Major areas of work
SOCA’s main functions are set out in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA). These are:
- preventing and detecting serious organised crime and contributing to the reduction of such crime in other ways and to lessening its consequences; and,
- gathering, storing, analysing and disseminating information relevant to the prevention, detection, investigation or prosecution of offences, or the reduction of crime in any other ways, or the mitigation of its consequences.
Putting it more simply, and in the words of the 2004 White Paper One Step Ahead, SOCA’s job is to reduce the harm caused to the UK by serious organised crime.
In addition, we provide support to UK law enforcement partners, notably UK police forces, HM Revenue and Customs, and the UK Border Agency.
Home Office priorities
Under SOCPA, the Home Secretary sets SOCA’s strategic priorities. This was first done in June 2005, to cover the first three years of SOCA’s existence, and confirmed at SOCA’s launch. The priorities set by the then Home Secretary were:
- SOCA should devote a higher proportion of its resources and activity to intelligence than the agencies that it replaces;
- Class A drugs and organised immigration crime should be its top priorities, and in that order;
- we should also work to counter other identified threats from organised crime, including fraud against individuals and the private sector, hi-tech crime, counterfeiting, the use of firearms and serious robbery; and,
- recovering the proceeds of crime should be a priority.
In October 2007 the then Home Secretary reaffirmed Class A drug trafficking and people smuggling and trafficking, in that order, as SOCA’s priorities. She also directed that SOCA should make firearms an additional priority, recognising that this would require some revision of priorities elsewhere.
Find out more now
You can read about SOCA’s main functions in the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 (SOCPA)
There’s more about SOCA’s remit in the 2004 White Paper One Step Ahead (571.55 kB PDF) and in our Annual Plan (243.07 kB PDF)
Where possible we have included downloadable files in Adobe PDF format. To view these files you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader which you can download free from Adobe’s website:
