| Serious Organised Crime Agency | |
| Abbreviation | SOCA |
| Logo of the Serious Organised Crime Agency. | |
| Agency overview | |
|---|---|
| Formed | 1 April 2006 |
| Preceding agencies |
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| Employees | 4,200 |
| Annual budget | £494M (2008/09) |
| Legal personality | Governmental: Government agency |
| Jurisdictional structure | |
| National agency (Operations jurisdiction) |
United Kingdom |
| United Kingdom | |
| Size | 244,821 square kilometres (94,526 sq mi) |
| Population | 60,609,153 |
| Legal jurisdiction | England and Wales, less in Scotland and Northern Ireland |
| General nature |
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| Operational structure | |
| Overviewed by | The SOCA Board |
| Headquarters | London, England |
| Elected officer responsible | Theresa May, Home Secretary |
| Agency executive | Trevor Pearce, Director-General |
| Child agency | Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre |
| Website | |
| http://www.soca.gov.uk (Online) | |
The Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) is a non-departmental public body of the Government of the United Kingdom under Home Office sponsorship. SOCA is a national law enforcement agency, established as a body corporate under Section 1 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, which operates within the United Kingdom and collaborates (through its network of international offices) with many foreign law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
The Agency was formed on 1 April 2006 following a merger of the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service (elements of which were incorporated into AVCIS), the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU), the investigative and intelligence sections of HM Revenue & Customs on serious drug trafficking, and the Immigration Service's responsibilities for organised immigration crime. The Assets Recovery Agency became part of SOCA in 2008 and the Serious Fraud Office remains as a separate agency.
SOCA Officers can be designated the powers of a constable, customs officer or immigration officer and/or any combination of these three sets of powers. The Director General of SOCA (or his designate) is responsible for determining which powers are given to members of staff which can be altered depending on the nature of the investigation.[1] Those police powers requiring a constable to be in uniform cannot be exercised by SOCA Officers as the agency is non-uniformed.
SOCA operates with greater powers in England and Wales than in Scotland and Northern Ireland and as such works with the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency and the Organised Crime Task Force (Northern Ireland), which share some of its functions in their respective jurisdictions.
Following the formation of the coalition government in 2010, the Home Office began consulting on proposals to merge its operations within a larger National Crime Agency.[2]
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The creation of the agency was announced on 9 February 2004 as one of the elements of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005, which also restricts protests and demonstrations in central London, and alters powers of arrest and the use of search warrants. According to Home Office figures organised crime costs the UK around £20 billion each year, with some estimates putting the figure as high as £40 billion.[3]
SOCA has a national remit and the role of the agency is to support individual Police forces in the investigation of crime and conduct independent investigations with regard to serious organised crime. SOCA is an agency which has the role of "reducing harm", not specifically the arrest and conviction of offenders.
Elements of the media have attempted to draw parallels between the organisation and the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States: indeed, parts of the press have labelled SOCA the "British FBI."[4]
SOCA is subject to similar internal and external governance mechanisms as the police service. The SOCA Professional Standards Department is responsible for receiving, investigating and monitoring the progress of public complaints about the misconduct of SOCA officers. Serious complaints regarding SOCA are dealt with by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC).[5] The IPCC will decide the appropriate method of investigation. In general terms, the IPCC will handle complaints against SOCA officers in the same manner as complaints against police officers or officers of HMRC. The Police Ombudsman of Northern Ireland (PONI) deals with complaints in Northern Ireland. In Scotland, this is the responsibility of the Lord Advocate. There is also be a bespoke inspection regime for SOCA, provided through Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary (HMIC).[6]
The agency is an executive non-departmental public body sponsored by, but operationally independent from, the Home Office. It is funded by the UK's central government, with a provisional budget for 2006/7 of £457m, of which £416m funds on-going resources and £41m is capital investment.[7] At formation it was intended to have around 4,200 employees, of which 400 were support staff. Of the remaining workforce, half will be criminal investigators and the other half will focus on analysis and intelligence. SOCA co-operates closely with the police, intelligence agencies, HM Revenue and Customs, foreign police forces and others.
SOCA is led by a board comprising non-executive and executive members. The founding non-executive chairman, responsible for the overall approach of the Agency, was Sir Stephen Lander, former Director General of the Security Service(MI5). Lander was succeeded by Sir Ian Andrews, a former MOD Civil Servant. The other original non-executive directors of the board were Stephen Barrett, Elizabeth France, Ken Jarrold, Janet Paraskeva and General Sir Roger Wheeler. Today, the non-executive directors are Peter Clarke, Sue Garrard, Francis Plowden and Dr Martyn Thomas.[8] The original executive directors of the board were David Bolt, Malcolm Cornberg, Paul Evans and Trevor Pearce[9], and today they are Malcolm Cornberg, Paul Evans, Trevor Pearce and Brad Jones. The agency's headquarters are in Victoria, not far from New Scotland Yard. There is also an office in Vauxhall, South London, not far from the Palace of Westminster and the SIS Building.
The founding Director General was Bill Hughes, formerly of the National Crime Squad. Hughes retired in 2010 and was succeeded by Trevor Pearce, who until then was Executive Director of SOCA's Enforcement Directorate.[10]
The board has directed that around 40% of its effort should be devoted to combating drug trafficking, 25% to tackling organised immigration crime, around 10% to fraud, 15% on other organised crime and the remaining 10% on supporting other law enforcement agencies.[11]
The organisation is currently split into three major directorates:
The Agency has had to deal with the effects of significant budget cuts that have affected both its strategy for dealing with organised crime and its ability to retain experienced police officers.[12]
The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) is an operationally independent component of SOCA and is staffed by SOCA officers. The task of online child protection had previously been (in part) the responsibility of the NHTCU. CEOP recently announced the opening of the CEOP Academy, designed to be a centre of excellence in this area of law enforcement.[13] CEOP works in conjunction with New Scotland Yard Child Abuse Investigation Command which has its own hi-tech unit.[14]
SOCA acts as the UK point of contact for Interpol, Europol and the Schengen Information System.
In this capacity SOCA maintains the following functions:
SOCA takes over responsibility for dealing with suspicious activity reports (SARs), previously made to the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) under the money laundering legislation. NCIS received just under 200,000 SARs in 2005 and throughout its active life was widely critical of the banking and financial services sector, and the Financial Services Authority, for not being more transparent or forthcoming in reporting their customers suspicious activity.
Despite criticism from professional representative bodies that the disclosure rules are too broad, SOCA has said that up to one in three SARs lead to or add substantially to terrorism investigations; that HMRC estimates that around one in five SARs identifies new subjects of interest, and one in four SARs lead to direct tax enquiries; and that many arrests and confiscations of criminal assets.[15]
The Assets Recovery Agency became part of the Serious Organised Crime Agency from April 2008. The power to launch civil recovery proceedings has been extended to the three main prosecutors in England and Wales; the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the Revenue and Customs Prosecutions Office (RCPO) and the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). It will also be extended to the Public Prosecution Service in Northern Ireland and the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service in Scotland.[16]
Officers from the former National Hi-Tech Crime Unit (NHTCU) became SOCA's e-crime unit. However, the remit of this unit is much narrower than that of the body it replaced. In particular, the NHTCU had established a confidentiality charter to encourage victims of computer crime to contact the police in confidence, because many corporate victims in particular do not report attacks due to fears of bad publicity. The loss of the confidentiality charter has been widely criticised.[17][18] although similar protection is now provided by the same Act of Parliament used to create SOCA. The Metropolitan Police is to help bridge the gap left by the disbandment of the NHTCU through an expansion of its Computer Unit and the formation of the Police Central e-crime Unit (PCeU), which will work closely with the new National Fraud Reporting Centre (NFRC) from 2009.[19]
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