The Minister for Security stressed that the UK faces a number of challenges in countering corruption due to the latent character of the latter, complexity of relevant cases and lack of resources available to the competent authorities: on the one hand, according to the estimates of the UK Home Office, in 2017-2020 in the seven key sectors 130,000 cases of bribery involving British companies might have occurred; on the other hand, the Minister for Security informed that in 2023-2024 the police of England and Wales formally registered only 169 corruption crimes, 19 of which were related to bribery. This means that there is an alarming gap between the high number of the alleged bribes and the low level of registered corruption crimes. At the same time, the National Crime Agency points out that the UK has “no accurate picture of the scale and nature of domestic bribery and corruption”, and the National Audit Office in 2023 concluded that the Government “does not fully understand the scale of corruption” in the public sector.

These are the reasons for establishing a new pilot unit of the City of London Police for countering domestic corruption.

At the moment, there is no much information about the new structure. In particular, according to the remarks of the Minister for Security, its functions will include:

• Conduct proactive investigations of corruption offences increasing anti-corruption potential “where it did not exist before”;
• Coordinate the activities of anti-corruption structures such as the domestic agencies, law enforcement and local self-government bodies to hold the corrupt liable;
• Enhance the capacities to analyse intelligence data and provide useful information on the scale of corruption, its character and associated threats.