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Organised Crime

The Government's strategy against organised crime

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In March 2004 we launched the White Paper, ‘One Step Ahead: A 21st Century Strategy to Defeat Organised Crime’ PDF 374Kb. The key aim of the strategy is to reduce significantly the harm done to the UK and its citizens by organised crime.

Press Release: One Step Ahead: A 21st Century Strategy to Defeat Organised Crime

We are taking a number of steps to achieve this:

  1. Sharper prioritisation
    We will improve the way we focus our effort and resources on organised crime. We are also building on our existing intelligence effort to develop a comprehensive understanding of the scale of the problem, and the working methods of organised criminals. Armed with this information, we can then agree national priorities to target our efforts against the main threats.
  2. SOCA: a new organised crime agency
    The Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) will bring together the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), the National Crime Squad (NCS), the investigative and intelligence work of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC) on serious drug trafficking and the recovery of related criminal assets, and the Home Office’s responsibilities for organised immigration crime.
  3. Working with police forces
    We will only achieve success by making sure that our national law enforcement effort is joined up with police forces and other enforcement agencies at local level and on our borders.
  4. New powers, new methods of working
    There is also a need for new ways of working and new powers. Some have required legislation; others can be achieved through enhanced co-operation between different agencies of Government towards the common aim. The strategy proposed a number of areas where agencies could do more by working together.
  5. Making the most of existing powers
    We are also making sure that we are making full use of the powers that we already have, for example, involving prosecutors as early as possible in investigations, and providing guidance on using immigration powers to disrupt the activities of serious criminals who are in the UK illegally.

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Last update: 24 October 2005

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