Q162 Mr. Dave Anderson: You have brought together three public sector groups, Mr Hughes, and you are also dealing with two public sector groups in the Republic. How do you decide who is going to take the lead, is there a criterion or do you sit and talk about it or what?

Mr Hughes: This will be an area where with all multi-agency work it is decided in a gold, silver, bronze structure, so at the gold level, the strategic level, you would decide who is going to take the lead, who is going to take primacy, in relation to a particular matter. The reasons for that can be many; one agency may be further ahead with the intelligence gathering, who have been dealing with it for some time, it may be a geographical issue that they are better placed to deal with where the main protagonists will be operating, it may be because - for example with SOCA now - where there is a money laundering or financial aspect to it then people may allow us to take the lead because we are further advanced and have a bigger set-up in relation to financial investigation as well. In every one of our investigations in SOCA, not only when we are looking operationally to put people before the courts, we are also running a parallel financial investigation at the same time. This is not an add-on or a bolt-on, it is done at the same time. To answer your question, there can be multi-criteria but we are not precious about who does it.

Q163 Mr. Dave Anderson: How does it work in practice? Have there been any conflicts?

Mr Hughes: No. One of the issues that I was pleased to see, and I am sorry it may sound as if I am digressing, in the recent Green Paper the Home Office has recognised that the setting of targets does not always help. The danger that we have had in the past in law enforcement is that different areas of law enforcement have been set competing targets; this is not a recipe for collaborative working. In the absence of those now we are finding it much easier to work in collaboration. Measures of effectiveness, yes, we are all signed up to that, but setting targets does not always help, so that has taken away some of that issue.

Q164 Mr. Dave Anderson: Mr Lauder, I believe you are responsible for Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Mr Lauder: Yes.

Q165 Mr. Dave Anderson: Does that give you problems in terms of the skills and resources you have in Northern Ireland actually doing the job you want to do? If that is the case do you therefore rely on the other bodies to support you?

Mr Lauder: I do not think it presents a particular problem because we do make great play on working in partnership and working together and where there are strengths and weaknesses we would look to get support from, if it was in Ireland, from PSNI or HMRC so it is a mutual benefit. There are some areas where we may have more developed technology than others and on the other side there will be areas where we really need to work in partnership to get the support we need from police forces both in Scotland and in Northern Ireland. The legislation in Scotland is fairly defined in terms of how we operate there and during the three years we have been in existence we have benefited greatly from that partnership working. It is about realisation of common goals; we are all there to do the same things, we are not in competition. If the objective is achieved in terms of harming those criminals who are active then that satisfies our need, so it is about mutual support and using the assets we have in terms of the skill base for our staff or technical skills or whatever, and it is to use them to the best effect in the area that we need to deploy them.

Mr Hughes: It is an important question because of course SOCA being a UK-wide law enforcement agency means that all the resources are available wherever they are required and we do not operate necessarily on a geographical basis. Yes, we are based in geographical offices purely because we have to be somewhere, but that means we can operate everywhere within the United Kingdom and indeed we have back-up teams for our liaison officers overseas: if they run into issues then we can send officers out to them, and we did that recently in a case in Sierra Leone where we had a fast reaction team that were able to go to their support as well. The answer to your question is we will put the resources in. The second point is - and I do not know whether this is where you are going but it may be important in the context of Northern Ireland - that we would not operate without letting the PSNI control know where we were and what we were doing. It is a very strong working bond between ourselves and PSNI in that regard.

Q168 Mr. Dave Anderson: Most of us probably agree that if you talk about targets they have probably been given more emphasis than they probably should have but at the other end of the scale is results. Can you assure us that what you have put together in quite short timescales is performing better than previously and, if it is, where is the evidence?

Mr Hughes: The simple answer to that is yes, it is performing better than it did before. That is no criticism of what went before, it is because we have a bigger agency in order to do that, and I am talking about particularly about asset recovery in Northern Ireland, that is what we are primarily dealing with here. The results we publish every year in our annual report which we lay before Parliament and we gave an undertaking that we would show aggregated results and also where we have been working in Scotland and Northern Ireland also, and those figures will be put together and reported upon at the end of the year. All of the agencies through the Organised Crime Task Force in Northern Ireland aggregate all the figures together, so they are not split between various agencies in that regard. We will demonstrate what we have done across the United Kingdom and where it is possible - because obviously we operate as a complete unit now rather than separate entities - we will try and break it down but in the main the report will be the sum of SOCA’s work on asset recovery across the United Kingdom.

This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee. Neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.

The full transcript may be read here.

Promoted by Paul Foy on behalf of Dave Anderson, both of St Cuthbert's Church Hall, Shibdon Road, Blaydon, NE21 5PT