The Collingridge Dilemma and Its Implications for Regulating Financial and Economic Crime (FEC) in the United Kingdom: Navigating the Tension Between Innovation and Control

The capacity of the United Kingdom (UK) to prosecute technology-enabled financial and economic crime (FEC) is increasingly shaped by the Collingridge dilemma. Even though the dilemma was broadly conceptualized in technology governance, its application to prosecutorial and enforcement practice, evidentiary standards, and criminal liability attribution represents uncharted scholarly territory. Through socio-legal mixed methods combining doctrinal analysis, case studies, and comparative analysis, the paper shows how the dilemma’s two horns or pillars (i.e., early epistemic uncertainty and late institutional inertia) manifest in criminal law and regulatory contexts. The paper finds that just like the European Union and United States, the UK criminal enforcement ecosystem exhibits both horns across cryptocurrency, algorithmic trading, artificial intelligence (AI), and fintech domains. By integrating supplementary theories such as responsive regulation, precautionary principles and technological momentum, the study advances a socio-legal framework that explains enforcement inertia and doctrinal gaps in liability attribution for emerging technologies. The paper demonstrates how epistemic uncertainty and institutional entrenchment shape enforcement outcomes and proposes adaptive strategies for anticipatory governance including technology-literate capacity building, anticipatory legal reform, and data-driven public-private coordination. These recommendations balance ex-ante legal clarity (reducing uncertainty) with ex-post enforcement agility (overcoming entrenchment) to provide a normative framework for navigating the Collingridge dilemma in FEC prosecution.