The special squad set up to take on the barons of organised crime has gone back to the drawing board after prosecuting only a handful of the 130 figures it aimed to bring to book.

Experienced officers are leaving the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) “in droves” and the organisation’s original hitlist has been shelved, The Times has learnt.

Sources said that it had spent two years pursuing a flawed strategy on the basis of poor intelligence.

Soca, which publishes its annual report this week, identified 130 crime barons it believed were controlling the drugs trade, human-trafficking and racketeering in Britain.

Just a few of those key figures have been prosecuted and Soca has used groundbreaking powers to strike plea-bargain deals with supergrasses only seven times since 2006.

Insiders say that the hitlist has been shelved after investigations revealed that many of the names on it were of minor importance.

Soca, which has had its budget slashed by the Home Office, has gone back to the drawing board and switched its focus to more than 500 criminal organisations involving 15,000 individuals.

One source said: “Up until recently we were focusing on what we thought were the top 130 criminals. Sadly, as we looked at them, a lot were much lower down the ladder or, in some instances, dead. Basically we’ve wasted two years and if we could not cope with 130, how the hell are we going to cope with that amount?”

The difficulty in building up a reliable intelligence picture of organised crime is just one of Soca’s problems. According to sources who have contacted The Times from various departments within the agency:

— Soca is paralysed by a top-heavy management structure that has created rival fiefdoms. In addition to a chairman, director-general and ten-member board of directors, there are 31 deputy directors.

— The agency’s creaking computer systems,including intelligence databases, can only support limited numbers of users and many cannot share information with each other.

— 148 former police officers — many of whom were cherry-picked to join the unit — have retired or returned to policing, complaining of a lack of enforcement activity.

A source said: “The experienced police officers are leaving in droves owing to management inefficiencies and incompetence and we are being left with a lot of very clever analysts and the like who wouldn’t know a Mr Big if he pulled out a gun and pointed it at their heads.”

Despite the retention of so many analysts, however, Soca failed to produce its Strategic Threat Assessment — one of its few public documents — last year and has not produced one since July 2006.

Soca was hailed as Britain’s answer to the FBI when it was launched in 2006. It operates across Britain and has more than a hundred agents stationed overseas.

Designed to combine policing and intelligence, its part-time chairman is Sir Stephen Lander, former head of MI5, while William Hughes, former head of the National Crime Squad, is director-general.

But internal critics have told The Times that the two men have failed to exert authority over an organisation that has become overburdened with senior managers.

The agency, which is responsible for tackling money laundering and financial crime, has also had to admit in its most recent accounts that there were significant weaknesses in its own internal accounting procedures.

David Davis, the Shadow Home Secretary, said: “It is alarming to hear reports that, two years after its creation, so many problems appear to be afflicting Soca.

“Serious and organised crime is not only a growing problem in its own right. It also fuels other crime, across the spectrum, which in turn causes misery to victims up and down the country. Yet Labour still appear unable to get a grip on it.”

But Alison Saunders, head of the Crown Prosecution Service’s Organised Crime Division, aruged that expectations of Soca had been too high at its inception.

She pointed to the difficult task of amalgamating a range of different bodies, including the National Crime Squad and the enforcement arm of HM Customs, to form the new agency, and to the complications of building up intelligence.

Mrs Saunders said: “If you are going to be an intelligence-led organisation — which I believe is the way forward for fighting organised crime — you have to take time to get the intelligence right. I think they are now getting it right. The picture we see now is much more joined up and much more effective.”

Mrs Saunders said that her team had a conviction rate of more than 90 per cent in Soca cases and that the caseload was increasing.

A spokesman for Soca denied that it had changed tack in its approach to fighting organised crime.

“Soca is still actively targeting the key criminals judged to be the most harmful to the UK,” he said. “We always said we inherited a poor intelligence picture and would continue to refine the intelligence.

“It is completely wrong to say this approach has been abandoned. In fact we have recently been working with police in England and Wales in a parallel exercise which has identified thousands more criminals in their records who will now be targeted jointly and also added to our records.

“We have always said there was a lot of work to do to take inherited staff, IT, estates, intelligence and systems and make them function efficiently for the new remit.”

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