Corruption and organised crime in the UK

Although public and official concerns about corruption and organised crime have grown steadily since the mid-1990s, the lineage of high-profile public and official concerns with problems of corruption and organised crime in the UK is far longer. ¹ Official and public discourse in the UK has tended to treat corruption and organised crime as discrete sets of activities, particularly when implicitly associated with different socio-economic class contexts. Thus, ‘corruption’ has more often been associated with corporate and ‘white-collar’ crimes perpetrated by elite socio-economic actors, whereas ‘organised crime’ has typically been identified with forms of criminality engaged in by lower-level socio-economic actors, such as illicit drugs markets, human trafficking, and local protection rackets (see Ruggiero, 2000; Levi, 2004). ² Recent years have seen a growth in efforts within the UK to encourage the state to treat corruption and organised crime as commonly interrelated problems. As explained in a joint article by the former Director-General of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA), William Hughes, and the Director of the Defence and Security Programme of Transparency International (TIUK), Mark Pyman, whilst counter-organised crime and counter-corruption communities in the UK have largely ‘travel[led] in separate, parallel universes’, there are good reasons for establishing collaboration between the two, both in terms of the multifaceted nature of the challenge they face, but also the very different ways in which these two broad crime categories have typically been combated (Hughes and Pyman, 2011).