Chair of SOCA ‘underestimated’ role

The chair of the Serious and Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) has said that he had underestimated the challenges he faced as chair of the newly created agency when it was created more than three years ago.
Sir Stephen Lander, who is due to step down from his role, told a Home Affairs Select Committee meeting that he had not foreseen the extent of the challenge he faced when he took on the role four years ago and said some of the difficulties resulted from the information and systems inherited from the precursor agencies.
Asked whether SOCA was delivering as expected, and if he felt a “sense of disappointment” about his time there, he said his tenure had been a “fascinating episode”, but one that had come with expected teething problems.
“To be honest, I underestimated some of the organisational difficulties that we had in the beginning,” he said.
An example of this was the decision to target 35 drug barons based on information inherited by the agency – some of whom had since died.
“We had to start somewhere with the records we inherited and we tried to pull out the key people from that,” said Sir Stephen. “We have certainly had teething problems but you show me a merger and acquisition that does not. I am absolutely confident that we have the right people now.”
He also admitted that aspirations presented to the public on the agency’s establishment were too high. However, he said that within the agency there was always realism, and that SOCA has now completed a very successful third year and he has every confidence that the agency will continue to develop.
“The expectations were very high and rightly so – and we took a little time to get there – but we are getting there and we have a lot to show for the money that was invested in us.”
Sir Stephen also defended SOCA’s performance, saying that its success was not easy to measure and that too much emphasis was placed on money seized from criminals, instead of the wider disruption the agency causes to serious and organised crime.
“It is difficult to prove monetary worth but it is the right thing for an agency of this size, in this position, to be concentrating on outcomes not on inputs,” he said.