vanishingly rare.
Professional enablers – getting off scot-free?
Time and again, white-collar professionals in the UK, like lawyers, accountants and estate agents have been instrumental in laundering the proceeds from major cases of corruption. But the UK’s lacklustre response to professional enablers remains its Achilles heel in anti-corruption enforcement.
The UK’s failure to effectively deal with complex, ‘high-end’ money laundering (HEML) – the kind of sophisticated dirty money flows facilitated by professional enablers – will no doubt be a major focus of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) when it reviews the UK in the coming months.
The current government has talked a good game on holding professional enablers to account, for instance through its 2024-2026 cross-system professional enablers strategy, or in its Anti-Corruption Strategy. But the lack of official statistics on HEML makes it hard to know whether these commitments on paper are bearing any fruit. The UK previously provided data on HEML investigations to the FATF, but has since then not published any statistics.
Recent reports that the NCA’s Combatting Kleptocracy Cell – set up with much fanfare as the UK’s flagship enforcement unit to tackle hostile state threats and oligarchs following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine – is operating at 50% capacity, suggests that the government is yet to put its money where its mouth is when it comes to tackling professional enablers.
Bribery enforcement stagnates
Enforcement against bribery remains underwhelming. Despite official research showing that 117,000 bribe offers were made in the UK in 2023-24, there was little change in prosecutions and convictions for bribery in 2024-25, and limited investigative activity.
Of the Serious Fraud Office’s 25 open cases, only seven (28%) relate to bribery or corruption (the rest concern fraud). The agency is at a really critical juncture, facing an unexpected change in leadership while struggling to increase its pipeline of self-reports. Corporates have little incentive to dish their dirt when the specialist prosecutor’s disclosure challenges continue to collapse cases.
The bottom line? Investing in enforcement pays off
The turnaround in money laundering and fraud prosecutions follows renewed government focus through the Economic Crime Plan 2023-26 backed by Economic Crime Levy investments on financial investigators and new technology. This suggests that smart investment pays off with results – more criminals held to account, and more assets recovered.
But without sustained and ambitious funding to back the delivery of commitments in the Anti-Corruption, Fraud, and forthcoming Anti-Money Laundering and Asset Recovery strategies, progress could stall.
While the Economic Crime Levy represents a crucial source of funding, a recent report by the official watchdog for the National Crime Agency found it imposes a significant administrative burden and creates a “financial risk” for the NCA as it does not constitute core funding for the agency.
A clear way to increase resourcing sustainably is to consolidate the various funding streams for economic crime into a pooled Fighting Fund that reinvests some of the millions generated each year by enforcement agencies through fines and recovered assets back into their work.
This must come with a sustained strategy to stop the professionals who enable dirty money to flow through the UK’s financial system.
With the FATF review around the corner, the government urgently needs to build on this progress while urgently addressing blind spots like the stark absence of accountability for professional enablers.
Note on the enforcement tracker:
Spotlight on Corruption’s enforcement tracker is a unique resource pulling together data that is publicly accessible but often located in hard-to-find spreadsheets. The latest update covers prosecutions and convictions for money laundering, fraud, misconduct in public office and bribery, but the tracker also covers key statistics on asset recovery and AML supervision that will be updated later this year when new official data is released.
