The number of defendants found guilty at all courts for ‘obtaining property by deception’ in Cleveland police force area, the North East Region and England and Wales, for the years 1998 to 2007 is shown in the following table.
Data have been provided for Cleveland police force area as information for Teesside and Middlesbrough and East Cleveland constituency is not collected centrally.
The Fraud Act 2006 which was implemented in January 2007 repealed eight sections of the Theft Acts 1968-1996, including section 15 of the Theft Act 1968, Obtaining property by deception.
Government are determined to tackle the problem of fraud, whether the victim is a multi-million pound organisation or a single individual.
Following a cross-Whitehall review of fraud, Government have allocated £29 million over three years to implement the National Fraud Programme. This includes the creation of a National Fraud Strategic Authority, launched last October, which published its first National Fraud Strategy on 19 March.
The statistics provided in this answer are for fraud offences where either the statute or the offence description identifies the fraud as relating to ‘property fraud’. However, the definition of “property” under the 1968 Theft Act is as follows:
“Property includes money and all other property, real or personal, including things in action and other tangible property”.
Therefore this could include a fraudulent acquisition of anything from a mortgage to a mobile phone. A number of other fraud offences may include ‘property fraud’, but as the individual circumstances of the offence are not held on the court proceedings database maintained by the Office for Criminal Justice Reform, it is not possible to separately identify them. One example of this is Section 2 of the 2006 Fraud Act, which came into force on 14 January 2007 and states:
“Dishonestly making a false representation to make a gain for oneself or another”.
Data under this offence have not been included in the table, as it may cover offences not connected with “property”. The number of defendants found guilty under this offence in England and Wales from 14 January to 31 December 2007 was 2,574.
These data are on the principal offence basis. The figures given in the table on court proceedings relate to persons for whom these offences were the principal offence for which they were dealt with. When a defendant has been found guilty of two or more offences, the offence selected is the one for which the heaviest penalty is imposed. Where the same disposal is imposed for two or more offences, the offence selected is the offence for which the statutory maximum penalty is the most severe.
Court proceedings data for 2008 will be available in the autumn of 2009.
1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 20073 Cleveland Police Force Area 143 157 131 104 98 68 74 57 39 14 North East Region 5 732 745 703 650 573 470 418 372 271 129 England and Wales 11,438 11,478 10,430 9,438 9,354 8,457 7,519 6,472 5,080 2,470 1 These data are on the principal offence basis. 2 Every effort is made to ensure that the figures presented are accurate and complete. However, it is important to note that these data have been extracted from large administrative data systems generated by the courts, and police forces. As a consequence, care should be taken to ensure data collection processes and their inevitable limitations are taken into account when those data are used. 3 The Fraud Act 2006 repealed S15 of the Theft Act 1968 and was implemented in January 2007. 4 Staffordshire police force were only able to submit sample data for persons proceeded against and convicted in the magistrates courts for the year 2000. Although sufficient to estimate higher orders of data, these data are not robust enough at a detailed level and have been excluded from the table. 5 North East Region comprises Cleveland, Durham and Northumbria police force areas. Source: OCJR - E. & A: Office for Criminal Justice Reform - Evidence & Analysis Unit