1Understanding serious and organised crime
1.On the basis of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, we took evidence from the Home Office (the Department), the National Crime Agency, and police forces about tackling serious and organised crime.1
2.Serious and organised crime is broad and varied in nature, can be difficult to identify, and causes considerable harm to people. The National Crime Agency (NCA) estimates that serious and organised crime affects more UK citizens, more often, than any other national security threat and leads to more deaths in the UK each year than all other national security threats combined. It categorises serious and organised crime as including ten major threats: child sexual abuse and exploitation; modern slavery and human trafficking; organised immigration crime; illegal drugs; illegal firearms; organised acquisitive crime; money laundering; fraud and other economic crime; international bribery, corruption and sanctions contravention; and cyber-crime. The annual social and economic cost of serious and organised crime was estimated to be £37 billion in 2015–16. This included £20 billion from drugs crimes, including drug-related deaths and hospital treatments, and £8 billion from economic crime.2
3.Serious and organised crime is planned, coordinated and committed by people working individually, in groups, or as part of transnational networks. There are more than 4,500 identified organised crime groups and 181,000 organised criminals operating in the UK. These groups use violence and intimidation in communities to operate and prey on vulnerable people.3 The Department considers organised criminals the biggest threat to national security in terms of the number of people that they kill, the communities that they harm and the “corrosive and chronic” effect that they have on society.4
4.The Department has overall responsibility for tackling serious and organised crime in England & Wales, including responsibility for policy, strategy and funding. The NCA is responsible for leading and coordinating UK law enforcement’s response to serious and organised crime. The Department is also responsible for coordinating the contributions of the NCA, nine regional organised crime units (ROCUs), 43 territorial police forces and other law enforcement partners. In total, the Department works with over 100 organisations to tackle serious and organised crime, including a range of national and local organisations. Government and law enforcement bodies spent an estimated £2.9 billion tackling serious and organised crime in 2015–16.5
The serious and organised crime strategy
5.In 2013, the Home Office launched a strategy for dealing with serious and organised crime based on the ‘4Ps’ model used in counter-terrorism. This model requires law enforcement organisations to:
- prevent people getting involved in crime;
- pursue and disrupt illegal activities once they have happened;
- protect society against crime; and
- prepare for when crime occurs so the impact can be mitigated.6
6.In 2017, the Department’s evaluation of the 2013 strategy found some significant failings and concluded that the approach was not designed to deal effectively with the increasing complexity and scale of serious and organised crime. In 2018, the Home Office produced a new strategy retaining the same ‘4P’ model. The new strategy aimed to address the issues identified in the 2013 strategy, including by doing more work to prevent people committing serious and organised crime and raising public intolerance of it, developing NCA’s capability to exploit data and improve the government’s understanding of serious and organised crime, aligning efforts to tackle serious and organised crime and a more sustainable funding model.7
7.The Department estimated that, of the £2.9 billion spent on tackling serious and organised crime in 2015–16, £2.2 billion was spent by front-line services on tackling crime. Of this £2.2 billion, £84 million (4%) was spent on the Prevent strand, compared to £1.8 billion (79%) on the Pursue strand of the strategy.8 We asked the Department whether this was the right balance given its commitment to undertake more work to prevent people becoming involved in serious and organised crime. The Department told us that, while funding was important, it was not the only measure of whether it was doing enough on Prevent and asserted it was putting a lot of effort into Prevent. It told us that bringing together services within communities, working with non-governmental organisations, and increasing collaboration, were “incredibly important” as part of Prevent.9 The PCC for Cumbria told us that Prevent was arguably more important than Pursue, as “if we can prevent people from being drawn into crime, we stop young people destroying their own lives and the victim’s lives” as well as saving money from not having to pursue individuals.10
8.We asked the Department what activities were included in Prevent, and what was stopping it from giving more focus to Prevent. The Department told us that it funded a range of Prevent activities across the ten major threats included in its definition of serious and organised crime. This included its pilot of community coordinators, who were responsible for bringing together local public services and other services within a community. It told us it was increasing community coordinators from five to eight areas in response to the pilot’s success. We asked how community coordinators would replace initiatives such as neighbourhood policing teams, which previously worked within local communities and contributed to national programmes such as the trouble families programme. The Department told us that it intention was to ensure that serious and organised crime received attention and focus from public services in the area. It explained that community coordinators were part of efforts to ensure that “children looking at their peers in their communities who do end up with the money and the wealth, and how you avoid them going down that track”. It did not, however, comment on how this initiative built on those previously in place.11
9.We asked the Department how it was ensuring that interventions with children and young people most at risk of falling into crime were adding value rather than re-inventing the wheel or duplicating efforts being made elsewhere. The Department told us that it had introduced other initiatives to address areas of serious and organised crime where prevention was particularly difficult, such as the Lucy Faithfull Foundation, which works with offenders of child sexual abuse who are trying to change their behaviour. It recognised, however, that Prevent remained an area where it wanted to do more as part of the strategy. It told us that the role of the Senior Responsible Owner for serious and organised crime was responsible for bringing together government Departments to ensure a shared understanding of activities being undertaken to tackle serious and organised crime.12 This included working with the Department for Education to teach young people how to keep themselves safe online, both as potential victims and to prevent potential criminal activity.13 The NCA told us that a product had also been launched for four to seven year-olds in recognition that this age group now have tablets and therefore access to the internet.14
Understanding the threat of serious and organised crime
10.In May 2019, the NCA estimated that the volume and complexity of serious and organised crime was increasing. The Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Cumbria told us that it was difficult to determine whether crime was increasing, or whether it was being better understood and better recorded. He and Merseyside police agreed, however, that overall levels of crime were rising, and that resourcing issues had been a key cause of this.15 Merseyside police explained that one of the consequences of having fewer police officers was that police forces focused on their statutory responsibilities and had therefore reduced their proactive activity which targeted individuals who caused the most harm. It asserted that as a result of communities seeing fewer police officers, members of the public had less confidence in policing to protect them should they report issues. It also explained that higher levels or serious and organised crime were being driven by a lack of opportunities for young people, and an increasing tolerance of criminal activity within some communities, particularly within deprived areas.16 The Department and the NCA told us that the increase also reflected the impact of technology and globalisation. They explained that while technology had many benefits, it was also a “massive enabler of crime” and was enabling the growth of new types of harm. This ranged from cyber-crime to the 2.88 million offenders of child abuse online worldwide. The NCA also recognised that “the more we look, the more we find” and there was now a greater willingness to report and record some types of crime, such as modern slavery and human trafficking.17
11.The Department’s review of the 2013 strategy found that the intelligence and assessment capability of organisations tackling serious and organised crime was underdeveloped for many types of crime. As part of the 2018 strategy, the NCA has committed to putting in place capabilities to process large amounts of data and join data obtained lawfully from multiple sources on multiple themes, including economic crime, cyber-crime and child sexual exploitation.18 The NCA accepted that its previous approach to serious and organised crime was far too linear and implied that serious and organised crime was far simpler than it actually was. It admitted that, until recently, it had not had a system to draw together the work being undertaken by police forces at a local and regional level,19 Law enforcement organisations also told us that the recording of crime varied greatly between police forces, forces have difference IT systems and it can be both time consuming and expensive to bring this together. They told us that it could be particularly difficult to access health data across the country, or data about activities that take place across different counties.20 Since the 2013 strategy, the NCA has improved its understanding of the scale of serious and organised crime through national assessments of the threat. This includes a new national data exploitation capability (NDEC) to make more effective use of large-scale data analysis, and a new national assessments centre (NAC) to join data and intelligence to spot patterns and identify new vulnerabilities that criminals have begun to exploit.21
12.Despite these activities, however, in 2018, the NCA assessed that the government’s and law enforcement’s understanding of the scale of crime was weak for four out of nine serious and organised crimes. Even where understanding was considered ‘good’, for instance understanding the threat from child sexual abuse and exploitation, other government publications, including the NCA’s annual assessment of serious and organised crime, made a more cautious evaluation of the level of understanding.22 The Department told us that the UK had the best understanding in the world of child sexual abuse and exploitation, but accepted that its understanding of modern slavery and human trafficking was still developing and more needed to be done to understand fraud and money laundering.23
1 C&AG’s Report, Tackling serious and organised crime, Session 2017–19, HC 2219, 28 June 2019
2 C&AG’s Report, para 1.2, Figure 2
4 Q 108
5 Q 11, C&AG’s Report, para 4, 1.3, Appendix 3
6 Q 51, C&AG’s Report para 3, 1.6
7 Qq 38, 41, C&AG’s Report, paras 1.7–1.9
8 Q 51, C&AG’s Report para 3.2, Figure 9
9 Qq 38, 57
10 Q 17
11 Qq 38, 51–54
12 Qq 38, 55, 59–60
13 Qq 63, 92–93
14 Q 104
15 Qq 1, 32–33, C&AG’s Report, para 1.2, Figure 2
16 Q 2
17 Qq 36–37, 109–111
18 C&AG’s Report, para 2.9, Figure 5
19 Qq 39, 41
20 Qq 6–8
21 C&AG’s Report, paras 2.3, 2.9
22 C&AG’s Report, para 2.4
23 Q 71
Published: 27 September 2019