Professor Robert Barrington from the Centre for the Study of Corruption looks at the use of research and evidence in the UK’s new Anti-Corruption Strategy.
Anti-corruption plans and strategies have a well-known challenge: what is the evidence base on which they can build a response? Copious academic research has concluded that a) corruption is hard to measure and b) existing measures mostly have flaws. Some countries (Nigeria and Bangladesh, for example) have been more fully researched than others, but some, including the UK, have historically not been well served by surveys or researchers.
The UK government’s Anti-Corruption Strategy 2025, a 120-page document released in December 2025, represents an ambitious attempt to address corruption in three ‘pillars’: corrupt actors, tackling UK vulnerabilities and global resilience. But does this Strategy rest on a solid foundation of research and evidence, or does it reveal gaps in our understanding of corruption’s true scale and nature in Britain?
Thorough preparation
The Home Office (lead department for the Strategy in government) clearly realised there was potentially an evidence gap, and that this might need to be filled if such a strategy document were to get political buy-in and have external credibility. The three-year delay in publishing the Strategy (yes, that’s right: three years) has probably been helpful in this regard. It has allowed for the commissioning of new research – from the University of Sussex and Ipsos – as well as the encouragement and assimilation of academic and think-tank research, and results from the early phases of the FCDO’s Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) programme to be published in a range of academic journals, books and other forums. Ground-breaking ACE research on procurement red flags, kleptocratic networks, the role of peer-to-peer accountability checks and mapping illicit financial flows are all referenced.
Good deployment of existing evidence
The Strategy deserves credit for acknowledging evidence gaps from the outset. The government admits that ‘it is difficult to quantify the overall scale of the corruption threat to the UK’ and that ‘reliable data is challenging to obtain and analyse.’ This honest assessment sets realistic expectations and demonstrates awareness of the measurement challenges. But this is also by some distance the most evidence-based plan or strategy that a UK government has produced on corruption to date. And the Home Office should be credited for publishing some of the underlying the research alongside the Strategy.
Where data exist, the Strategy deploys the information effectively to help make the case about why there is a problem and where it exists. For example, the document cites Home Office research showing that 68% of the public are concerned about corrupt foreign actors’ impact on national security, and 59% about their impact on housing markets. These figures help justify policy priorities around kleptocracy and sanctions. Similarly, the 2024 Economic Crime Survey’s finding that businesses were offered an estimated 117,000 bribes worth over £300 million provides new evidence of domestic corruption’s economic footprint.
The Strategy also references international benchmarks, noting that the UK was placed at its lowest ever ranking of 20th in Transparency International’s 2024 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI). Although the use of the CPI as a measurement tool for national progress has had its fair share of academic criticism, it remains the most widely used and reported measure of corruption, and this comparative evidence creates urgency around reputational damage, positioning anti-corruption work as essential to Britain’s global standing.
Overall, the Strategy has a substantively different feel to previous documents, as though research and the evidence base have been key considerations in drafting the priorities and commitments. That gives it a welcome sense of coherence and authority.
Where evidence needs tightening
Despite these strengths, some important evidence gaps remain. The note that ‘evidence of corruption in public procurement is largely anecdotal’ must be a cause for concern given that £400 billion flows through government contracts annually. When the Strategy states that ‘law enforcement partners assess local government as a key sector exposed to corruption risk,’ this appears to reflect professional judgment rather than being based on systematic research. It is more or less as much as we know at present about corruption ion local government, and in being so clear about the evidence base the government is both being honest about what is currently known and setting an implicit research agenda for what we need to know.
Like in many such documents from governmental and international organisations, the Strategy at times relies on assumptions where, ideally, data should shape policy. Although few experts would quibble with the claim, there is limited empirical support for the statement that corruption ‘makes British people poorer and less safe’. The NCA’s cautiously worded view that ‘it is a realistic possibility that over £100 billion is laundered every year through the UK’ carries a degree of uncertainty, yet has for a number of years underpinned major policy statements and commitments.
Another question mark is over the quality and deployment of evaluation evidence. The Strategy builds on two decades of anti-corruption initiatives, including the Bribery Act 2010 and the establishment of specialised enforcement units. Yet the document does not point to research that systematically assesses what worked well, less well, and why. Did Unexplained Wealth Orders achieve their intended impact? Have Deferred Prosecution Agreements deterred corporate corruption?
Looking forward
However, these are observations rather than criticisms. Other countries have also found such gaps hard to fill, and some have given up at that point. This document has – very commendably – an entire section on Evidence, acknowledges these issues and commits to ‘seek to improve the corruption evidence base, including through the new UK policy definition of corruption.’ Two areas that are rightly picked out for this are the use of beneficial ownership data and the activities of professional enablers.
There cannot be many government strategies in this field across the world that have similar commitments. If delivered, such research could transform our understanding of how corruption operates in modern Britain.
This is also reflected in the promises for future monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL): a commitment to ‘an initial measurement framework agreed with partners within six months of this strategy being published.’ Although in a perfect world it would have been preferable to have such a framework in place at the outset, this is an opportunity to take a best-practice approach, building on the research the Home Office commissioned on the approaches other countries have taken to MEL.
Conclusion
The Anti-Corruption Strategy 2025 represents a significant step forward for the UK government on evidence use, understanding of data gaps, and commitments to fill the gaps. Where data exist, the document deploys the information skilfully. The collaboration with academic researchers to develop conceptual frameworks, notably on the new definition of corruption and MEL, shows commendable rigour.
However, some gaps inevitably remain: anecdotal evidence substitutes for systematic research in some important areas like procurement and local government corruption; and there is no evaluation of past interventions, which – though unusual – would be a best of class approach.
The test will be whether the government follows through on the Strategy’s commitments to improve data collection and research. Without good evidence, even well-intentioned anti-corruption measures risk missing their mark. Perhaps the UK should be reflecting back into the Strategy the approach that it introduced a decade ago to gathering anti-corruption evidence (ACE) overseas through its ACE Programme. Britain’s fight against corruption deserves to be evidence-led, not just evidence-informed.
Disclaimers: the University of Sussex a) has received funding from both the Home Office and FCDO for some of the research mentioned in this blog; and b) is home to one of the three strands of the ACE Programme.