HMRC has been under pressure from politicians for some time to increase criminal prosecutions for tax evasion. In September 2010 MP Danny Alexander, the chief secretary to the Treasury, pledged to make funding available for a five-fold increase in criminal prosecutions for tax evasion. Perhaps not surprisingly, given such targets and the availability of additional funding, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of criminal prosecutions for tax evasion, from 430 in 2010 to 1,258 in 2015. In 2017, HMRC announced that it had charged over 1,000 individuals in respect of new cases of tax fraud.