The Role of the NCA

The NCA’s mission is to protect the public from serious and organised crime (SOC), which affects UK citizens more often than any other national security threat. It will achieve this by targeting high-harm, high-impact criminals and organised crime groups (OCGs), leading the wider law enforcement system to reduce the SOC threat.

In 2023 the NCA launched an ambitious long-term Strategy (2023-2028) which sets out how the Agency will perform our operational role more effectively. We also surpassed our ‘operational tilt’ target to grow high impact disruptions against the most harmful criminals in the UK and overseas by 20%, achieving 37% growth with 364 high impact disruptions. This places us in a strong position to meet the target of growing the Agency’s disruptions against the most harmful criminals and groups by 50% in the next year.

Over the next five years the Agency will achieve this strategy by focusing its activity on the four priorities below:
Degrading the most harmful organised crime groups
Leading the UK’s operational response
Transforming the Agency’s capabilities
Growing a highly skilled workforce

In order to counter the threat most effectively, the Agency’s operational focus is the SOC risk to the UK that is: Overseas, Online, Upstream.

The NCA collaborates with a range of UK and international law enforcement partners. Within Scotland, a significant representation of this is the Organised Crime Partnership (OCP), which sees officers from both the NCA and Police Scotland collaboratively responding to the most harmful SOC threats impacting on Scotland.

The Agency and OCP ensure opportunities are identified and taken to disrupt subjects of interest (SOIs), through the criminal justice system and civil routes. The Agency and OCP also proactively progress a wide range of disruptive and preventative activites to deliver a holistic approach to tackling the SOC threat. This work is coordinated under the 4D objectives used by the Scottish Multi-Agency Strategic Threat Assessment (SMASTA): Detect, Disrupt, Deter, Divert. These objective are compatible and complimentary to the 4P objectives used by the wider NCA: Pursue, Prevent, Protect, Prepare.

Additionally, the NCA develops, maintains and deploys a range of national and international capabilities. These are accessible by all UK police forces and SOC LE partners to manage risks.

The NCA’s 2022/23 Performance Ambitions

In the 2022-23 financial year, the Agency committed to targeting the most harmful criminals and the individuals and infrastructure that enable them. The Agency focused on high-complexity and high-impact operations and improved prioritisation to ensure the most appropriate system partner delivered operations. Within Scotland, the ambitions were:

Continue to achieve NCA-led disruptions in Scotland to build on our achievements in 2021/22

Maximise the impact of our capability deployments in support of the SOC response in Scotland

The NCA has recently introduced the 2023/24 Performance Ambition.

The NCA is working with Police Scotland and partners to ensure the Agency’s five year strategy maximises opportunities to tackle SOC. The NCA is taking a geographic approach based on threat, risk and harm within Scotland to focus capabilities. The NCA and Police Scotland have a process to assess the most harmful SOC offenders/groups in Scotland and a route to task action for either the Agency to lead or support tactical activity.

What we do in Scotland

There has been a 65% increase in NCA support to Police Scotland in 2022/23, compared to the previous year (33 disruptions). There has also been a 36% (24 disruptions) increase in higher impact NCA lead disruptions compared to 2021/22. This indicates more significant, and longer term, impact on SOC.