Thornberry vows to crack down on corporate fraud if Labour wins election
Labour has vowed to crack down on corporate fraud if it wins the next election by making it easier to prosecute firms for illegal conduct.
Shadow attorney general Emily Thornberry said “fraud is now the UK’s most commonly-experienced crime”, calling it “an epidemic that the government has ignored and dismissed”.
The proposed policy would see a change of the way the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is funded to boost its coffers, the creation of a “convictions first culture” in the SFO and scrapping a law that states investigators must prove executives are complicit in fraud before the company itself can be prosecuted.
Labour said the law makes it more difficult to prosecute white collar crime because of the “vast and complex management structures of today’s multinational corporations”.
“It’s time to get tough on fraud, and that must start at the top,” Thornberry said.
“Too many company bosses have stolen from their workers, undercut their competitors and cheated the public purse in recent years because they know fraud is difficult to prove.
“The government’s response has simply been to wave the white flag to those white collar criminals, and allow the Serious Fraud Office to give up on seeking corporate convictions.”
The Crime Survey for England and Wales found in 2021-22 that fraud accounted for 39 per cent of all crime recorded.
This was up from 30 per cent in 2016-17.