Home affairsLetter from Rt Hon Theresa May MP, Home Secretary, to the Chair of the Committee, 7 October 2013

Serious and Organised Crime

I am today launching a new cross-Government strategy for tackling serious and organised crime. Its publication coincides with the formal establishment of the new National Crime Agency (NCA). It reflects changes to the threats we face from serious and organised crime and the lessons we have learned from our previous work. This marks the biggest change in our approach to tackling this national security threat for a decade.

The aim of the strategy is to substantially reduce the level of serious and organised crime affecting the UK and its interests. It will contribute to the Government’s objective to cut overall crime and to the National Security Strategy objectives of ensuring a secure and resilient UK and shaping a stable world.

Our new strategy uses the framework we have developed for our counter terrorist work and has four main areas of activity: prosecuting and disrupting people engaged in serious and organised criminality (Pursue); preventing people from engaging in this activity (Prevent); increasing protection against serious and organised crime (Protect); and reducing the impact of this criminality where it takes place (Prepare).

Our immediate priority is the work set out under Pursue to prosecute and continuously disrupt organised criminals and reduce the threat they pose. This includes the formation of the NCA as a powerful new body of operational crime-fighters. The Agency will hold the single authoritative intelligence picture of the threat to the UK from serious and organised crime. It will have cutting edge capabilities. The NCA will work closely with the police and others, and have a mandate to lead and coordinate the national response. We will continue to build specialist police capabilities within Regional Organised Crime Units and have provided an additional £10 million to support this. We will ensure that local partnership boards, in which we envisage police and crime commissioners playing a leading role, bring all available powers to bear against organised crime.

I am proposing new measures to attack criminal assets and groups, and tackle modern slavery. We will take more enforcement action against foreign nationals involved in serious and organised crime who are in, or travelling to, the UK. And we will restructure our overseas crime-fighting network to deal with all types of serious and organised crime which now fall to the NCA, including child sexual exploitation and cyber crime.

We will create a new programme to stop people beginning or continuing to engage in serious and organised crime. We will raise awareness of the reality of serious and organised crime through new education and communications programmes. We will use existing intervention programmes (such as for gangs and troubled families) to prevent people from being drawn into different types of organised crime. We want to see more aggressive use of legal interventions such as Serious Crime Prevention Orders. And at the same time, we will better manage the threat from lifetime career criminals through an effective approach to tracking them into and out of prison. We want to do more preventative work with key professions, and their regulators, recognising that bankers, lawyers and accountants are used by organised criminals as ‘gatekeepers’ to the legitimate economy. Some professionals will be complicit or negligent. Others will be unwitting facilitators. As you know, I have already announced the compulsory licensing of private investigators.

We will increase our protection against serious and organised crime. Secure borders are a vital part of this. We have reorganised border responsibilities and major capability programmes are under way. We will ensure there is better information sharing with the private sector about the threats we face, including about cyber crime. The public will also be better informed. We want to see better collaboration between law enforcement and local authorities to contain the risk of organised crime benefitting from local authority procurement. And we set out a range of new measures to improve, more broadly, our anti-corruption response.

However improved our response, we recognise that serious and organised crimes will continue to occur. We need to be prepared for them, and support people most affected by them. A new Computer Emergency Response Team will ensure we are prepared for a major cyber attack. Additionally, we will develop a national programme to exercise and test the capabilities of our law enforcement agencies and other partners. We will ensure victims, witnesses and communities affected by serious and organised crime receive more effective support, including through a new Victim’s Code and Witness Charter, and the establishment of a new UK Protected Persons Service which will overhaul our current witness protection arrangements.

Serious and Organised crime requires a response across the whole of government (national and local), the police and our law enforcement, security and intelligence agencies, and close collaboration with the private sector and with many other countries. The public has a part to play. The new strategy sets the framework, and unifying direction, for this response. It sets clear and coherent strategic objectives. It will bring the full power of the state to bear against serious and organised crime.

The National Security Council will have oversight of the strategy. Its coordination and delivery will be driven by the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism (OSCT) in the Home Office. There will be a small number of measures to assess the impact of the strategy. I will publish an annual report on progress.

I anticipate that the Home Affairs Committee will take an interest in both the work of the NCA and the implementation of this strategy. I welcome that. I know that you are seeing Keith Bristow on 15 October.

I enclose a copy of the strategy and an accompanying summary pamphlet we are publishing today. Copies will be placed in the Libraries of both Houses.

I am writing in similar terms to Sir Malcolm Rifkind and Margaret Beckett.

Rt Hon Theresa May MP, Home Secretary