Police service gets cash to chase computer crime

Three year old plans to create a specialist national computer crime unit have finally been given the go-ahead by Home Secretary Jack Straw.

The unit will provide the first national expert police resource to combat cybercrime. Until now only a handful of local police forces have created specialist units, which have been regarded as insufficient to fight an increasingly sophisticated and borderless crime.

The police intelligence agency, the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), has been given £337,000 by the Home Office as seed money to develop the unit and agree its strategy with the police forces' umbrella, the Association of Chief Police Officers.

An NCIS spokesperson said: "The Home Office has given us money to prepare the ground to create a national computer crimes unit. As yet its remit has not been decided. We're only at the start of the process to create it."

The original recommendation to create a unit was made by NCIS analysts in a two year research programme for ACPO, dubbed Project Trawler. The first draft of the report, while unpublished, contained the plan in 1997.

But ACPO sat on the plan, which was publicly repeated in June 1999, when extracts of the final version of Trawler was made public.

Work will be led by NCIS deputy director-general Roger Gaspar and the Chief Constable of Kent Police, David Phillips.