Serious Organised Crime strategy

What are we doing to reduce the harm caused by serious organised crime?

It is clear that while we have had considerable success in some areas there is more to be done.

It is also clear that, given the speed of change and the speed with which SOCGs react to changing landscapes, we need an overarching strategy that sets the framework for what we are hoping to achieve and that encourages coherent, joined-up activity to deliver against the aims and objectives. There are four main elements that must be incorporated into any approach. These are:

• The strategic vision – what are our aims and objectives
• The threat assessment – informed by intelligence and evidence
• Tasking – how we translate our threat assessment into specific activity in order to achieve our objectives
• Collaboration – how we work together to deliver more effectively

We will therefore use analysis of the latest threat assessment to enable the Serious Organised Crime Taskforce to set the priorities for action. We believe that this will give partner organisations the flexibility to respond quickly to changing threats. It may require organisations to react differently in order to ensure they play their part. We will ask partner organisations to consider how they will manage this response. The threat impacts on us all; it is right that we each consider how best to respond.

This should create a more integrated picture where the strategy sets the vision, objectives and direction of travel, where our assessments of the threats we face provide the intelligence to help us prioritise our actions, where we have arrangements in place to support collaborative working between Taskforce members and between the Taskforce and other organisations, and where information gained at any level in the process can be utilised to secure improvements and to change direction if necessary. It will require some changes to the existing structures and governance arrangements in order to improve cohesion between the strategic, tactical and operational layers. These changes are set out in Annex B.

Challenges will remain, not least those caused by leaving the European Union and the changing international picture given the increasingly global nature of organised crime.