Britain’s new supercharged crime-fighting force, The National Crime Agency, is set to be operational in two years’ time, with implications across Whitehall. Joshua Chambers investigates how it will change policing

The proposed new National Crime Agency (NCA) will be tasked with hunting down increasingly sophisticated national and international criminal networks. From drugs smuggling to people trafficking, a single unit will be charged with catching the perpetrators and closing down their operations.

The NCA has been dubbed Britain’s answer to America’s FBI. Technically, this is inaccurate because the UK doesn’t have a split between federal and state laws – but according to the Home Office, the NCA will have much more power and a far broader remit than any existing units dedicated to tackling serious and organised crime.

These include the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), which will be merged into the NCA. The new body will also co-ordinate the pursuit of economic crime, border policing, cyber-crime, and child exploitation, and it will absorb the Child Exploitation and Online Protection centre (CEOP).

The new organisation will work with a large number of government departments, and therefore with civil servants across the country. Not only will it deal with the Home Office, but also – according to the NCA strategy – it will regularly work with the Department for Work and Pensions; the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; the Department for International Development; the Department for Transport; the Ministry of Defence; and the Ministry of Justice.

A shadow NCA is being set up during the next year, with legislation establishing the organisation on a statutory basis due in 2012. It will then take a year until the NCA is fully operational. As efforts to set up the NCA get underway, CSW looks at what the new agency will do, the arguments over its role, and the pitfalls that could cause problems.

How do things currently work?
According to the home secretary, Theresa May, the policing landscape and response to serious and organised crime in the UK is at present “patchy and fragmented.” There are 43 police forces across the country, and Brian Paddick, former deputy assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, explains that “some police forces are so small and the occurrences of serious and organised crime so infrequent that they are unable to maintain their own expert and experienced teams of detectives dedicated to dealing with such complex crimes.” He adds that “by their nature, the crimes and criminals involved [in serious and organised crime] tend to span many police force boundaries, making a police organisation with a national remit more effective in tackling serious and organised crime.”

The NCA is not the first attempt to centralise and co-ordinate efforts to tackle serious and organised crime. In 1998, regional crime squads were merged into a National Crime Squad (NCS). Then in 2005, the Serious and Organised Crime Act merged the NCS, the National Criminal Intelligence Service, the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit, and HMRC’s drug trafficking functions into a dedicated agency: SOCA.

Charles Clarke was the home secretary who set up SOCA, and he says that previously around the country there were “different levels of focus being given to serious and organised crimes, different levels of coordination between police forces, and different priorities given to targets. That was magnified by relations between the National Criminal Intelligence Service and Customs & Excise, who were involved in the same areas, often with completely different philosophies and approaches. We therefore felt it was important to get a co-ordinated approach.”

Yet SOCA was not seen as a universal success. Clarke himself admits that “it took a long time to get running,” and his choice of Sir Stephen Lander – previously the director-general of MI5 – as head of the organisation was not popular with police officers. Clarke says that his intelligence background was vital for the new organisation; but Rick Muir, an expert on policing at think-tank the IPPR, says that SOCA “was perceived by police to be disconnected from the police service, sitting outside the police service and not working well with local police forces.”

What will the NCA do?
Muir says that the NCA is intended to be “much more integrated” with police forces across the country. And rather than just taking control of serious and organised crime – absorbing SOCA in the process – it will have an expanded remit to co-ordinate the policing of economic crime, child exploitation, border policing and cyber crime. A Home Office spokesperson says that these areas have been chosen because “organised criminals operate across crime types, as well as geographical boundaries,” adding that “the Strategic Defence and Security Review highlighted organised crime, border security and cyber crime as critical national security risks.”

There have been teething problems establishing the exact powers and remit of the NCA. For example, initially it was envisaged that the Economic Crime Command of the NCA would run a dedicated Economic Crime Agency. This would have taken powers and resources from the Financial Services Authority (FSA), the Serious Fraud Office (SFO) and the Office of Fair Trading (OFT). However, plans for the agency were ditched after the FSA, the SFO and the OFT successfully lobbied to remain independent. Instead, the NCA will contain an Economic Crime Coordination Board, which a Home Office spokesperson says will meet in the autumn to shape how the Economic Crime Command of the NCA will operate.

The plans for border policing are still a work in progress, too. The Labour Party claims that the Conservative Party has abandoned its election pledge for a single border police force. Certainly, the Home Office’s June plan for the National Crime Agency states that the Border Policing Command will co-ordinate the work of ports officers, the UK Border Agency and HMRC, along with MI5. It does not mention a border police force as a unique entity.

Some critics suggest that the NCA should be bolder in the powers it takes on. Paddick says there is a clear need to take control of counter-terrorism operations from the Metropolitan Police. “It only makes political sense to leave counter-terrorism out of the new agency,” he says, explaining that any such move would be “fiercely resisted” by the Metropolitan Police commissioner. “It’s well established that serious and organised crime provides a funding stream for terrorist activity,” he adds.

Others have suggested that the NCA needs to be able to co-ordinate procurement across police forces. Neil O’Brien, director of think tank Policy Exchange (see interview) says that allowing individual forces to purchase their own helicopters or uniforms at different prices “is a crazy way of running things”. Muir agrees, stating that the NCA “needs more teeth” and should push forces to work closer together and procure centrally.

However, there has also been resistance as the nascent NCA prepares to take over one particular area of responsibility: child protection. Jim Gamble, the former head of child protection agency CEOP, resigned in protest at plans to incorporate his organisation into the NCA. “It’s shoehorning a tiny child protection agency – with great potential for protecting children – into the criminal justice infrastructure,” he says. Gamble argues that the organisation needs to remain independent because it works closely with schools and social care organisations, and should not be seen as a crime-fighting agency. Much of its work is about educating children, he explains. Gamble also says that the Home Office amended its definition of organised crime to include CEOP’s remit, in order to meet a political commitment to close down quangos.

A Home Office spokesman responds that “we do not think that moving CEOP into the NCA puts its unique character at risk. Indeed, we think that it will benefit from being able to access directly the resources of the NCA.” He adds that “CEOP has been very successful as an affiliate of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency. We are keen to ensure CEOP continues to build on its success as part of the NCA, and it will there retain a high degree of flexibility and its distinctive identity.”

Implementation issues
There will always be problems faced when implementing radical change, Clarke explains. “There were lots of organisations that felt they didn’t need to change” when he established SOCA, he recalls – although he does add that most were cooperative.

Tarique Ghaffur was assistant commissioner in the Metropolitan Police responsible for specialist crime and then for operations until 2008, when he left after successfully suing the force for racial discrimination. He says that establishing the NCA will be “a huge change management exercise. When SOCA was formed, you were bringing together four different agencies. Now you are bringing several other agencies together, and there is a culture change when you bring cross-culture organisations together. It’s an art in terms of managing culture, and it takes a long time.” He adds that organisational reform also has a cost, disrupting operations and distracting staff: “If you consistently put change on an organisation, they take their eye off the ball so they’re not effectively able to meet expectations in terms of performance.”

Police will be particularly distracted at present because of the 20 per cent cuts in policing budgets, shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper said recently. She added that the £120m budget of the NCA may cause ill will amongst police forces, although she did say that Labour “supports further reforms to national policing” to build on what she sees as SOCA’s success.

How will it work?
Once established, the NCA’s four dedicated commands for organised crime, child exploitation, border policing and economic crime will each manage their own priorities and risks. There will also be a separate cyber crime unit, which will provide specialist capabilities to the other units and to police forces.

The NCA will be headed by a senior chief constable, whom the Home Office is currently recruiting. Initially, there were reportedly plans to cap this person’s salary at £140,000, but those ideas have been scrapped in order to attract the best talent. The person who takes the role will have to be a serving UK chief constable.

A Home Office spokesperson says it will be for the head of the NCA to decide the budgets for each command, according to the NCA’s priorities at the time. These in turn will be set out by the home secretary, drawing on analysis contained in the UK Threat Assessment – a document published annually to assess the risks from organised crime – and the National Security Strategy.

Clarke warns that setting the NCA’s priorities will be a tricky business. He explains that “if you’ve got 15 priorities, which start with drugs and people trafficking and go down through antiques and lorry theft and God knows what else, then what happens is that all priority tends to go to the top item on the list and nothing is given to the rest. Now that’s not right; you don’t want no attention given to something, even though it’s not a high priority.”

This struggle to climb the priority list, Gamble warns, won’t favour small parts of the NCA such as CEOP’s legacy unit. “You’re like Oliver at the end of the table, always asking for more. People don’t like that, so you become a nuisance, you become a squeaking wheel,” he says. “And when you prioritise budgets within large organisations, where do you think the small entity will come?” He adds that being a part of a “billion pound organisation” will also prevent CEOP’s successor from winning funding from other sources.

However, Muir says that the risk of conflicts over resources and priorities is outweighed by the need to improve the coordination and coherence of efforts to tackle organised crime. Criminal networks do not operate in silos, he says, and tackling them requires cross-command action: “We know what the big drivers of cross-national criminal activity are, and we have had a range of agencies dealing with different aspects of that. This is bringing them together; the most important thing is to make sure that it covers all of those important areas so that we don’t lose focus.”

Establishing the required coherence may take a while: Clarke notes that several of these agencies use quite different systems of assessment and prioritisation. Some organisations quantify success in preventing drug dealing by measuring the weight of drugs seized; others by the number of criminal organisations disrupted. Strategies also vary: when SOCA was set up, some people said it should focus on preventing certain types of crime, such as drug dealing, whereas others argued that this would simply redirect criminals’ activities into new fields – you should play the man, not the ball.

Ghaffur also warns that there have never been national policing infrastructure systems for measuring and disseminating intelligence. The risk is that without investment in intelligence-sharing infrastructure, he says, “you get an intelligence world of garbage in, garbage out…[and] you’re not able to produce effective threat assessments and responses that are real.”

How will the NCA interact with local forces?
While the NCA is centralising control over tackling serious and organised crime, the coalition government is also localising control over police forces by introducing elected police commissioners.

Muir says that there will be a duty on elected police commissioners to cooperate with the NCA, but adds that there are fears in the police that elected commissioners will focus priorities on very local issues such as anti-social behaviour. He warns that police working on national operations may be culturally separate from local forces, and viewed as outsiders when they liaise with local police. Engagement with local officers will be crucial in order for NCA staff to understand each area’s culture and criminal networks, he adds, but national and local police cultures may diverge with the election of commissioners.

Further, while elected police commissioners will make local police forces appear more accountable, Paddick argues that it will be difficult to make the NCA seem accountable and to demonstrate to local communities that it is having an impact. SOCA and its predecessor agencies often suffered because they appeared unaccountable, he says, and “the types of crime being investigated tend to be those that do not directly impact on communities. The arrest and conviction of an importer of illegal drugs may have an effect on the price and quality of illegal drugs available on the street, for example, but in terms of immediate impact on the quality of life of law-abiding citizens, the impact tends to be indirect and marginal. Whether the NCA is doing a good job is not immediately apparent.”

Before the NCA is established, the government will first push through legislation to establish elected police commissioners. After that, the government’s plans for the NCA are set to receive much more scrutiny from MPs and the media. Some commentators, such as Gamble, think that the NCA is sucking in too many agencies. Others, such as Muir, would like the government to give it control over even more areas. But most agree with the rationale behind centralising control over tackling organised and international crime.

While the NCA is going to be a significant change in the policing landscape, it doesn’t yet represent a shift to an FBI-style model: a national agency applying federal law in a landscape of variable local laws and police forces. But if localism is taken to its logical conclusion then perhaps, one day, it may become something similar.

Jim Gamble: 'Why I resigned over the NCA'

Jim Gamble was the head of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP), but resigned last year over plans to merge his organisation into the National Crime Agency (NCA). He isn’t opposed to the NCA, he explains: he thinks it is a “great idea” because it allows for a more efficient allocation of assets, creates economies of scale, and capitalises on the “huge synergy” between border policing, cyber crime, economic crime, and serious and organised crime.
However, he doesn’t think that CEOP’s remit fits under a sensible definition of organised crime. Indeed, he says that “we highlighted in a letter to the home secretary that actually CEOP did not fit the criteria or definition of organised crime. The following iteration of the [Home Office’s] business case stated that they had amended the definition of organised crime to include all the activity carried out by CEOP.”
Gamble also complains that when he met with the home secretary last year, she was unable to provide any evidence that moving CEOP into the NCA would make it a more effective organisation or help tackle the areas it is responsible for. CEOP, he fears, has become a victim of the government’s determination to reduce the number of quangos.
Further, Gamble says that the Home Office did not hold a proper consultation on the decision to integrate CEOP into the NCA. He says: “The main reason I chose to resign at the time I did – having had my first engagement with the home secretary at the end of July, I resigned in October – was because I had already seen three iterations of the business plan, and those iterations already included CEOP but the consultation had not even closed. How can that be an ethical way of doing business?”

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Written by Joshua Chambers, CSW