This is such an important topic I thought it warranted its own thread.

As there seems to be confusion about the new legislation, I have posted a summary which hopefully clarifies the law.

The Skills and Post-16 Education Bill received Royal Assent on 28 April 2022. It applies to England.

The new Act includes a variety of measures relating to the post-16 education landscape, including new criminal offences aimed at stopping "cheating services", often informally known as "essay mills".

In summary, there are two new criminal offences, namely:
an offence of providing or arranging a relevant service in commercial circumstances; and
an offence of advertising a relevant service to students.

A "relevant service" is defined as: "a service of completing all or part of an assignment on behalf of a student where the assignment completed in that way could not be considered to have been completed personally by the student".

ADDED

The Section of the Act relating to essay mills did not come into effect until July 2022. Although the legislation has only been in force a short while, monitoring of essay mills is already taking place. Social media, in particular Twitter, display adverts for essay mills often operating outside the UK. But this will not deter the authorities from taking action.

The person or entity advertising and/or providing the 'banned and illegal' service will be subject to penalties set out in the Act.
Taking any action to its logical conclusion, will result in enough information on students being disclosed, so that their university or other education establishment can be contacted. Clearly this will only apply to students ordering essays after July 2022.

There is a call for whistleblowers to help the authorities with enforcement. A former student and her friends are keen to expose cheats and frauds who blatantly ignore the law on various forums. They have been monitoring this forum and extracted posts by freelance writers and his recent clients. He seems to be the only one who flagrantly and persistently breaches the law. I thought it only fair to post this.