Dr Karen Harrison and Dr Nicholas Ryder look at sentencing and the Fraud Act 2006
The law relating to fraud mainly comprises eight statutory deception offences in the Theft Acts (1968 to 1996) and the common law offence of conspiracy to defraud. The statutory offences are specific and overlapping, yet are not related to each other to cover the variety of fraudulent behaviour in an organised way. It is not always clear which offence should be charged, and defendants have successfully argued that the consequences of their particular deceptive behaviour did not fall within the definition of the offence with which they had been charged. See, for example, R v Preddy, R v Slade [1996] UKHL 13, [1996] 3 All ER 481.
In 1999, the Law Commission issued a consultation paper, Legislating the Criminal Code: Fraud and Deception, and published a final report in 2002 along with the Fraud Bill. The Fraud Act 2006 (FrA 2006) received Royal Assent on 8 November 2006. It overhauled and widened the array of criminal offences available in respect of fraudulent and deceptive behaviour. It is also
