Collaboration across bordering areas

Particularly in large urban areas, supply operations may not reflect Local Authority or Police Command Unit boundaries. Indeed, some individuals will work across boundaries for meetings to sell organised by mobile phone. Some locations, such as stations, are often based at the join of administrative areas.  In these cases it is essential that possible displacement effects are fully taken into account in consultation with police services and local authorities in neighbouring areas.

Working across boundaries requires force led and regional strategy.

Within forces individual BCUs should be working closely with neighbouring BCUs to look at bordering issues and how valuable intelligence should be shared, not just formally with FIB’s, but informally.

Force wide there should be a strategy for handling middle market dealers who span BCU’s and each BCU should have a clear understanding of what is expected of them  - especially in the form of intelligence sharing.

At cross force level, NCS should play a clear role in mapping persons who act criminally across force boundaries as part of their support for Regional tasking and Co-ordination groups. Force Intelligence Bureaux should actively supply NCS with intelligence for this purpose. The regional tasking group is the right forum for tasking cross border initiatives to tackle these suppliers, working closely with NCIS and Customs. The capacity required at regional level should of course be agreed and resourced as required by the relevant chief constables, using their main budgets or such funding is available from central government.

There is considerable value in a regional availability group which works to the regional tasking group and which mirrors the local availability groups, drawing in partners outside of the police who can help with understanding markets regionally and providing solutions, but the core membership is the police. Such a group should be engaged in doing the detailed development and co-ordination work that underpins regional cross force collaboration

Further evaluations of other teams in Liverpool and South Wales is underway and will be published when it is complete