Law and Order: linkage

By Richard North - January 31, 2026

I’ve written a few times about the illicit tobacco trade, noting the wholly inadequate enforcement effort devoted to closing down criminal enterprises collectively worth billions of pounds annually.

The lack of effort is not only regrettable in its own right, but a sharp indictment of the failure of the authorities to recognise that these illegal enterprises are often part of a spectrum of activity.

All too often, they are carried out by organised crime syndicates which effortlessly switch from one crime sector to another, with the income from one cross-financing other nefarious activities, while also fuelling money-laundering, tax evasion, bribery and corruption.

With Bradford playing a leading role in the burgeoning illicit trade, therefore, it was of some interest to see this report published yesterday by the BBC local news team.

The fact that it is relegated to local news tells you something, as we are dealing with a nationwide problem, and the significance of this report has major implications for law enforcement.

Headlined, “Illegal cigarette shops escape justice due to cost”, it tells us that shop owners who sell counterfeit cigarettes can escape legal penalties due to the cost of taking them to court – a message given to Bradford Council’s licensing panel members by West Yorkshire Trading Standards which said it cannot afford to prosecute every retailer who sells illegal goods due to strained funds.

The report gives an insight into the difficulties involved pursuing prosecutions where, in some cases, defendants and lawyers drag out cases for several years, forcing Trading Standards to spend thousands on barristers’ bills.

In some cases, defendants have sold their shops by the time a case comes to court with the owners claiming that they are unemployed. This means that after lengthy court cases, defendants could sometimes end up with a fine of as little as £120.

Other times there are questions over ownership, which is a typical ploy to avoid prosecution, especially with ethnic communities but also a feature of organised crime involvement, where ownership is often obscured by using proxies and middle-men as cut-outs.

What gives this issue a new twist, though, is another article, this one in the Telegraph on a different but not wholly unrelated aspect of criminality – the scourge of shoplifting.

This article is headed “The police force turning the tide on shoplifting by going back to basics”, with the sub-head telling us that “Thieves are four times more likely to be charged in Humberside than London”, a good news story for the people of Humberside who are seeing their local police force tackle an important but often neglected crime epidemic.

But the underlying message is one of stark simplicity, and one so blindingly obvious that it is staggering that the point even has to be made. What this amounts to is that, if you catch criminals engaged in a particular crime, bring them to book and ensure they are punished, that criminal activity reduces. Who knew?

But what this report doesn’t deal with is the resilience and flexibility of organised crime – which is driving much of the explosion in shoplifting. This is simply that, as one sector becomes effectively policed, the gangs simply shift their emphasis to other types of crime which deliver better rewards for less risk.

This brings me to a third report doing the rounds, covered by the BBC and others, the former telling us that two men have been arrested as part of an investigation into the dumping of thousands of tonnes of rubbish in a field in Oxfordshire.

From this, we learn via the Environment Agency that a 69-year-old man has been arrested at a property in Andover, Hampshire, while a 54-year-old man has been arrested in Slough in connection with the massive pile of rubbish tipped near Kidlington.

This general issue I’ve written about many times, such as in this piece, where I’ve noted that large-scale illegal waste disposal has become so lucrative and low-risk, that the organised crime syndicates are moving in, generating millions of pounds in profit.

The scale of the problem is indicated in this current BBC report, where the broadcaster tells us that that there are more than 500 illegal tips across England, including at least 11 so-called “super sites” bigger than 20,000 tonnes.

The costs to society are also illustrated, with the news that preparation work to clear the Kidlington site started earlier this month, with a private waste clearance firm having been given the contract to deal with the site over the next 12 months at a cost of £9.6 million.

And yet this is just one site, suggesting that the authorities are not even beginning to get a grip on the problem, something which I discussed in my earlier piece.

There, I noted that, in 2024-25, the Environment Agency had shut 743 sites in England, but it had 13 cases that had been open for 11 years. On the 11 “super-sites”, only five were under investigation by the EA.

I thus quoted Matthew Scott, the Kent police and crime commissioner, who said that efforts to stop waste crime are hampered by lack of communication between the three main bodies: the Environment Agency, local authorities and police.

“Intelligence is being lost in what I call the Bermuda Triangle, because you’ve got these three agencies and they’re not talking. It’s all just falling through the middle”, Scott says.

Nor is there any comfort to be drawn from the fact that a joint unit was set up six years ago to bring together 11 partners ranging from the EA to HM Revenue & Customs to bridge this gap, with critics questioning its effectiveness.

And there’s the rub. We have a wide range of criminal activities, ranging from illicit tobacco sales, to shoplifting and illegal waste disposal, any of which at a low level can be local crimes but which can also be linked in a vast network of constantly evolving organised crime which takes on board many other different criminal activities.

But not only do these crimes tend to be treated separately, in their different categories, we also have an array of different enforcement agencies, each with their different priorities, budget restrictions and capabilities. Rarely is a holistic overview taken and joint action, with close coordination between the agencies, is the exception rather than the rule.

The same disjointed view tends to be taken by the media which will report on individual crimes, but – taking the cue from the enforcement agencies – will rarely join the dots.

This is why some of the proposals by The Muslim Lady on police reforms could be a good thing, if the outcome is a National Police Service capable of tackling organised crime across the spectrum of its activities.

Somehow, though, I doubt whether the ideas being considered by Mahmood will be up to the challenge, which is why I suggested that we need properly coordinated and resourced task forces, along the lines of the FBI’s famous “untouchables”, which can take a holistic approach to organised crime, and go after the top echelons and the crime families.

It will be recalled that when the US through its “untouchables” brought down the gangster Al Capone, it was initially through convictions on tax evasion rather than his other crimes.

Before we even start, though, our authorities need a better understanding of the linkages between the different types of crime in order to organise more effectively to deal with them. At the moment, criminals are running rings round our law enforcers, looting the nation’s wealth to the tune of what must be hundreds of billions of pounds each year.