Britain’s underworld bosses have a five per cent chance of seeing the inside of a prison cell after decades of poor police intelligence and investigations, the head of the country’s new serious organised crime agency has admitted.

Sir Stephen Lander, the head of Britain’s answer to the FBI, said yesterday that many crime chiefs, knowing they are safe from prosecution, have set up bases abroad and continue to operate their networks.

The result says Sir Stephen, chairman of the 4,000-strong Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca), is that “if you’re an organised crook for 20 years you have a five per cent chance of being nicked”.

Soca was created last year by the merger of the National Crime Squad, the National Criminal Intelligence Service, sections of Customs and the Immigration Service.

The agency has a budget of £400 million and 4,000 agents but Sir Stephen says that it has been hamstrung by a mass of old, useless intelligence; 380 different IT systems that are incompatible, and insufficient funds.

Police chiefs and ministers are celebrating the conviction last week of Terry Adams, one of the most powerful crime bosses in the country, but Sir Stephen has a sobering message for them.

He warns that there are many other crime chiefs and families operating in Britain but that law enforcement agencies know little about them or what makes them flourish.

After decades of work by Scotland Yard, regional crime squads, Customs units and the National Crime Squad and the National Criminal Intelligence Squad, Sir Stephen said there was still a serious intelligence deficit.

In a speech released yesterday Sir Stephen, a former director-general of the Security Service, admitted that the agency’s annual crime threat assessment for ministers is a “statement of how little we know about the serious organised crime. And we do know very little.”

He said the agency had 178 “lines of issues that we need to know about: the who, what, why, when, where, questions about organised crime. And for most of them our state of knowledge is poor.”

“It’s because we’ve not been systematic about capturing that information or going out to find things. So things you would think we would have known we don’t,” he said.

Soca is building up pictures not just on the drug dealers but how the business operates, ways of sabotaging the trade and what will push up prices. Sir Stephen said: “This organisation needs to be knowledge before action.”

Now after 18 months of work a team of 40 Soca staff has waded through thousands of inherited files and dumped many because they are nothing to do with organised crime.

After sifting through the 56,000 people recorded on the Ncis database Soca is targeting 2,000 who are considered to be crucial.

Speaking at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies at King’s College London at a meeting sponsored by The Times, Sir Stephen said that the new agency faced an underworld that included an estimated 300 major drug importers, 3,000 drug wholesalers and 70,000 street dealers.

The drugs trade is estimated to have a turnover of £7-£8 billion a year. Sir Stephen said the drug trade was so endemic that 85 per cent of British bank-notes were contaminated with heroin or cocaine.

And looking at the drugs world had been “quite a sobering experience” Sir Stephen said. In one unnamed northern town Soca and police found 50 crime gangs smuggling drugs for a population of less than 100,000. Sir Stephen said: “This is quite a frightening situation.”

Fraud could be generating a profit of £14 billion a year and hitting at some of the weakest and most vulnerable in society with worthless shares and dubious prize draws.

The agency has been attacked for lack of results and poor morale. Sir Stephen admits that morale is mixed. But Soca is already looking at record seizures of cocaine at home and abroad and Sir Stephen said that the agency will not rely on traditional methods.

Gang leaders leaving prison will for example face new restrictions written into their licences. Others are being persuaded to help the prosecutors.

A high price

- Organised crime costs the UK up to £40 billion per annum

- Profits lie in class A drugs trade, human trafficking, fraud, money laundering, prostitution and smuggling

- In addition, as the illegal music trade booms, British criminals earn an estimated £480 million a year from the sale of pirated DVDs and CDs

- The abuse of Class A drugs is estimated to cost £13 billion a year, while organised immigration crime is estimated to cost £3 billion

- Britain’s own version of the Godfather, 52-year-old Terry Adams, was jailed last week after admitting money laundering

- Adams’ organisation was involved in drugs, extortion and protection rackets, amassed an estimated £100 million and was linked to a score of murders Source: Times database & the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

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