The National Crime Agency (NCA) is a national law enforcement agency in the United Kingdom. It is the UK's lead agency against organised crime, human and drug trafficking, weapons and cybercrime, including economic crime that goes across regional and international borders, but it can be tasked to investigate any crime.
The NCA has a strategic role as part of which it looks at serious crime in aggregate across the UK, especially analysing how organised criminals are operating and how they can be disrupted. To do this, it works closely with regional organised crime units (ROCUs), local police forces, and other government departments and agencies. It is not a police force as such, but many of its employees do have the power of a constable.
It is the UK's point of contact for foreign agencies such as Interpol, Europol and other international law enforcement agencies. On a day-to-day basis, the NCA assists police forces and other law enforcement agencies (and vice versa) under voluntary assistance arrangements. In extremis, the NCA director general has the power to direct a chief officer of a police force to give directed assistance with NCA tasks where necessary (but only with consent of the relevant Secretary of State). The NCA itself can also be directed by the Secretary of State to give directed assistance to a police force or other law enforcement agency.
It was established in 2013 as a non-ministerial government department, replacing the Serious Organised Crime Agency and absorbed the previously separate Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (CEOP) as one of its commands. It also assumed a number of responsibilities from other law enforcement agencies.
The NCA has also assumed a range of functions from the National Policing Improvement Agency, which has been scrapped as part of the government's changes to policing. These include a specialist database relating to injuries and unusual weapons, expert research on potential serial killers, and the National Missing Persons Bureau. The agencies going into the NCA had a combined budget of yet the new agency only had £464 million in its first year—a decrease of 43%. Some of the responsibilities of the former UK Border Agency (now Immigration Enforcement and Border Force) relating to border policing also became part of the NCA. Like its predecessor SOCA, the NCA has been dubbed the "British FBI" by the media.
As of October 2021, the director general is Graeme Biggar.
History The proposed agency was first publicly announced in a statement to the House of Commons by Theresa May, the then home secretary, on 26 July 2010. On 8 June 2011, she declared that the NCA would comprise a number of distinct operational commands: Organised Crime, Border Policing, Economic Crime and the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre, and that it would house the National Cyber Crime Unit. She added that capabilities, expertise, assets and intelligence would be shared across the new agency; that each command would operate as part of one single organisation; and that the NCA would be a powerful body of operational crime fighters, led by a senior chief constable and accountable to the Home Secretary. In her statement to the House of Commons, May stated that the new agency would have the authority to "undertake tasking and coordination, ensuring appropriate action is taken to put a stop to the activities of organised crime groups".
In June 2011, the coalition government announced that SOCA's operations (serious drug trafficking investigative and intelligence sections) would be merged into a larger National Crime Agency to launch in 2013.
On 23 September 2011, the Home Affairs Select Committee called for the Metropolitan Police's counterterrorism role to be given to the NCA when it became operational, saying that the terrorist threat was a "national problem" and that there would be "advantages" in transferring responsibility. The Metropolitan Police raised concerns around the cost of such a move.
The Home Affairs Select Committee met again on 9 May 2014 to discuss counterterrorism. As a part of the report, the committee reconsidered the question of moving counterterrorism responsibilities to the NCA. The committee came to the conclusion that:
However, the report acknowledged that the NCA was still a new agency and that at the time it was not fully operational in Northern Ireland. Questions have been raised as to how effective this model would be and, with a limited budget, whether other responsibilities would suffer and not be resourced as properly as they should be. If the whole of Counter Terrorism Command were to transfer from the Metropolitan police to the NCA, the NCA would receive a further 1,500 officers or more if other counterterrorism units transferred in as well. It raised the question of what other national police units could be absorbed into the NCA, such as the National Wildlife Crime Unit, National Domestic Extremism and Disorder Intelligence Unit, National Vehicle Crime Intelligence Service and other units with a national remit from ACPO, the Metropolitan Police and other forces. Plans are being discussed for the second time of moving the Serious Fraud Office into the NCA.
The process of looking at moving counterterrorism into the NCA was put on hold on 9 October 2014 by Home Secretary Theresa May due to an increase in the terror threat level.
In October 2011, it was announced that Keith Bristow, the then Chief Constable of Warwickshire Police, would head the organisation.
The NCA came into existence under provisions granted by the Crime and Courts Act 2013, which received Royal Assent on 25 April 2013.
Until 20 May 2015, the agency was only able to carry out border and customs functions in Northern Ireland. This was due to the fact that under the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that led to a political settlement and power-sharing in Northern Ireland, policing was subjected to a far higher degree of community oversight and monitoring than in other parts of the UK. The chief constable and officers are responsible to the Policing Board.
Jurisdiction
Powers The NCA operates across the UK, respecting the devolution of policing in Scotland and Northern Ireland.
A large number of NCA officers, including Investigators, can be designated with the powers and privileges of a police constable, immigration officer, customs officer, or a general customs officer (or any combination of the four sets of powers) under Section 10 of the Courts and Crime Act 2013. When NCA officers are designated with all three sets of powers it is known as being triple warranted, or "tri-warranted".
Although NCA officers can be designated with the above powers, they do not hold the office of constable and are civil servants. This is a different legal position from that of police officers who serve in the various police forces of the UK. The NCA is not a police force but an operationally independent non-ministerial government department.
Scotland In Scotland, the NCA's operations and powers are limited to those inherited from its predecessor, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, and the powers to operate in Scotland are conditional on authorisation from the Lord Advocate and through co-operation with Police Scotland. Previously co-operation was with the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency (a police force which was responsible for similar matters in Scotland).
Northern Ireland In Northern Ireland, the NCA is "fully operational", through the passage of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 (National Crime Agency and Proceeds of Crime) (Northern Ireland) Order 2015 which extended provisions of the Crime and Courts Act 2013 to Northern Ireland. A general authorisation was signed by Minister of Justice for Northern Ireland and the director general granted trained and qualified NCA officers the powers of a constable in Northern Ireland. However, the NCA requires authorisation from the Chief Constable of the Police Service of Northern Ireland for the use of covert techniques.
Crown Dependencies
The NCA also has a role in assisting the Crown Dependencies, having assisted Guernsey and Jersey police on matters of serious crime. In December 2024, a joint investigation conducted by the NCA and the States of Jersey Police led to the disruption of a multi-million pound Russian money laundering network.
Challenges
The NCA faces several challenges. The first of these is the scale of the growing problem facing them. At the end of 2014 UK law enforcement estimated there were 5,800 organised crime groups – comprising some 40,600 individuals. This is an increase of three hundred organised crime groups and 3,500 people on the year before. The National Crime Agency estimates that there are as many as 50,000 people in the UK involved in the downloading and viewing of indecent images online. The director general of the NCA has suggested that the British public cannot expect every person viewing indecent images to enter the criminal justice system – not least because of the sheer scale of the problem. The NCA received 12,505 referrals from the National Centre for Missing and Exploited Children in its first 12 months, compared to 9,855 in 2012, an increase of almost 27 per cent. Tackling modern slavery is another area that the Home Secretary has identified as requiring more effort. The Home Office's Chief Scientific Adviser estimates that there may have been as many as 13,000 potential victims of modern slavery in the UK in 2013. This figure was increased in August 2017 to "tens of thousands of victims". Most will rely on the services of organised criminal groups at some point in their journey to the UK.
In addition to this the NCA has been tasked with the Rotherham investigation into child sex exploitation. According to the NCA there are 3,300 lines of enquiry, around 1,400 victims and 300 suspects.
The second challenge, of funding and resources, links with the first challenge. Although the NCA budget is half a billion pounds, in proportion to the scale of the problem it is small. The combined budget of previous agencies and units that make up the NCA was almost a billion pounds, so the agency has had an almost 50% cut before its creation. The NCA has 5000 staff, only around 1250 of which are investigators, again small when faced with the problem. For the Rotherham investigation the NCA has had to bring in agency staff who are ex-police to assist with the scale of the investigation.
Thirdly there is the challenge of the "failure" of its predecessor agencies, SOCA and the National Crime squad and the fact that its success needs to be judged over years and not months due to the nature of the threat. SOCA was criticised for poor management and that some staff had poor investigation skills due to not working in law enforcement before. It is suggested that around 300 police detectives left SOCA due to this. With the NCA having the same staff this could be an issue. The NCA has already been criticised for not seizing enough assets (even though they seized more than SOCA in their last year of operation as well as using a search warrant that was judged to be illegal after staff at the agency were "deliberately trying to stretch the boundaries imposed upon such investigation agencies by the statutory scheme under which they operate". The judge Gary Hickinbottom stated though "This case smacks of incompetence, not bad faith."
Organisational structure
The NCA is organised into eight operational branches, overseen by seven directors, who are in turn overseen by a director general, assisted by a deputy director general. The commands are as follows:
Border Policing Command CEOP Command Economic Crime Command Organised Crime Command Intelligence Operations Specialist Capabilities Proceeds of Crime Centre