NCA launches the National Strategic Assessment 2026

The threats we face — from drugs to child sexual abuse, from people smuggling to fraud and cyber-attacks — have always been serious.

But something fundamental has changed.

Technology is no longer simply a tool that criminals use. It is reshaping crime itself: accelerating it, globalising it, and making it more harmful.

That is the central finding of this year's Assessment , and I want to set out what that means — not just for the NCA, but for law enforcement.

Because if the nature of crime is transforming, then so must our response.

I also want to pay tribute to the 6,000 officers of the NCA.

Every one of them brings skill and dedication to the task of protecting the public.

I am proud of what they do.

The threats are serious. The public should be reassured that so too is our response.

The assessment shows that last year, overall, the threat from serious and organised crime increased.

Technology has enabled criminals to get smarter, faster and more connected, to each other and to victims.

I will focus on three areas today: drugs, organised immigration crime, and crime online.

Drugs remain the single biggest driver of serious crime in the UK.

The scale of the problem is growing.

Cocaine production in South America is at a record high, and wholesale prices at an historic low.

The heroin market remains broadly stable, but we are seeing it cut with synthetic opioids, making it much more dangerous.

Ketamine use has surged — the number of adults seeking treatment has increased ten-fold in a decade, and the number of under 18s seeking treatment has tripled in just three years.

And new technology is playing a key role in this old crime. It is being used:

I’ll expand on two of these.

Synthetic opioids pose the biggest risk.

Second, criminals are getting more inventive in attempting to hide drugs as they cross borders.

We are seeing more 'chemical concealments', where cocaine is altered at a molecular level to bond with another material — charcoal, glue, plastic.

It crosses the border as something innocent, and is extracted at the other end.

The cocaine is not hidden inside a box of bananas. It is the box of bananas.

This is organised crime operating at the technological frontier. And our response has grown in sophistication to match it.

Last year, with international partners, we seized a staggering 230 tonnes of class A drugs, mostly cocaine.

A material proportion of that would have been destined for the UK, where it would have had a street value of over £18bn.

And we are targeting criminals in the UK too.

Through our Operation Venetic, following the takedown of EncroChat encrypted phones in 2020, we and policing have now secured 2,437 convictions, mostly of serious drug criminals.

The conclusion I draw is that, while we need to respond to a range of new challenges, we cannot take our eyes off the drug threat.

It has always caused a lot of harm, it is evolving fast, and we need to stay on top of it.

Organised immigration crime

The second threat I will talk is organised immigration crime.

Migrant demand to reach the UK unlawfully continues to be high, and the conflict in Iran is likely to increase the challenge.

2025 saw the Horn of Africa emerge as the main source of migrants, replacing peaks of Vietnamese and Albanians.

It also saw three changes in the business model, all in response to law enforcement pressure.

Tackling organised immigration crime is the NCA’s ‘main effort’ - far from our only task but our most important - accounting for a quarter of our operational activity.

It is not straightforward. Stopping crime is hard; stopping crime that is primarily taking place in other countries is much harder; doing so when the activity is not a crime in those countries is harder still.

But the NCA was not set up to do what is easy. And we are having increasing success.

We target the people smugglers, their equipment, how they get paid, and how they advertise and communicate.

Demand remains high and the task hard, but we retain a relentless focus. We recognise the importance of our response to public confidence.

The third area is crime online — where the pace of change is most acute.

The last eighteen months have seen a series of high-profile cyber-attacks : TfL, the Legal Aid Agency, M&S, the Co-op, Kido nurseries, and Jaguar Land Rover.

The majority still originate overseas, but we have seen the emergence of UK-based attackers, combining sophisticated malware with social engineering — exploiting not just technical vulnerabilities, but human ones too.

The message for organisations is clear: securing your systems is not enough. You also need to address how your people and processes, and those of your supply chain, can be manipulated.

Online fraud continues to grow.

Investment fraud and card-not-present fraud both increased last year, often enabled by the same social engineering techniques — criminals manipulating people into handing over their savings or their one-time passwords.

And new scam centres in south east Asia and, more recently, west Africa are industrialising these methodologies, and thus the harm they cause.

The threat to children online remains deeply serious.

Last year we received 92,000 referrals of child sexual abuse from tech companies — up almost a third in two years.

This year it has increased further to 2,000 a week.

These referrals are also becoming more complex and more disturbing, with growing numbers involving sextortion and sadistic exploitation.

AI adds complexity and volume, and algorithms accelerate and normalise harm.

Tech companies need to face up to their responsibilities in a way they have simply not done yet.

But if the challenges are significant so are our growing capabilities.

The online world can be as happy a hunting ground for law enforcement as for criminals.

Crypto currency can be traced. Online anonymity can be peeled away.

The same technology that criminals exploit can be used to find them. We intend to.

The picture that emerges from the assessment is clear.

These trends do not just affect serious and organised crime. They apply to terrorism, state threats, violence against women and girls and much more.

The boundaries between crime types are blurring.

Crime has become one ecosystem.

We cannot keep treating it as many separate ones.

As crime changes, so must we.

The case for Police Reform

That is why I have argued for the creation of a National Police Service.

Two years ago, at RUSI, I traced the history of how law enforcement in England and Wales has evolved in response to criminal threats: from regional crime squads, to the National Crime Squad and NCIS in the 1990s, through SOCA in the 2000s, to the NCA in 2013.

At each stage, the structure changed because the threat had changed.

As technology saw crime shift from being local to also global, and from being real world to also online.

I see the National Police Service as the necessary step in that evolution, building on the success of the NCA and Counter Terrorism Policing.

The argument for the operational element of a National Police Service rests on two things.

First, the threats . As I have said, we are seeing more connections between the traditional threats.

And there are also new threats emerging in the space between the NCA, CT Policing, the Regional Organised Crime Units, and territorial policing.

We work hard to make sure nothing falls between the gaps – for example through the joint unit we set up last year to tackle online sadistic exploitation groups.

But new threats would be easier to spot and respond to from a single law enforcement body responsible for crime best dealt with nationally.

Second, the response . The skills, capabilities and partnerships we need are very similar.

Building these capabilities and relationships collectively, rather than in parallel silos, will make us better.

And will provide an excellent opportunity for people who work in law enforcement, to develop new skills, and have more varied careers.

Making the NPS a success

As we design the National Police Service, I believe four things will be critical.

The first is that the NPS will need not just policing but also NCA DNA coursing through its veins.

One of the great opportunities of the NPS is to apply these strengths – that DNA - to all crime types.

The second is the workforce .

The NCA's model - employing a huge range of specialists and treating them all as officers, and as a single team - is one of our greatest strengths.

The NPS needs a workforce model that builds on the best of the policing and the NCA.

This is no small challenge, but one of the most important to set the NPS up for success.

The third is the national-local balance .

The White Paper envisages ROCU functions splitting between the NPS and the new merged police forces.

Getting the split right will be important, and will depend on the final number of forces.

But as important will be the ability of the NPS to set a clear, single requirement for what the capabilities should be, and for intelligence and tasking to move smoothly up and down between national and local.

Because global threats impact local neighbourhoods, and success depends on bringing together local and national teams.

The fourth is fraud .

The White Paper is right to make the NPS the lead agency.

My view – and I recognise there will be others - is that the national fraud functions currently ably provided by the City of London Police should transfer to the NPS.

These crimes are too interconnected with each other and with broader crime, and the capabilities required too sophisticated, to be sensibly managed any other way.

Broader Police Reform

The changes from Police Reform of course go well beyond the operational element of the NPS.

Having sat on Chief Constables’ Council for the last five years, I am in awe of much of what my police colleagues do, but they succeed despite the system not because of it.

Two changes are necessary to make reform work.

Too many decisions currently require consensus across 86 separate organisations. That is not a system designed for pace, coherence or value for money.

More decisions made nationally means we can move quickly, and invest once rather than multiple times in new capabilities – putting better crime fighting technology in the hands of local policing teams.

That does not mean centralising all decisions; but it does mean shifting the balance.

We have four tiers of policing in England and Wales - local, county, regional and national - three would serve us better.

The very local level must be protected and reinforced: neighbourhood, borough and district policing is what communities see and trust.

The national level is also essential as crime has become more online and more global.

So one of the middle tiers needs to go; and I look forward to contributing to Lord Hogan-Howe's review.

I have spent the last seven years in the NCA.

In that time, I have met investigators dismantling the most dangerous criminal networks in the world, analysts uncovering threats to life, and officers helping victims of the most appalling abuse.

That is what our work is - protecting people.

When I think why I have argued for the creation of a National Police Service, it comes back to that.

Not because what we have built here is failing — far from it.

But because, compared to when I started, the criminals we face in 2026 are faster, more connected and more technically sophisticated.

I refuse to accept that the law enforcement system should be any less so.

We have an opportunity, right now, to build something genuinely fit for the future.

Something that takes the NCA DNA, and combines it with the breadth and community connection of policing.

I have seen what the NCA can do. I want every community in this country to benefit from that.

That is what Police Reform is for.

And that is what I will be working with partners and the dedicated officers of the NCA to deliver.

You can read the National Strategic Assessment here .

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