Plans to create British 'FBI' shelved until after election

Plans to form a British "FBI" by merging three national crime squads have been shelved until after the next general election.

Security chiefs considered joining the National Crime Squad (NCS), parts of Customs and Excise and the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) to form one elite force responsible for combating organised criminals, including drug barons.

Downing Street ordered the review of the national crime-fighting forces amid concerns that their ability to tackle serious and organised crime was being damaged by rivalry, inefficiency and overlap between the agencies. The idea is understood to have been championed by John Birt, a former director general of the BBC, when he was advising Tony Blair on crime issues in 2000.

But despite finding evidence that agencies did not always share information with each other and that a merger could improve crime fighting and be cheaper in the long term, any plans for an FBI-style organisation have been put on hold.

Sources have indicated that Whitehall has not abandoned the issue of a single super-agency and is likely to review it after the next election.

Ministers feared that cultural differences in the new agency would lead to friction in the initial period of the merger and senior officers would want to protect their patches or engage in empire-building. This, said the source, would inevitably hamper investigations and reduce police intelligence effectiveness while the new force was bedding down.

"The police forces and Customs already achieve a great deal on their own and it's not clear that the sum of their parts would be a more effective single law enforcement agency," a senior security source said.

For this reason ministers were not prepared to suffer the short-term political consequences of an under-achieving national crime-fighting force, the source added.

The NCIS, which has an annual budget of £93m and a staff of 1,200, draws up intelligence packages and assessments on different types of organised crime as well as information on Britain's top criminals. This information is passed on to Britain's police forces. The NCS has a budget of £130m for 1,330 detectives and 420 support staff. The NCS concentrates on serious and organised criminals and spends three quarters of its time in operations against drug traffickers.

Customs and Excise has a £1bn budget that includes about 350 officers in the National Intelligence Division, which gathers information on drug-dealers and traffickers, and 1,500 operational officers belonging to the National Investigation Service.

A small number of criminal intelligence officers from MI5, the Security Service, also work with the three agencies.

David Lock, chairman of the service authorities for the NCIS and the NCS, which oversee the running of the organisations, said: "This is a decision for ministers, not those of us in the agencies. The key to tackling serious crime is to continue making greater use of people's specialities by getting them to work together more rather than fighting turf wars or trying to redesign a perfect new agency. There is still room for improvement but the NCIS, National Crime Squad, Customs and the larger police forces are more joined up and are more focused than ever before and are having a greater impact in disrupting and dismantling serious and organised criminal businesses."