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This article aims to focus on the impact of the current austerity measures on UK public sector anti-fraud and financial crime investigative resource capacity building initiative developed over the years to tackle fraud against the public purse.

The article draws on secondary sources of data and available literature on fraud and financial crime.

Fraud is a challenge in the UK public sector but the cut-back on anti-fraud and financial crime investigative resources, given the scale of public sector fraud, the growing emphasis on accountability and the time of austerity with public money more exposed to fraud is arguably a back-door/u-turn policy on zero-tolerance approach in tackling public sector fraud and financial crime. There is the potential of this encouraging more fraud and financial crime against the public sector in the long term if measures are not taken to devise strategies for enhancing anti-fraud and financial crime investigative resource capacity.

The research implication for this article is that it opens an avenue for future studies to examine post austerity strategies for strengthening public sector anti-fraud and financial crime investigative resource strategies to deal with emerging fraud threats to UK public sector.

This article acts as a reference guide for policymakers to reflect on the long-term adverse impact of the austerity on anti-fraud and financial crime investigative resource capacity and capability in tackling fraud public sector fraud.

The paper attempts to present an alternative lens to examining the scale of UK public sector fraud problem rather than relying on headline story of declining fraud in UK.

The purpose of this paper is to research how local councils in England responded to a national initiative intended to address the risk of the involvement of organised crime in local government procurement fraud. In so doing, it considers definitional issues before undertaking original research to explore how councils responded and, through in-depth interviews with three councils, what initial explanations may explain the responses. It concludes that the national initiative was insufficiently thought-through, and that councils’ responses were significantly influenced by the relevance of the threat of organised crime, financial constraints and competing priorities.

The case study involves a literature review, an analysis of official documentation, a questionnaire to local councils in the north of England and semi-structured interviews with anti-fraud practitioners in three councils in the northeast of England. The approach is to provide an analysis of the implementation of a national initiative to promote a local government response to procurement fraud by organised crime.

On the basis of original research, the paper proposes that the national initiative was insufficiently thought-through, and that councils’ responses were influenced by the relevance of the threat of organised crime, financial constraints and competing priorities.

The research looks at a national initiative and how local councils responded within the context of financial and other constraints. The research is limited in terms of the range of responses it sought, and that it only studied the experience of three local councils in detail. On the other hand, its findings support further research into the implementation of national initiatives in terms of practice on the ground.

The findings identify issues surrounding the design and implementation of national anti-fraud policies from the perspective of local government and will be of value to practitioners and academics interested in fraud, policing, organised crime, local government and policy making.

The paper is the first study in the UK on the local implementation of national strategies on procurement fraud and organised crime and raises positive and less-positive aspects of how far national strategies and intentions are addressed on the ground, with a focus on what factors may influence local implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the challenges of measuring fraud in overseas aid.

The research is based on 21 semi-structured interviews with key persons working in the delivery of aid in both the public and voluntary sectors. It uses the UK Department for International Development as a case study to applying more accurate measures of fraud.

This paper shows there are significant challenges to using fraud loss measurement to gauge fraud in overseas aid. However, it argues that, along with other types of measures, it could be used in areas of expenditure in overseas governments and charities to measure aid. Given the high risk of such aid to fraud, it argues helping to develop capacity to reduce aid, of which measuring the size of the problem is an important part; this could be considered as aid in its own right.

The researchers were not able to visit high-risk countries for fraud to examine in the local context views on the challenges of measuring fraud.

The paper offers insights on the challenges to accurately measuring fraud in an overseas context, which will be useful to policy-makers in this context.

Given the importance of as much aid as possible reaching recipients, it offers an important contribution to helping to reduce losses in this important area.

There has been very little consideration of how to measure fraud in the overseas aid context, with most effort aimed at corruption, which poses some of the same challenges, as well as some very different challenges.

This chapter reviews the economic turn in criminology to contextualise the prominence of market rationalities in penal privatisation and outsourcing in England and Wales. It illuminates how fiscal crisis and austerity have provided opportunities for transferring state penal assets and powers to private interests on an unprecedented scale. A series of scandals relating to fraud and mismanagement by private companies have revealed regulatory gaps and wilful oversight on the part of legislators. These factors virtually guarantee that state regulators will continue to be disadvantaged in asserting the public interest.

The chapter brings together the literatures on prison privatisation with theoretical critiques of neoliberal influences on state disaggregation. It applies those insights to recent trends and controversies surrounding the privatisation of prison and probation services in England and Wales.

The race to privatise more prisons and resettlement provisions in England and Wales is placing additional strains on an already inadequate regulatory system, which virtually guarantees that future scandals and crises relating to private sector custodianship will recur.

This chapter explores the under-appreciated criminogenic and governmental challenges to the regulatory environment which are brought about by outsourcing.

This paper analyses the nature and impact of budgetary responses to the pandemic in the context of the strengths and weaknesses of UK public sector financial management.

The analysis is developed through consideration of four modes of government accounting. Data are drawn from multiple official sources, which report actual and forecast government receipts and expenditures as the crisis unfolds.

There have been dramatic effects on UK government finances. Government receipts have fallen by 12% and expenditures have increased by 36% in the first three months of the crisis (April–June 2020), compared to the previous year. Government debt increased to £1,984bn (99.6% of GDP), the highest percentage since March 1961 (ONS, 2020c). The pandemic will have the greatest impact on UK public finances in 2020–21, with a record budget deficit which, under the OBR (2020c) central scenario, may approach £322bn and increase public sector net debt to £2,205bn (104.1% of GDP).

The research is necessarily limited by the impact of the pandemic and the government's responses in a rapidly changing social, economic and fiscal environment.

Statistical accounting and budgeting dominate attention because of reporting speed and issues of international comparability. The pandemic has emphasised the importance of timeliness. Government financial reporting is marginalised, though this should not be permanent if the pandemic retreats. Fiscal sustainability analysis will warn that UK public finances are even more unsustainable than before the pandemic.

The interaction of higher levels of debt and future increases in interest rates might result in a new era of austerity and further centralisation of public power and economic decision-making in one of the world's most centralised democracies.

The paper provides an early, structured analysis of the impact of the COVID-19 emergency on UK government finances.

The increasing profile given to fraud in the UK led the author to examine how the police forces were responding and whether this differed from the practice in both the private and public sectors. Research, amongst all UK police forces, and some private sector companies and public sector bodies was carried out in 1989. The research examined manpower, training and attitudes, concluding that police forces have a homogeneity of approach despite the separate powers of each Chief Constable; and that future fraud investigation needs to involve a number of disciplines.

The proliferation of homelessness and housing precariousness, along with a dramatic growth in food banks, are two signs that while parts of the UK economy may be recovering from the 2008 financial crisis and recession, the same cannot be said for the living conditions of much of the poor and working class population. Much of the media discussion has centered on the ways in which these social ills have been caused by government policy, particularly cuts to social and welfare services introduced under the banner of “austerity.” I argue in this paper, however, that a narrow focus on austerity risks obscuring some of the longer-term structural transformations that have taken place under neoliberal capitalism, namely: (1) financialization and (2) the privatization of social reproduction. Situating these two trends within a longer history of capitalism, I argue, allows us to understand the contemporary housing and food crises as specific (and highly gendered) manifestations of a more fundamental contradiction between capital accumulation and progressive and sustainable forms of social reproduction. Doing so further helps to locate the dramatic proliferation of household debt, which has been supported by both processes, as both cause and consequence of the crisis in social reproduction faced by many UK households.

This study aims to draw out the common characteristics of frauds associated with pandemics and to identify any risks unique to them.

It considers the range of frauds and their reporting lags and examines what is known about current frauds against individuals, businesses and government, principally using public and private sector data from Australia and the UK.

The study identifies some novel crime types and methodologies arising during the current pandemic that were not seen in previous pandemics. These changes may result from public health measures taken in response to COVID-19, the current state of technologies and the activities of law enforcement and regulatory guardians. It shows that many frauds would occur anyway, but some specific – mainly online – frauds occur during pandemics, and because of large scale government assistance programmes to businesses and individuals, far more opportunities were created from COVID-19 than in previous eras.

The study concludes with a discussion of the policy implications for prevention, resilience and for private and public policing and criminal justice. It stresses that plans for future pandemics must include provisions for better early monitoring and control of fraud and associated procurement corruption and notes that these require greater political will and organisation. It recommends a more serious analysis of the impact of prevention communications outreach to citizens, businesses and government.

The study uses fresh data on frauds from the private and public sectors and assesses some measures of control in a holistic way.