The Home Secretary has set out for SOCA his strategic priorities for its first year of operation, and explained how he will judge its success. The main points are:

• SOCA should devote a higher proportion of its resources and activity to intelligence work than the agencies that it replaces;
• Class A drugs and organised immigration crime, in that order, should be its top priorities;
• effort should continue to be devoted also to the other organised crime threats already identified, including fraud against individuals and the private sector, hi tech crime, counterfeiting, the use of firearms and serious robbery; and
• emphasis should be placed on recovering the proceeds of crime.

So far as the assessment of performance is concerned, the measures that will be applied are:

• trends in underlying harms caused by organised crime;
• evidence of dislocation of criminal markets, including evidence that criminal groups are finding the UK a less attractive market;
• growth in SOCA's own capacity to make a difference, with particular focus on the quality of our understanding of organised crime; and
• performance against asset recovery targets.