Sir, It is ridiculous to say that the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) would “abandon hunt for crime lords” (report, May 13). We continue to target and take action against these and other criminals judged to be causing harm to the UK, as is evident in our annual report, published today. We have also been working recently with police in England and Wales in a further exercise to identify more serious criminals from their records who will now be targeted jointly.

It is also wrong to say we have not prosecuted any of the 130 criminals identified in autumn 2006. At least 36 are either in prison (in the UK or abroad) or have been arrested by Soca and/or our partners. Most of the criminals judged to be causing most harm to the UK are subject to action by Soca and partners using the full range of our powers. Some criminals are based overseas and could not be brought before our courts, but are being addressed with our partners in other ways.

We said that our initial list of criminals was a point of departure, not a definitive statement about the scale of the problem. We continue to refine the intelligence on serious organised criminals as we have always said we would need to, given the poor state of the intelligence picture at Soca’s launch and changes in the criminal underworld.

It is also not true that “police officers are leaving Soca in droves”. Of the 148 former police officers who have left since Soca was formed, 46 of them retired, and we continue to receive applications from police officers to join Soca. Our staff turnover rate over all is lower than the public sector average and matched what we needed to balance our books.

William Hughes
Director-General, Soca

Sir, It will come as no surprise to many observers that Soca is being forced to change tack. Cocaine has become ubiquitous in Britain, largely because of Soca’s failure.

There was nothing wrong in principle with the Government handing the anti-drug trafficking duties of the Customs Investigation Service to Soca, along with its investigators and other resources, if Soca had been made to work.

It does not work, it is dysfunctional and unfit for purpose. There has been financial mismanagement (see National Audit Office reports). Its intelligence function, in particular, has gobbled resources yet is failing. The targeting of cocaine imports to the UK is way down on what went before (though Soca will no doubt spin figures about “upstream disruption”).

As your report says, Soca is riven by bad morale and remuneration and personnel issues. The hours spent by Soca investigators on direct enforcement activity are way down on the hours worked by those same officers when they worked for Customs & Excise or the National Crime Squad. They are less effective and much more expensive. Soca is more top-heavy.

The wider problem involves the uniformed part of Customs, which used to have an integrated intelligence role with Customs Investigation; it is now part of the new Border Agency and has no serious effective intelligence function.

The Border Agency has no Investigation Service back-up. When it detects “cold seizures”, it has to call on Soca to investigate. Soca has usually refused, even when faced with substantial amounts of Class A drugs) because it is, or has been, fixated on 200 or so “core criminals”. The Border Agency with a cold seizure or sound intelligence and a Soca refusal, has to scout around for a willing police force to investigate.

These lack the skills, surveillance techniques and technical resources, and using police forces for this work diverts resources from local policing and costs much more than formerly.

The UK capacity to deal with drug trafficking has been seriously damaged.

David Raynes
Member, International Task force on Strategic Drug Policy

Sir, Sean O’Neill has highlighted a failing of not just Soca but a malaise that runs through all police and British law enforcement agencies. It has been shown repeatedly in the past few years that poor intelligence coupled with a lack of experienced management leads to one public disaster after another. In an earlier report (Comment, April 29) O’Neill tells us of the “smouldering unhappiness” within the ranks of Soca. The exodus of top-tier law enforcement professionals from Soca is no surprise — they joined the Blair crusade with the belief that it would make a real difference but they are fighting with one arm tied behind their backs on restricted budgets and nobody interested. Serious politicians should stand up and support this organisation or it will inevitably fail.

Terry Bennett
Caterham, Surrey

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