Elite officers to form FBI-style superforce

Published on Sunday 8 February 2004 00:00

THOUSANDS of Britain’s top police officers are to be moved into a new FBI-style agency to break up the networks behind the nation’s most lucrative and dangerous organised crimes.

Tony Blair will this week unveil proposals for the national agency to tackle crimes including drug trafficking, money-laundering and vice.

The ‘superforce’ will draw on 5,000 expert staff from existing agencies, including the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) and Customs and Excise. But, in future, police chiefs hope to recruit agents specifically for the organisation, and to train them at a dedicated college.

The shift towards an aggressive, co-ordinated approach to the Mr Bigs behind crime cartels will have no immediate effect on Scottish forces.

Home Office sources last night confirmed the agency would in its earliest years tackle organised crime in England and Wales, although it will gather intelligence from across the UK and enlist specialist units in Scotland and Northern Ireland for individual operations.

The government hopes the agency will wipe out competition between various police units and other security organisations. Ministers have used the evidence of intelligence failings and the breakdown in communications between key state agencies revealed during the Hutton Inquiry to push forward the case for a co-ordinated assault on a wide-ranging problem identified by the Prime Minister as a priority. "At the moment the system works in spite of itself, but there’s room for improvement with better co-ordination," one senior police source said of the present arrangements, where a number of highly specialised units fight crimes largely independently of each other.

The shake-up also has the attraction of saving money from the police budget, as it would absorb units such as the National Crime Squad and NCIS - with annual budgets of 130m and 90m respectively - and cut down on duplication of their work.

The concept of a combined agency has won support from bosses at NCIS and other police organisations, who accept the need for a co-ordinated strategy for dealing with "level 3 crime", or national and international organised crime.

"The whole NCIS approach to this has been to say, whatever happens, intelligence will be at the heart of it," said an NCIS spokesman.

"It makes sense that it is intelligence-led," said a police source. "You can’t hope to search every container coming from Rotterdam. You have to have some idea which ones are likely to be full of drugs."

Barry Irving, director of the Police Foundation, an independent policing think-tank, said: "There is lots of speculation about how the new force might be managed. In the past, it has proved very difficult to find out what’s going on in the National Crime Squad and NCIS, and one wonders whether management culture issues are going to be addressed."

The biggest ‘casualty’ of the re-organisation could be Customs and Excise, which has in recent years been condemned over its handling of a number of inquiries.

The new agency, expected to be announced tomorrow, demonstrates Blair’s demand for change.