Bobby Dean

I bring to the House this week a matter that I have raised with the Leader of the House before: fraud. As he knows, fraud is a devastating crime that can destroy people’s life savings and plunge them into debt, and it is now the most frequently experienced crime in Britain. On Monday, the Government released their fraud strategy, but anybody would be forgiven for not noticing, because no Minister came to the Dispatch Box to speak about it, and there was hardly any media coverage. Given how prevalent this crime is, we have to ask ourselves why no noise was made about this significant strategy. I think the reason is that a key pre-election commitment on fraud was quietly dropped. The Prime Minister himself said that big tech companies need to be held financially accountable for their role in fraud, but when the strategy was released, it did not enforce that commitment; instead, an industry working group emerged, which will talk to the industry and ask them nicely to act. The banks and financial regulators are unhappy about this—of course, the banks are on the hook for paying out compensation to customers when they are victims of fraud. They say that when they try to get big tech companies to act, those companies are far too slow and not responsive, and the only thing that will make them act is if they are also hit in the pocket when fraud takes place. Can the Leader of the House organise for a Minister to come to the Dispatch Box and explain why that commitment was dropped? Also, I raised this matter with the Leader of the House in October last year, and I still have not received a reply from the Minister.