In October 2021, the Department also published its first tranche of voluntary sector charters, covering the retail banking, accountancy, and telecoms sectors. These set out commitments from the industry sectors on actions they will take to tackle fraud and are monitored by the Joint Fraud Taskforce. The Department told us that these have yielded some positive results. For example, it told us that, following a charter commitment with the telecoms sector to introduce new software to try to reduce the number of scam text messages, some operators had seen a 90% reduction.39 However, in written evidence submitted to the Committee, UK Finance, a major representative body for the financial services sector, told us it would “encourage the Government to re-evaluate the continued focus on the Charters given the advent of the Government’s Fraud Strategy.”40