Commander Karen Baxter, the City of London Police’s head of economic crime, says she needs 5,000 more officers with analytical skills to tackle fraud – and that they don’t necessarily have to carry a warrant card.

Her ideal recruit needed to have the same analytical skills as Special Branch and intelligence officers but also the empathy skills to deal with victims who have lost tens of thousands of pounds.

Speaking about the future of economic crime policing at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) on Tuesday, Ms Baxter said: "I want investigators who think like Special Branch and intelligence officers.

"I want them to have analytical skills. I also want people who will be able to look at a criminal in the custody suite and get them over the line and into the criminal justice system."

She said the Prime Minister's 20,000 police officer recruitment drive would need to consider this as while "blue suits" will reassure the public, they will "not necessarily be good for economic crime investigation".

She revealed Action Fraud, the reporting centre for fraud and cyber crime, received 741,000 reports in 2019 but the true scale was around 3.8m offences. She warned the country was facing a “pandemic” of fraud that would reach 5m cases by 2025.

“It really does touch the economic wealth and health of the nation,” she said but comparing it to a crime like human trafficking was “a hard circle to square”.

But just one in 200 police officers work in economic crime, compared to one in six who are involved in neighbourhood policing, she said.

“I would say that needs to be redressed,” she said and the public needed to understand who is carrying out the crimes.

“We are not talking about a ‘cheeky chappie’. They are never there to look that person [the victim] in the eye. They don’t have any remorse.”

Cmdr Baxter, who also leads on economic crime for the NPCC, said Action Fraud had changed since media reports revealed the lack of reporting by the team taking calls from the public: “The people in Action Fraud that were the cause of that were no longer there at the end of the day that I got my report.”

Action Fraud, the national reporting unit hosted by City Of London Police, was backed as the main source for registering domestic crime to feed into intelligence on criminals.

There was also a call for both the public and the government to change their view that fraud is a victimless crime.

Graeme Biggar, director general of the National Economic Crime Centre, said: “We need to land it with the public, with the politicians and with the media.”

He warned said fraud was the "single biggest crime type" in the UK last year, adding: "It has grown over the past decade unlike any other crime."

He warned the government would need to have “corralling effect” on society and tackle ruthless crime bosses – and include as victims the highly trained technology graduates in developing countries forced to work for them because they have no other work opportunities.

The response would have to include telecoms firms, the banking sector and covert intelligence as well as specially trained police.

Mr Biggar said there needed to be clear leadership to achieve this: “I don't think we have had a clear, single grip of leadership on the fraud agenda across law enforcement, but also the banks and the financial sector. I think there is a real important role for Home Office to play there. That would make a really big difference.”

He added: “The biggest difference we can make is going after the groups that are behind most crime.”

The Home Office was urged to rethink how it funded fraud detectives; budgets are linked to proceeds of crime cases.

Waheed Saleem, Assistant Police and Crime Commissioner, West Midlands Police called on the Home Office not to top slice budgets “as usual”.

He said: “PCCs and Chief Constables need to be united on this. The Home Office doesn’t do a lot for its 50%.”