Organised criminals are exploiting gaps in policing created as officers become more concerned with hitting government targets and fighting terrorism, senior figures in the Metropolitan Police have warned.

The Serious Organised Crime Agency cannot cope with the spread of organised crime so it is left to local officers to deal with the problems in their area. They, however, are tied up dealing with neighbourhood issues, officers have claimed.

At the other end of the scale specialist officers are being taken away from their posts tackling organised crime in order to deal with the fight against terrorism.

It has left what Commander Sharon Kerr, from the Specialist Crime Directorate, has called an “ungoverned space” because of a lack of ministerial focus and a lack of focus by local policing units.

Ms Kerr – who deals with serious and organised crime at the Metropolitan Police – speaking at the recent European Serious Organised Crime Conference in Liverpool, said: “We have a real focus on volume crime and neighbourhood policing with quite a narrow set of targets.

“At the high end there is counter-terrorism policing. But in between we have an exponential growth in serious and organised crime – manifesting itself in all kinds of ways; from Chinese DVD sellers, which can involve murders, trafficking and kidnap – to Romanian gangs of bag snatchers again using young children trafficked into the United Kingdom.

“I think there is an expectation, since the creation of the Serious Organised Crime Agency, that they will be able to pick up all the organised crime problems, but that is simply impossible.

“At the moment we are losing the skilled officers we need to tackle the issue, to areas like neighbourhood policing.”

At the conference Ms Kerr told Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary, that she was worried that tackling serious and organised crime was becoming a “Cinderella service”.

Her fears are backed up by other senior officers, including the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Sir Ian Blair, the highest-ranking officer in the country.

He said that organised criminals were taking advantage of the holes in policing that were appearing.

“I think law enforcement struggles to find appropriate organisational structures at regional and international level. Globalisation, increased migration and local law enforcement arrangements are encouraging criminal networks to take advantage of ungoverned space.

“Worrying trends are emerging in relation to the nature and sheer size of recent drug seizures in London. Additionally, a significant number of firearms, often automatic weapons, are turning up in London and other UK cities, having been sourced in other EU states. Thirdly, as an example, the Romanian pickpocket gangs are not a myth.”

Another problem was that the Government did not see organised crime as a priority, unlike volume crime, because it did not fall within performance targets, according to Bernard Hogan-Howe, the Chief Constable of Liverpool.

He said: “It is not often that someone will ask me ‘How are we doing against organised crime?’ We will let each other down if we fail to ask that question more.”

He said that it was hard to show the public what a good job his officers were doing against organised crime as a lot of it was done behind the scenes – dealing with intelligence and bringing a case together.

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