At the heart of the creation of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) was the radical realisation that traditional policing was never going to catch Britain’s most dangerous criminals.

Tony Blair conducted the official launch at Downing Street in 2006, announcing that Soca was going to make life “hell” for the men and women who run the £40 billion organised crime industry in Britain.

Soca would borrow intelligence-gathering techniques from MI5 and MI6 to create a picture of the wealthy individuals behind organised crime and how they go about their business here and overseas.

It would poach methods from the world of counter-terrorism, seeking to disrupt and destroy criminal networks without necessarily prosecuting them through the courts.

Experts in finance and accounting would go after the money, the property, the sports cars and the artworks, hitting the Mr Bigs where it would hurt them most – in their pockets and bank accounts.

But somehow, say the critical voices from within, that vision has become blurred. Soca’s chiefs are good at articulating the idea but not so good at translating it into action.

The critics portray an organisation that is cautious and bureaucratic, overburdened with managers and inexperienced at the sharp end.

They also say that the agency’s original mission statement – to tackle the types of criminality that cause most harm – was too vague really to mean anything. Soca has not yet, the critics say, begun to make life hell for the criminals.

One insider said that even large drug seizures seemed to have little impact on the activities of the big traffickers. He added: “When we take a load of stuff out the bad guys hardly ever flinch. Sometimes it is not even an inconvenience.”

Soca finds it difficult to talk about its work – much of which is necessarily secret – and cannot trumpet all its successes. It had a covert role in the Ipswich prostitute murders inquiry, for example, that has not previously been revealed.

But it is also an organisation that cannot really be judged by the traditional methods of measuring crime figures and totting up jail terms.

Organised crime is a complex and dangerous problem that will not be cracked simply by kicking down doors and arresting footsoldiers.

Alison Saunders, who works closely with Soca at the Crown Prosecution Service, pleads for patience: “Two years ago we didn’t have an organisation that only dealt with organised crime – people in Italy and the United States couldn’t believe it when I told them that.

“There has been a cultural change in the way the UK looks at and tackles organised crime and that takes time.”

Perhaps the biggest problem facing Soca is that its masters are politicians and civil servants who prefer short-term, easily achievable aims. In the past 12 months ministers have set about cutting Soca’s budget while at the same time setting new targets and adding to its workload.

Whitehall is already buzzing with whispers about the agency’s performance and future.

But it would be wrong for politicians to dismantle the organisation and scupper a genuinely radical approach to tackling the menace of organised crime. As Misha Glenny points out in his new book McMafia, the threat posed to our society by organised crime is much more sinister than that of terrorism.

“In terms of the death and misery caused, terrorism is a primitive and relatively insignificant species,” he writes. “Crime and the pursuit of money and political power have proved incomparably more damaging over the last two decades.”

Soca has problems, but they are not insoluble. It appears to need more streamlined management and a more focused approach. Perhaps it needs to learn from the criminal gangs it deals with and be a bit more ruthless about going after them.

Prime assets

£400m Soca’s operational budget for 2008-09

£46m criminal assets seized by it last year

4,000 Soca officers and staff

140 Agents stationed overseas

90 sites house Soca staff, 40 of them overseas

40% of Soca’s operational effort is directed against drug smuggling

Sources: Stationery Office; Soca; Home Office

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