Government proposes fraud law reform
The Government has today published a consultation paper on fraud law reform, proposing for the first time a general criminal offence of “fraud”.
The publication was announced by Home Office Minister Paul Goggins in a Written Ministerial Statement to the House of Commons.
The consultation paper picks up on the 2002 proposals put to the Government by the Law Commission, which was requested to investigate fraud law in 1998.
The central proposal of the consultation paper is that there should be a general offence of fraud – a something English law has long shied away from – which could be committed in one of three ways. Firstly, by false representation; secondly, by wrongfully failing to disclose information; or thirdly, by abuse of position.
The Government is also seeking to close a loophole in the existing offence of “obtaining services dishonestly”, relating to e-commerce.
The current offence of obtaining services by deception does not cover, for example, giving false details to access data from the internet for which a charge is made. This is because the law does not recognise that a machine can be “deceived” in the required way.
Reform of fraud law would go hand in hand with the Government’s proposals for identity cards, details of which were published in April. One of the principal aims of the identity cards scheme as expounded by the Government is the combating of identity fraud.
Fraud and financial crime costs the UK £14 billion per year, Mr Goggins contended, declaring, ” To equip law enforcement agencies to tackle the threat we face from Fraud, the existing law needs to be modernised.
“The main problem is that the existing statutes focus on very specific types of fraudulent behaviour, so they do not effectively cover all the potential varieties of fraud and cannot keep pace with rapidly developing technology.”
