Independent report

Independent Review of Serious and Organised Crime (accessible version)

Published 16 March 2021

Sir Craig Mackey QPM

Presented to the Minister for Security

27 February 2020

On 4 September 2019, the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced a formal review of serious and organised crime to identify the powers, capabilities, governance and funding needed, to be completed in advance of the next Comprehensive Spending Review. Sir Craig Mackey was appointed as the Independent Reviewer and the Review was established in late October 2019, reporting to the Security Minister, with oversight provided by a steering group of senior representatives from relevant departments and agencies. The recommendations and all other comments are those of the Independent Reviewer, and it is the Home Office’s decision on future handling including publication in part or in full.

The Independent Reviewer was supported by a small secretariat of civil servants and law enforcement and intelligence professionals, and engaged with a wide range of stakeholders and experts, including a small group of senior advisors to the Reviewer. The terms of reference for the Review are at Annex A, the terms of reference for the advisory group are at Annex B, and a list of contributors and a summary of evidence reviewed is at Annex C.

The Independent Review of Serious and Organised Crime proposes a package of transformational changes that will require long term commitment and investment – which, if delivered, will significantly improve the Government’s ability to protect its citizens and reduce the harm to the UK from serious and organised crime.

Executive Summary

1. The definition of Serious and Organised Crime (SOC), as set out in the Government’s 2018 strategy, covers a large range of threats and harms, many of which are hidden and involve overseas dimensions. The pace and scale of technological change are fundamentally shifting the ways that people and society behave, resulting in SOC evolving faster than ever before as entrepreneurial criminals develop new ways to profit from crime and exploit their victims.

2. The Review found that every day, people in law enforcement, government, the private sector and the voluntary sector work to disrupt the perpetrators of SOC, prevent or reduce the harm it causes and provide support for its victims. While their commitment, dedication and creativity are commendable, they are severely constrained in their ability to take on these challenges which limit the delivery of the system’s full potential. They operate in a system with significant capacity constraints and with a set of tools that has not adapted to the evolving nature of crime, relying instead on a traditional view of the relational proximity between crime and its victims.

3. There is a lot of valuable activity to counter SOC but its impact could be amplified with a stronger collaborative system approach. Current efforts have safeguarded the vulnerable and brought dangerous offenders to justice. However, learning and innovation are rarely systemised to allow adoption by others at scale and capabilities are duplicated unnecessarily, without coordination or building at an enterprise scale, leading to regulating activity rather than achieving strategic effect. Those who work tirelessly to tackle SOC simply do not have the connectivity across the system to make use of the full force of the state and the power of the private sector to address these problems.

4. This Review offers a package of mutually reinforcing recommendations that are designed to reduce the threat from SOC and the harm it causes, giving greater protection to citizens and potential victims, and increasing the confidence of businesses, communities and the people who live and work in them by:

• making it easier to detect and disrupt those who seek to conduct serious and organised criminal activity in the UK;
• making it harder for serious and organised crime to impact the UK; and
• offering greater protection to the potential victims of such crimes

5. At the heart of this package of recommendations is a substantial transformation proposal to restructure and rebalance how law enforcement and wider government work with each other, and with the private and voluntary sectors, to tackle SOC, commensurate with its status as a national security threat. Through the development and implementation of what the Review refers to as a “campus model”, this transformation proposal will reinforce, strengthen and connect capability at local, regional, national and international levels to deliver a more flexible, effective and efficient response to SOC. It will provide the necessary structures and platforms to allow the various organisations and agencies involved to work as a single mission across organisational boundaries to share data, intelligence and tools. This will improve understanding of how and why SOC happens and lead to smarter, faster and more effective interventions and greater value for money for the taxpayer.

6. The campus model would include:

• the creation of a UK Crime Campus (UKCC), housed in NCA as a combined brand for a collaborative and shared working environment for law enforcement and other related agencies. It would perform its functions by engaging capabilities in the NCA and across the system and act as a brokerage for access to national security or other national capabilities from the regions;
• a range of new or enhanced functions for the NCA which would be accessed through the UKCC platform. These would include national prioritisation of operational activity, development of a SOC capability strategy, administering simplified multi-annual SOC law enforcement funding, setting a single performance framework for driving and measuring operational SOC outcomes and threat levels; and setting a core operational SOC system workforce and an estates strategy;
• reinforcing the role of ROCUs by providing a statutory foundation requiring all English and Welsh police forces to be part of a ROCU and to pool, at minimum, a specified set of their capabilities within the ROCU’s direction and control. ROCUs would be owned by a lead force, as agreed and scrutinised by the region’s PCCs and CCs, and led day to day by a chief police officer with delegated responsibility from local force CCs to the ROCU Head, and accountable to the lead force CC;
• a range of new or enhanced functions for ROCUs, including regional prioritisation of police operational SOC and other high harm activity in coordination with the UKCC, ensuring an equitable balance of response to nationally and locally driven priorities, and ability to task ROCU and local forces’ specialist SOC resources and transfer other requests to local forces for appropriate risk assessment and action;
• the creation of Regional Crime Campuses (RCCs) to complement the UKCC concept. The RCCs would be a combined brand for the ROCU, NCA and other agencies’ regional presences, enabling, at a minimum, a collaborative and shared working environment where threat assessments, information and intelligence can be shared, and resources pooled. They would, among other things, be responsible for ensuring that the RCC is appropriately managing the resources pooled in it to deliver the agreed key outcomes, and act as brokerage for access to cross-system capabilities.

7. Implementing this campus model will break down the constraints imposed by traditional, geographically defined policing while preserving law enforcement operational independence and the need for local priorities and accountability for territorial police forces. It will facilitate closer working between police and other service providers across Pursue, Prepare Protect and Prevent (the 4Ps) as set out in the 2018 SOC Strategy. At national level, the UKCC will provide the strategic leadership and prioritisation throughout the system, from international to local level, to more actively deliver a better response to SOC. At a regional level, the RCCs will provide a platform for a range of local and regional agencies to come together to work collaboratively to tackle SOC. And at local level, the campus model will give Chief Constables and Police and Crime Commissioners better access to the capabilities, intelligence, powers and expertise of a range of organisations to disrupt SOC and, through improved scrutiny arrangements, they will be able to more effectively hold regions to account for what they have delivered for local forces.

8. Alongside this, the Review recommends further strengthening the capabilities of the National Crime Agency, local police forces and their regional organised crime units (ROCUs), as well as the UK’s global efforts to work with international partners against SOC.

9. Key to this structural change is a set of proposals for digital transformation that puts data at the heart of strategic decision-making and operational activity. Achieving this will require investment and skilled technologists to deliver a stable foundation of secure and interoperable IT infrastructure, increasingly Cloud-based, which shares data effectively between the many partners in the SOC system while at the same time protects sensitive equities and maintains recognition that many partners who tackle SOC have other organisational priorities.

10. The Review emphasises that these reforms will need to be addressed in the context of the Government’s wider policing and criminal justice reforms. It sets out substantial cultural changes in the way that law enforcement agencies and others in the SOC system will need to work together. Ultimately the SOC system needs to be able to learn, adapt and continuously transform itself, responding to evolving technology and threats. This requires building the culture, mindset, leadership and skills to effectively support partnering, collaboration and innovation across a diverse and complex system of systems which inevitably interlinks with the UK’s response to wider policing and national security threats. Most critically, this will require more central coordination and direction – including through revisions to the Strategic Policing Requirement - than the current devolved system affords. Without this, the effect that can be achieved will be limited. All of this will take time to implement and bring to fruition.

11. To deliver these improvements to the Government’s response to SOC, the system will need sustained and coordinated investment over the next 5-10 years, with system transformation, capabilities development and capacity growth all being essential and intertwined components of an investment programme. Among other things, this will require agreed multi-year budgets to invest in the structures, skills, capabilities and technologies that a world-class system requires to be as nimble and technologically adept as those who exploit those technologies to perpetrate crimes; and strengthened accountability, including the implementation of a performance framework to better inform strategic decisions and offering the assurance to communities that their safety and security is at the forefront of these efforts.

Annex A: Terms of Reference for the review

The current situation

Government has made significant commitments to improve public safety such as the recent commitment to 20,000 additional police officers. The 2018 SOC strategy aims to protect citizens and set out a wide range of actions to tackle the growing threat from Serious and Organised Crime (SOC).

However, both internal government analysis and external reviews have identified a number of challenges facing the SOC system, including but not limited to:

• the scale of the threat from SOC is growing and becoming more complex
• data sharing within law enforcement should be improved, particularly between local forces and agencies
• implementation of the strategy is made more complex by disparate funding
• funding to tackle serious and organised crime is uncertain and inefficient
• whilst a SOC performance framework has been developed, it is not yet integrated in all parts of the system, and so does not yet support effective management and decision making
• operational tasking is not as effective as it could be, and there is duplication between the work of different agencies
• much of the decision-making about resource allocation is made locally, in isolation from national plans

Aim of the Review

To make recommendations that should be delivered through the 2020 Spending Review to improve the SOC system, its governance, capabilities and funding, in relation to:

• understanding the threat posed by SOC and the government’s response
• a whole system response that uses capabilities effectively, across the law enforcement, intelligence and criminal justice system response
• addressing the system’s governance, structures and accountability issues and the funding mechanism challenges that earlier reviews have identified
• the use of performance management in decision making
• the cost of delivering the 2018 SOC Strategy, including how funding can be prioritised and aligned to changing threats; and
• the response to fraud and county lines.

Structure of the Review

The Review will be independent; the findings and recommendations of the Review will represent the views of the Reviewer. The Review will report to the Minister of State for Security and Deputy for EU Exit and No Deal Preparation. The Reviewer will be supported by a Secretariat, led by HO and with representation from main stakeholders, and a selection of advisors from the law enforcement and national security sphere. A senior steering group of officials from relevant departments, chaired by Director-General SOC, HO will give strategic oversight to the Review. The Reviewer will provide interim findings to the steering group by the end of December and present the final report no later than 28 February 2020.

Scope of the Review

The Serious and Organised Crime Strategy, published in November 2018, sets out the Government’s approach to prevent and protect against serious and organised crime in all its forms. In development of the Strategy and since its publication, there have been several reviews and assessments (for example, the NAO Report on Serious and Organised Crime, the Public Account Committee’s report on SOC, National Strategic Assessment, various HMICFRS reports) that have helped to shape the Strategy and its implementation.

This review will take the Strategy as its starting point and offer concrete, implementable, scalable and costed recommendations on what needs to be done across the policing and law enforcement landscape to improve our response to serious and organised crime in England and Wales in all its forms. The Review will take into account the work committed to in the Economic Crime Plan to develop a sustainable resourcing model to support economic crime reform.

This will include reviewing the powers, capabilities, governance and effectiveness of funding across the policing and law enforcement landscape, including the NCA and the wider justice system. The review will make recommendations on:

• the status, roles and responsibilities of NCA, ROCUs and local police forces in England and Wales, to ensure that each organisation has the necessary authorities and underpinnings to take decisions, and that the governance structures reinforce those roles and responsibilities.

• the legal powers available to each organisation to enable their respective roles in delivering the SOC strategy and whether additional powers would enable greater delivery. This should include whether the NCA’s statutory tasking powers extend to the right organisations and are supported in the right way, as well as consideration of how criminal and civil powers and offences could be amended to improve the response.

• the capabilities available in the SOC system, in particular whether these are at the right levels (international, national, regional and local), and are coordinated and aligned in the right way across the whole system, including between both law enforcement bodies and intelligence agencies.

• a sustainable resourcing model across the system to drive efficiency, deliverability and value for money. This should include other law enforcement agencies and intelligence agencies.

• the use of funding across the whole system to deliver an improved response to serious and organised crime. This should consider the scope for better use of existing funding and how resources can be aligned to the highest priorities. Any new proposals should identify the outcomes they expect to achieve.

• the ability of organisations to measure their performance and impact in tackling SOC, and how this supports decision making.

• the capacity of the downstream criminal justice system (courts, CPS, Judiciary, prison and probation services) in relation to SOC.

• the response to current high priority threats, with priority given to tackling fraud and county lines.

The geographic scope of this review will follow that of the Serious and Organised Crime Strategy published in November 2018. The devolved administrations in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales are responsible for the functions which have been devolved to them. In Scotland and Northern Ireland, crime and policing matters are the responsibility of the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Executive respectively. These devolved administrations have published their own strategies (Scotland’s Serious Organised Crime Strategy 2015 and Northern Ireland’s Organised Crime Strategy 2016), which are outside the scope of this review.

Given that national security, including serious crime, is not devolved and the interconnectedness of serious and organised crime, we will engage with the devolved administrations and territorial offices on the review at working level and through a Ministerial letter to ensure awareness, understanding and consultation when concerning shared resources and capabilities