The Home Office has awarded City of London Police, which leads nationally on fraud cases, an extra £6.1m funding to fight economic crime.

The funding was earmarked for policing and the National Crime Agency, to fund several projects that the force says “will help to improve the current policing response to economic crime.” 
 
A national taskforce for “more integrated regional working on fraud” and a direct-entrant recruitment campaign for fraud detectives will help to increase capacity in the system, City of London Police said.

The project will look to improve capability through training and accreditation for specialist fraud detectives across England and Wales, making use of the City of London Police’s already established Economic Crime Academy. 
 
A second project will seek to improve the way that police forces receive information from Action Fraud and the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau.

The project will integrate the Action Fraud and National Fraud Intelligence Bureau’s analytics platform with force record management systems reducing the need to re-key data. 

The force says the initiative will ensure “greater cohesion between the national reporting service for fraud and cyber crime, speeding up the process of sharing data and allowing outcomes to be automatically captured.

“It will also offer forces an enhanced capacity to provide improved services to victims, by linking all crime to a victim not just those which are typically recorded at a local level.”

Multi-year funding has been awarded in support of the project, in recognition of the scale of the task. 
 
City of London Police’s national co-ordinator for economic crime, Commander Karen Baxter, said: “We are very pleased to have received this funding from the Home Office.

“The money will allow us to fulfil an aspiration that the City of London Police has had for a long time, to upskill police officers in economic crime and build fraud capabilities across the country. 
 
“The results of this project allow us to transform police forces’ approach to fraud and help to tackle this type of crime.”  
 
Minister for Policing and the Fire Service, Nick Hurd MP, said: “Criminals don’t stand still and neither should our police forces.

“We’re determined to support police leaders in creating a modern, agile and responsive police service.
 
“The Police Transformation Fund is delivering real change in policing, and this new funding will continue to help forces improve efficiency and tackle threats like serious, organised and economic crime.”