The most consequential line in the government’s new anti-money laundering and asset recovery strategy is not really about money laundering statistics at all. It is that the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) is taking over supervision of legal, accountancy, and trust and company service providers for anti-money laundering purposes. That single change will cut the number of AML/CTF supervisors in the UK from 25 to 3, and it is arguably the biggest structural shift to the UK’s AML/CTF supervisory architecture in years.
The Home Office and HM Treasury published the strategy on 15 September 2026, setting out the government’s approach for the next three years. The ministerial foreword, signed by Security Minister Dan Jarvis and Economic Secretary to the Treasury Lucy Rigby, is refreshingly frank about the ambition: “crime should not pay,” and the strategy is built to “take the profit out of criminality, disrupt criminals, and make the UK a hostile environment for dirty money.”
At a glance
The FCA will become the AML/CTF supervisor for legal, accountancy, and trust and company service providers, cutting the number of UK AML/CTF supervisors from 25 to 3 (FCA, HMRC and the Gambling Commission). This is a multi-year transition, backed by stronger enforcement powers for all three remaining supervisors.
Suspicious Activity Reports are being reworked at the edges: the defence against money laundering threshold has already risen from £1,000 to £3,000, and the government is now reviewing the suspicion threshold itself.
£550m of new investment and more than 500 new officers are being deployed over the next three years, funded largely through the Economic Crime Levy.
Three objectives sit at the centre of it. The government wants to make the UK’s defences more effective and efficient, while making it simpler and safer for honest businesses to grow. It wants to disrupt money laundering, dismantling high-harm criminal networks at home and abroad, including those operating on the high street. And it wants to recover more criminal assets, returning money to law enforcement, victims and the public.
Three pillars sit underneath that framework: target, integrate and empower. In practice, that means focusing time and effort on the criminals and activities that cause the most harm rather than low-value box-ticking, sharing information more freely so suspicious activity gets spotted and acted on sooner, and giving the system the people, training, technology and legal powers it needs to move quickly, with fewer barriers standing in the way.
That funding picture, in full: £520m from the Economic Crime Levy over the next three years, plus a further £30m from the high streets package announced at Budget 2025, taking the total to at least £550m, alongside more than 500 new officers.
The transition itself will take several years. The government confirmed in 2025 that the FCA would absorb AML/CTF supervision of legal, accountancy, and trust and company service providers, cutting the number of AML/CTF supervisors from 25 to 3: the FCA, HMRC and the Gambling Commission. Year one covers transition planning; by year three, the strategy expects legal and accountancy firms to have begun moving across, alongside updated enforcement powers for all three remaining supervisors, including unannounced visits, search powers for cash, and stronger director accountability for breaches of the Money Laundering Regulations.
On Suspicious Activity Reports, the direction of travel is toward fewer, higher-value reports. The threshold for a defence against money laundering request under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 was already raised from £1,000 to £3,000 in 2025, a change expected to remove around 25,000 low-value requests a year and free up roughly £4m in costs. The government is now reviewing whether to raise the suspicion threshold itself, alongside a broader push to cut low-value compliance activity: a related change to enhanced due diligence on high-risk jurisdictions, in force since July 2026, is already estimated to save the regulated sector £178.1m a year.
The strategy also leans on a track record, and the numbers are worth pulling out on their own. In 2025/26:
3,158 illicit finance disruptions, up 15% on the year before
4,085 money laundering convictions, up 11%
£345.3m in assets recovered, up on the six-year median
£1.1 billion denied to criminals
£26.1m returned to victims, up 29% on the six-year median
Two named operations sit behind those figures: Destabilise, which has been dismantling Russian-speaking money laundering networks, and Machinize, which targeted cash-intensive high street businesses such as barber shops, vape stores and tobacco outlets, resulting in 924 arrests and more than £10.7m in suspected criminal funds seized or restrained.
None of this creates new direct obligations for firms today. But the direction of travel is clear, and it is worth watching closely if you are a legal, accountancy or trust and company services firm: your supervisor is changing, not just your rulebook.
And, because we cannot resist saying it: the timing is interesting. A new strategy full of ambitious government commitments, landing not long before a Mutual Evaluation Report (MER) cycle, is at the very least a convenient coincidence. Whether that is a driver or just good timing is a fair question to ask.
The strategy also confirms the UK will use two international platforms to push the same reform agenda further: its FATF presidency, running from 2026 to 2028, and its G20 presidency in 2027.
Source: Anti-money laundering and asset recovery strategy 2026 to 2029, HM Government, CP 1677, 15 September 2026