National Crime Agency

As their strategic partner, one area where we supported the NCA was on a five-year transformation of their digital capabilities, that has set them on course to keep pace with technology-driven changes in criminal behaviour.

Meeting digitally-enabled crime head on

The internet has become a forceful enabler of SOC. Criminals can hide behind services offering anonymity, encryption, and the ability to masquerade as somebody else. To continue to protect the UK public from SOC, the NCA needed to better disrupt online-enabled crimes, both those coordinated from the UK and overseas that affect the UK. This called for a robust, whole-system approach that included increased cooperation with the Agency’s key partners in the UK and internationally.

Operationalising an ambitious mission

In our role as strategic partner, we drew on our experience working across the law enforcement ecosystem to guide the Agency’s approach. Our team, with expertise in strategy, organisational design, programme delivery, data analytics, HR and change, designed a dynamic strategic framework informed by a ten year forward-thinking view of the SOC threat landscape. The Agency used this as one of its sources to write a new five-year strategy, with enhanced operational capabilities and digital skills at the heart of the NCA’s new strategic approach to disrupt SOC upstream, overseas and online.

Following our work to support the creation and publication of the NCA’s new five-year strategy, we worked with the NCA to fundamentally redesign how the Agency worked. Our team supported the development of threat-specific strategies for different crime types, ensuring NCA officers have enhanced roadmaps to better reduce threats by exploiting new technologies as they emerge.

Aligning agency-wide intelligence

Intelligence is at the heart of the NCA's operations. However, there have been growing challenges with the ever-increasing amounts of data coming from digital sources such as hard drives, social media, and international databases. Working alongside the NCA, our team mapped out the processes and systems needed to enhance data capture and mobilisation across the NCA and its partners and carefully balanced the new approach with established international law and policy.

We also helped establish the new National Data Exploitation Capability (NDEC) designed to deliver industrial-scale data analytics, building the foundation for a suite of data-driven products that will underpin intelligence relating to criminal activity. With a centralised view, automated processes, and reporting features, NDEC will empower NCA officers to quickly identify crime, link together criminal activity, and predict future threats.

Embedding a data culture

As technology continues to open new communication pathways for criminals, the NCA needed to ensure it could monitor and disrupt them. We supported the agency as it began to pinpoint the skills it needed to do this in-house and shaped its workforce strategy.

Our experts provided insights into how the NCA should attract, recruit, and retain a workforce equipped to navigate the future threat landscape and the role it must play in continually upskilling staff. Key to this was the creation of the Digital Literacy Project, a programme of training that upskilled officers in areas including data protection, information security, and government security classifications.

Driving greater disruption in crime

Today, the NCA is disrupting more crime than ever before. In 2023, the agency’s intelligence helped seize over 200 tonnes of Class A drugs globally; prevented 260,000 frauds; and enabled UK policing to safeguard approximately 11,000 children¹. A clearer strategy, resilient operations, and enhanced capabilities, such as NDEC, have played a critical role, allowing the agency to quickly identify crimes and save 1.25 million officer hours to date.

¹ National Crime Agency annual report and accounts: 2023 to 2024. Published 9 August 2024.