§ Mr. CohenTo ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department what consideration he has given to setting up a national criminal intelligence unit along the lines of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States and as to what purposes it would have which are not adequately covered by existing policing; and if he will make a statement.
§ Mr. Peter LloydThe developing challenge of serious criminal activity across local, regional and national borders requires effective enforcement counter-measures, based on the best intelligence. As my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr. Hurd) said in his speech to the Police Superintendents Association annual conference on 26 September, we need to make sure that these new needs are met. We have therefore initiated consultations with the Association of Chief Police Officers who have accordingly set up a working party on our criminal intelligence arrangements to assess the case for a national criminal intelligence unit, as part of the strengthening of police co-operation at home and internationally to deal with serious cross-border crime.
Any such unit will be necessarily different from that of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States of America, and will need to take account both of existing national intelligence arrangements for specific kinds of crime, notably drugs, and our system of locally based police forces and regional crime squads.