Pillar 1: Enhancing capability and confidence

In an environment of increasing global instability and rapid technological change, organised crime gangs and fraudsters continue to adapt their methods to exploit new opportunities. As a result, SEOC cases are becoming more complex, digitally enabled and increasingly international in nature, placing growing demands on the criminal justice system. Around 70% of fraud cases referred to the CPS have an international element and 80% are cyber-enabled, one of the fastest‑growing crime types, driven by a low-risk, high-reward profile. These trends are contributing to a significant increase in the scale, complexity and volume of digital material that prosecutors must assess alongside rising caseload demands.

To address growing demand, complexity and capacity pressures, we have significantly expanded our workforce over the past five years. This has shifted the experience profile of our prosecutors, with more lawyers entering the CPS at an earlier stage in their criminal practice. While this growth is essential in meeting demand, it also means that we must focus on building specialist capability and confidence, so prosecutors are equipped to manage the complexity, scale and risk inherent in SEOC casework.

Given both the challenges we face now and those we anticipate in the future, strengthening our people’s capability and confidence is a central aim of this strategy. In complex SEOC cases, early, inquisitive prosecutorial engagement is critical to shaping investigations, adding strategic value and developing effective case strategies from the outset. We will therefore focus on building a confident, SEOC-capable workforce, supported to engage early and decisively even in a high-pressure operational environment.

We will invest in the continuous development of our people, ensuring prosecutors are effectively trained and supported by specialist expertise, including through our specialist units, empowering them to adopt a proactive and inquisitive approach, exercise sound judgement and identify the wider criminality that often underpins SEOC offending. We will ensure CPS engagement, advice and decision-making align with evolving policing structures and partnership frameworks in response to the Government’s programme of police reform. The proposals include plans to establish a National Police Service, which will reshape how serious and organised crime capability is organised and delivered across policing. As functions currently delivered through organisations such as the NCA and Police Regional Organised Crime Units (ROCUs) evolve within this model, there will be implications for how complex serious and organised crime investigations are structured, referred and progressed. The CPS will work closely with policing partners to shape and support effective engagement, including through early legal advice, case strategy development and collaboration on complex cases as these reforms are implemented, contributing to a coherent, whole system response to SEOC.

Pillar 2: Securing the nation

SEOC poses a direct and growing threat to the safety, security and resilience of the United Kingdom as recognised in the Government’s National Security Strategy 2025. Its impacts extend beyond individual victims and local communities, affecting border security, national infrastructure, public confidence and the integrity of the international rules-based order. Criminal networks exploit global instability, operate across jurisdictions, leverage global supply chains, launder vast sums through complex financial systems, and increasingly intersect with national security threats, including hostile state activity and terrorist financing.

The threats we face in SEOC cases are continually evolving, and we must be prepared to respond to these changes through a system-wide approach across the criminal justice system, focused on disruption, resilience and long-term harm reduction. Online extortion, specifically "sextortion," has become a rapidly growing crime targeting young men and teenage boys, leading in some instances to tragic cases of suicide. Criminals, often operating from overseas, lure victims into sharing intimate images and then demand payment, threatening to release the images to friends and family. 

Organised Immigration Crime (OIC), including people smuggling and human trafficking, also continues to endanger lives and undermine border security. These crimes are often coordinated from overseas, facilitated through online platforms and encrypted communications, and driven by significant financial gain. We are also increasingly seeing industrial scale offending models, so-called ‘scam factories’, where individuals may be trafficked, coerced or otherwise exploited into committing criminal acts. These models blur traditional distinctions between victims and offenders and present complex challenges for the criminal justice system.

At the same time, the convergence of serious organised crime, money laundering and terrorism presents an increasingly complex threat landscape. Criminal methodologies used to generate, move and conceal illicit funds are frequently repurposed to finance terrorism or support hostile state actors, obscuring the boundary between serious organised crime and national security threats. The CPS has a vital role in ensuring that money laundering prosecutions, confiscation and forfeiture powers, and ancillary orders are deployed robustly to disrupt these networks and remove the financial enablers of harm.

We are also seeing a growing trend in cases involving individuals acting on behalf of, or in support of, hostile states through economic crime, sanctions evasion, cyber-enabled offending and the misuse of financial systems. These cases sit at the intersection of serious organised crime and national security and require close alignment between the CPS’s SEOC and Counter Terrorism capabilities. Prosecuting such offending is essential not only to uphold the rule of law, but to protect national security, deter hostile activity, and reinforce the UK’s resilience to state‑linked threats.

The CPS plays a critical role in supporting the Border Security Command (BSC), working alongside law enforcement partners to ensure that criminal networks involved in OIC are disrupted through effective prosecutions and the use of the full range of available criminal and financial powers. Recent legislative developments, including new offences focused on conduct that endangers life during small‑boat crossings and provides important additional tools within the overall response to border security threats. The CPS has worked closely with law enforcement partners to ensure that these offences are applied consistently and proportionately, in line with existing prosecution guidance and agreed referral arrangements and are targeted at the most harmful actors within organised criminal networks as part of a wider disruption‑to‑prosecution approach.

Effective prosecution in this space plays a critical role in deterrence, upstream disruption and the protection of the UK’s borders, particularly where early legal advice can shape investigations, enable the use of appropriate offences, and support international cooperation from the outset.

In this context, the CPS’s role goes beyond responding to offending that has already occurred. Early engagement, proactive legal advice and joint case strategies with law enforcement and international partners are critical to disrupting harm before it escalates. By shaping investigations, supporting the use of appropriate powers, and ensuring that prosecutions reflect the full scale and seriousness of the criminality, the CPS contributes directly to a whole‑system response to serious organised crime and national security threats. This will include strengthening our engagement with key private sector partners, recognising their critical role in preventing, detecting and disrupting economic and organised crime.

Through this strategy, we will strengthen our contribution to securing the nation. We will ensure that prosecutors are prepared to respond to emerging threats, that asset recovery and financial disruption are embedded from the outset of cases, and that our SEOC and Counter Terrorism functions work seamlessly together where threats converge. In doing so, we will play our full part alongside criminal justice system and international partners in protecting the UK’s borders, disrupting serious organised crime, and safeguarding national security.

Pillar 3: Optimising our use of Tech and AI

SEOC is increasingly enabled, scaled and concealed by technology. Organised crime groups and fraudsters exploit digital platforms, encrypted communications, automation and emerging technologies to expand their reach, obscure criminality and operate across jurisdictions with speed and agility. As a result, SEOC cases now generate unprecedented volumes of complex digital material, placing significant demands on investigators, prosecutors and the courts. These challenges are compounded by fragmentation in data and systems across the criminal justice landscape, which can limit the timely and effective use of information across complex cases.

At the same time, the criminal justice system is operating under sustained pressure. Independent reviews have consistently highlighted that delay, inefficiency and the exponential growth of digital evidence are undermining the timely delivery of justice and public confidence in the system. These pressures are felt most acutely in serious and complex cases, including fraud, organised crime and cyber‑enabled offending, where digital material can overwhelm traditional processes and slow cases at every stage.

For the CPS, this creates a clear imperative. If we do not adapt our tools, systems and ways of working at pace, we risk falling behind both the threat and the system we serve. To prosecute effectively, safeguard fairness and deliver justice within a reasonable timeframe, the CPS must at least keep pace with those who seek to exploit technological complexity, digital volume and systemic delay. Phase 2 of the Independent Review of the Criminal Courts and the Independent Review of Disclosure and Fraud Offences, reinforce this direction of travel. They highlight the current disclosure regime is struggling to keep pace with the scale and nature of digital material, particularly in serious and complex cases. They identify technology enabled solutions as essential to modernising disclosure, reducing administrative burden and supporting consistency and fairness in the digital age. Failure to address these challenges risks not only delay, but case collapse, miscarriages of justice and further erosion of confidence in the justice system.

Sitting at the heart of the system between police and the courts, the CPS is uniquely placed to see both the challenges and opportunities at every stage of the system, and provide insights needed to enable effective reform.  We must work with criminal justice partners to support a more joined-up, interoperable digital environment that reduces duplication, improves data quality, enables earlier collaboration and supports case progression, while preserving prosecutorial independence and judicial oversight. As an independent prosecutor, we must also ensure that our processes and tools enable early, well-informed decision-making; proportionate management of large volumes of material; and effective, compliant disclosure.

Our approach to technology and AI will be principled, ethical and transparent, and remain aligned with the CPS’s current and future AI mission statements. AI will augment, not replace, human decision-making. Used responsibly, it can help prosecutors identify evidential issues earlier, manage complex datasets more effectively, improve consistency and quality, and release time to focus on complex legal judgement and advocacy. Used poorly, or not at all, it risks entrenching inefficiency, increasing delay and undermining trust at a critical moment for the criminal justice system.

Through this strategy, we will modernise how we use technology and AI to support SEOC prosecutions. We will explore opportunities for secure, interoperable digital tools that improve decision-making, support modernised disclosure and drive efficiencies across the system. In doing so, we will help ensure that justice keeps pace with the evolving threat, that serious and complex cases are progressed fairly and proportionately, and that confidence in the criminal justice system is strengthened rather than diminished.

Assurance and Delivery

Delivery of this strategy will be supported by a single, integrated governance structure, providing oversight of progress and ensuring coordinated delivery alongside the International 2030 Strategy. This approach will support the translation of strategic ambition into practical outcomes for the CPS and its cross-agency partners, with a continued focus on delivery against agreed outcomes. Progress will be subject to regular review through this framework, including monitoring against key actions, milestones and success measures. A midpoint progress report will be published to provide transparency on delivery, assess emerging priorities, and support any necessary reprioritisation.

Conclusion

This strategy sets out how the CPS will respond to the evolving threat from serious economic and organised crime, strengthening our capability, partnerships and contribution to the wider criminal justice system. Delivery will require sustained focus, collaboration and adaptability as the operating environment continues to change. Through the approach set out in this strategy, the CPS will continue to support effective outcomes and contribute to a coherent, whole-system response to serious and organised crime.