Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood announced on 15 September that the government will fund more than 500 additional enforcement specialists for economic crime, as part of its £550 million Anti-money laundering and asset recovery strategy: 2026 to 2029. "We are putting 500 more officers on the trail of dirty money, going after the criminal bosses behind organised crime and stripping them of the funds they use to fuel drug trafficking, people smuggling and other serious crime," she said.
Of the £550 million, £520 million comes from the Economic Crime Levy, paid by businesses already regulated under rules against money laundering. A further £30 million comes from a package for high streets announced at Budget 2025. The strategy's stated goals are recovering more criminal assets, dismantling more laundering networks and improving prosecutions, intelligence and supervision.
The strategy does not attach a number to any of those goals. It lists assets recovered as one of the indicators that will be monitored, but does not state how large an increase would count as success. A Theory of Change and outcomes framework, including indicators for the new measures, is still being developed and will be produced later, alongside promised midpoint and final progress reports.
The previous economic crime plan took a different approach. When Economic Crime Plan 2 launched in March 2023, the Home Office and HM Treasury announced £400 million (£200 million from government, £200 million from the levy) and an uplift of 475 financial crime investigators, tied to a specific objective over ten years: recover an additional £1 billion in criminal assets.
The new strategy says 99 per cent of those 475 posts have now been recruited. The Home Office has not yet published a process evaluation of what that staffing uplift achieved; the strategy says the evaluation is due later in 2026. A progress report from September 2025 said the department was still exploring whether an impact evaluation could establish what measurable changes, if any, were caused by the additional staff. The government is adding a further 500 enforcement specialists before that question about the first 475 has been answered.
Asset recovery has risen in the period since the 2023 plan. Official statistics for 2025/26 show £345.3 million recovered through confiscation, forfeiture and civil recovery powers, 20 per cent more than the previous year and 29 per cent higher in real terms than in 2020/21.
That total is not evenly spread across the three powers. Forfeiture receipts rose 28 per cent to £155.9 million. Civil recovery rose from £7.5 million to £38.5 million. Confiscation receipts, the largest single category, fell 5 per cent to £150.9 million.
A further £1.1 billion of assets was denied to criminals during the year, including £677 million under restraint orders and £376.4 million seized or frozen under forfeiture powers. That money was not accessible to criminals while legal processes continued, but it is not the same as money recovered by the state, and the Home Office itself cautions against treating the two figures as interchangeable.
Victims received £26.1 million through the proceeds of confiscation orders in 2025/26, 45 per cent less than the previous year, though still above the median for the past six years. The figure covers only compensation paid through confiscation receipts, not every form of criminal justice compensation.
The National Crime Agency assesses that it is a realistic possibility that more than £100 billion is laundered through or within the UK, or through corporate structures registered in the UK, each year. A separate Home Office analysis published alongside the new strategy puts the identified proceeds of certain crimes driven by profit in England and Wales in 2023/24 at least £21.9 billion. The Home Office says explicitly that this second figure should not be used as a measure of performance against money laundering or treated as an estimate of assets available to be recovered, since criminal proceeds may already have been spent, moved overseas, concealed or otherwise placed beyond reach.
Part of the £550 million is funded through changes to the Economic Crime Levy that took effect in April 2026. Firms with UK revenues above £1 billion moved from a £500,000 to a £1 million annual charge. A new £500,000 band was introduced for businesses with revenues between £500 million and £1 billion. Treasury estimates these changes will raise an additional £110 million in 2027/28 and around £115 million a year after that. That is revenue from the rate change itself, not the total £520 million the strategy draws from the levy.
Some recovered money already returns to enforcement. In 2025/26, £129.6 million was distributed to Proceeds of Crime Act agencies through the Asset Recovery Incentivisation Scheme, with a further £12.8 million awarded to 18 projects through its central funding pot.
The strategy sets out detailed delivery milestones for individual reforms and says tracking will tighten once the outcomes framework is built, with a progress report at the programme's midpoint and another at its end. What it does not yet say is how much higher than £345.3 million the government expects annual recovery to be by 2029, or what scale of change in the results of the uplift of 475 officers would justify the judgment that a further 500 specialists are worth the money.