Britain’s National Economic Crime Centre is still slowed by outdated technology and patchy data sharing nearly eight years after it was built specifically to fix that problem, according to a study by researchers at the University of Manchester. Work that should take days is often taking far longer, the researchers found, particularly where public sector tools lag behind private sector data analysis.
The centre was designed to end exactly this kind of fragmentation. Now, with a new taxpayer funded coordination unit for online fraud just months into its own life, the same institutional bet is being placed again.
A Centre Built to End Turf Wars
The National Economic Crime Centre launched on 31 October 2018, hosted inside the National Crime Agency (NCA), the UK’s lead agency against serious and organised crime. It brought together the NCA, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC, the UK’s tax authority), the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA, the UK’s financial regulator), City of London Police and the Crown Prosecution Service under one roof.
Its mandate was summed up in three words: understand, direct, enhance. Officials would build a shared picture of economic crime threats, use it to steer partner agencies toward the biggest risks, then feed operational lessons back into the system. A parallel Data Fusion capability was meant to let banks share bulk, targeted datasets with the NCA so investigators could spot new targets faster.
Nearly eight years on, researchers say the coordination the centre was built to deliver still is not happening smoothly.
Twenty-Two Officials, One Common Complaint
The University of Manchester study drew on interviews with 22 senior officials across the NCA, HMRC, the SFO, the FCA, City of London Police and private sector partners. Their findings, published in the Journal of Economic Criminology, describe a system where goodwill is doing work that infrastructure should be doing instead.
Four problems came up again and again:
- Data sharing – arrangements between agencies remain poor, slowing intelligence gathering that should move quickly
- Ageing technology – public sector tools lag well behind the data analysis capability available in the private sector
- Competing priorities – agencies juggle economic crime work against other statutory duties with the same limited staff
- No shared definition – economic crime spans so many offence types that ranking threats against each other is difficult
Researchers said fixing this needs improved intelligence infrastructure and better information sharing arrangements, paired with accountability rules formal enough to stick but flexible enough to survive contact with seven different agencies’ cultures.
The Label That Helps and Hides
One tension the study surfaces cuts against the centre’s own political usefulness. The umbrella term economic crime helps pull in funding and ministerial attention precisely because it sounds big. The same breadth makes it harder to tell a multimillion pound laundering network apart from a small scale invoice fraud when both compete for the same investigators’ time.
Professor Nicholas Lord, a criminology expert at the University of Manchester who worked on the study, said coordination was never going to be simple.
The National Economic Crime Centre was created to bring together the many organisations involved in tackling economic crime, recognising the need for a collective response. However, coordinating agencies with different responsibilities, priorities and resources is not straightforward, and certainly needs more than goodwill.
Lord’s point is echoed in the study’s call for a shared, working definition of economic crime, something researchers said does not currently exist across the partner agencies in any practical form.
The Bill Keeps Climbing
The volume of fraud the centre and its partners are meant to be coordinating against keeps rising. The UK Finance Annual Fraud Report 2026 puts fresh numbers on the scale of the problem investigators are working against.
- £1.28 billion was stolen through payment fraud in 2025, a rise of four percent on the year before
- Over 4 million confirmed fraud cases were recorded in 2025, including 248,070 authorised push payment cases
- Eight people were defrauded every minute last year, at a rate of nearly £2,500 stolen each minute
- £14.4 billion is the government’s own estimate of what fraud cost society in the 2023 to 2024 financial year, once victim care, recovery and prosecution are included
Those figures are the backdrop against which the study’s complaints about slow information gathering land. Days-long delays matter more when the volume behind them keeps growing every year.
Ministers Bet on the Same Blueprint
While the study was being finalised, the Home Office and the NCA were standing up a new coordination body built on strikingly similar lines. The Online Crime Centre launched in April 2026 with permanent staff drawn from government, policing, intelligence agencies and private industry, backed by £31 million as part of a wider £250 million fraud strategy running over three years.
Its job is to identify the accounts, websites and phone numbers organised crime groups use to run scams, then dismantle them at scale by blocking scam texts, freezing accounts and pulling down fraudulent social media pages.
| Attribute | National Economic Crime Centre | Online Crime Centre |
|---|---|---|
| Launched | 31 October 2018 | April 2026 |
| Hosted by | National Crime Agency | Home Office and National Crime Agency |
| Core partners | NCA, HMRC, SFO, FCA, City of London Police, CPS | Telecoms providers, law enforcement, intelligence agencies, tech firms, NCSC |
| Disclosed funding | Not separately published | £31 million within a £250 million, three-year strategy |
| Core mandate | Understand, direct, enhance economic crime response | Identify and dismantle fraud infrastructure at scale |
The overlap in design is hard to miss: multiple agencies, a shared operations floor, private sector data feeding public sector action. It is the same wager the NCA made in 2018, aimed this time at fraud that moves through phone networks and social platforms instead of bank transfers alone.
What Researchers Want Fixed
The Manchester team’s prescription is not another rebrand. They want intelligence infrastructure built to move data at the speed investigations actually need, information sharing arrangements that do not depend on individual relationships between officials, and accountability structures formal enough to survive staff turnover without becoming so rigid they cannot flex across seven agencies with different legal powers.
That call for formal but flexible oversight lands alongside a separate row over how well Whitehall cooperates with scrutiny in the first place, after a Lords committee inquiry into UK regulators accused the business department of withholding evidence from peers examining regulatory performance. Coordination problems inside government, it turns out, are not unique to fraud fighting.
The National Economic Crime Centre has had nearly eight years to solve its data and technology problem. The unit now built to stop online fraud the same way has had a matter of months.
Frequently Asked Questions
What Is the National Economic Crime Centre?
The National Economic Crime Centre is a multi-agency unit hosted by the National Crime Agency that coordinates the UK’s response to serious economic crime, a category covering fraud, money laundering, bribery and corruption. It was established to set strategic priorities and direct operational resources across the agencies that investigate these offences.
Who Conducted the University of Manchester Study?
The research was carried out by Diana Bociga, Nicholas Lord and Elisa Bellotti at the University of Manchester, based on interviews with 22 senior officials, and published in the Journal of Economic Criminology under the title examining challenges and enabling conditions in the governance of economic crime.
What Is the Online Crime Centre?
The Online Crime Centre is a separate unit launched in April 2026 by the Home Office and the NCA, focused specifically on fraud conducted through phone numbers, websites and online accounts. Rather than long running investigations, its stated approach is to identify criminal infrastructure and disable it in bulk, including blocking scam text messages and removing fraudulent social media accounts.
Why Is Economic Crime Hard to Define?
The term covers offences as different as a multinational money laundering network and a small business tax fraud, all under one label. Researchers found that without an agreed working definition, agencies struggle to compare how serious different threats are against each other, which makes it harder to decide where investigators’ limited time should go.
