UK Cuts At High Street Money Laundering and Organised Crime

Last month, 19 police forces across England and Wales engaged in ‘Operation Machinize’ – a nationwide crackdown on High Street businesses suspected of laundering the proceeds of serious and organised crime (SOC). Over the course of the headline-grabbing operation, law enforcement agencies visited 265 premises, froze over £1 million in bank accounts, seized £40,000 in cash, made 35 arrests, shut down two cannabis farms and forcibly closed ten shops.

Although widely welcomed, this action has been perceived as long overdue. Politicians and the public first raised concerns several years ago that some newly opened barbershops, American-themed sweet shops and other cash-intensive businesses were fronts for organised crime groups (OCGs) in need of money laundering services.

Hiding in Plain Sight

A variety of factors explain why the national response was seemingly slow (although isolated investigations have previously occurred). Some are relatively straightforward, such as the time needed to prepare for and coordinate a large-scale, multi-agency operation, added to the advantages of monitoring criminal activity over an extended period for the purpose of gathering intelligence on high-level actors.

Other reasons, however, are more complex. UK law enforcement agencies frequently find themselves caught between the perennial ‘rock’ of allegations of racism and ‘hard place’ of accusations of overreacting to these very allegations. Consequently, the link made by some politicians between High Street money laundering and the divisive topic of immigration may have prompted additional caution on this issue according to sources within the law enforcement community.

Nevertheless, what is clear, and perhaps most important, is that law enforcement in the UK is tasked with an ever-expanding remit in the face of diminishing funding. The result is numerous, competing priorities. Understandably, resources are focussed on high-harm crimes such as sexual violence, knife crime and drug trafficking. Nevertheless, this unfortunately results in neglect of the wider criminal landscape that enables these headline-grabbing, high-priority crimes.

High street criminal enterprises do not only provide vital money laundering services to OCGs, they also play a key centralising role for OCGs themselves, facilitating the operations of vast organised immigration crime and drug trafficking networks. However, the dichotomy created by rigid prioritisation means that investigations into these ‘non-priority’ criminal enterprises are under-resourced, allowing OCGs to profit from street level crime with little risk of sanctions, potentially providing them with resources that fuel the very high-harm crimes that police sought to stop in the first place.

The Big Picture: ‘Take Back our Streets’

Money laundering enterprises, in particular these high street criminal fronts, are therefore central to the proliferation in street crime that has been witnessed in recent years and includes increases in shoplifting, vehicle theft and phone theft. In response, the Labour government has pledged to ‘take back our streets’ following a decade of cuts to neighbourhood policing. Consequently, Operation Machinize can be understood in light of broader attempts by the government to visibly honour this pledge, which follow two main axes: a new Crime and Policing Bill and increased funding for police forces.

The Crime and Policing Bill, which is currently passing through the House of Commons, has been described as one of the ‘biggest legislative updates to crime and policing for decades’. Covering everything from fly-tipping to terrorism, the bill seeks to halt the rising tide of certain crime types by a variety of means. New police powers to seize banned items, including vehicle theft devices and electric bikes, as well as to enter and search properties for GPS-tracked stolen goods, are intended to combat vehicle and phone theft that is increasingly perpetrated by OCGs. Stronger penalties for shoplifting target street-level crime, while cost protections in civil recovery cases will supposedly incentivise law enforcement agencies to prosecute high-net worth individuals by reducing the financial risks of prosecuting wealthy defendants.

However, legislative fixes alone cannot fix funding shortfalls. In many cases, new powers will simply create new burdens for already overstretched officers. To rectify this, the government has announced a 6.6% spending increase for 2025/26, bringing the maximum budget for police forces in England and Wales to £17.5bn. Of particular note is the £200 million earmarked to fund the government’s flagship policy of boosting the number of neighbourhood policing officers by 13,000.

As impressive as it sounds, this cash injection will not lead to a transformation in policing. £230 million of the £1.1 billion total funding boost will return straight to the Treasury to cover the increased National Insurance contributions announced in the Autumn 2024 budget. Rising costs in other areas mean that significant shortfalls persist despite increased spending; the Metropolitan Police announced in April that 1,700 officers and staff would be cut in an effort to fill a £260 million funding gap, with similar cutbacks planned in other force areas.

Political Ploy or Meaningful Change?

What then is the likely impact of Operation Machinize amid broader efforts to ‘take back our streets’? In the short-term, very little. Although 265 premises were visited by police during the operation, only ten were closed.

Whilst more may follow in the coming weeks, the agility with which OCGs can relocate their operations and the sheer scale of the problem mean that this national operation has barely scratched the surface. Over the last decade, the average number of barbershops per 10,000 people has more than doubled, with 665 new barbershops opening in 2023 alone. Evidently, these are not all criminal enterprises, but when combined with other retail types exploited as criminal fronts such as nail salons, vape stores and bureaux de change, the closure of tens of shops amounts to a drop in the ocean.

The proliferation of this crime type highlights lessons that can hopefully be learned by law enforcement decision-makers. These include the need for sustained police presence in local communities and the dangers of the false dichotomy that rigid prioritisation creates. As resources have been reallocated away from tackling ‘lower-harm’ crime to focus on ‘high-harm’ priorities, OCGs have moved into the void created by this retreat from traditional, community-centred policing. Unfortunately, given current fiscal constraints, the hope of dramatically increased budgets for police forces to adequately address crime across the board is little more than wishful thinking. Genuine innovation, including but not limited to embracing novel technology, may be the only way to free up resources to enable strengthened neighbourhood policing.

However, in the unlikely event that police are equipped to crack down on these illicit enterprises, it is unlikely to meaningfully reduce SOC in the UK. There is growing evidence to suggest that disruptive law enforcement operations have little to no demonstrable impact on wider criminal networks and markets, even when they successfully incarcerate large numbers of senior OCG members. Given that many law enforcement practitioners are well aware of this, crackdowns like Operation Machinize can be best understood less as genuine attempts to reduce criminal activity, and more as exercises to restore public confidence in policing. With trust in the police declining in the UK and growing criticism of law enforcement and the government for not doing more to tackle such visible crime, these dramatic, newsworthy operations may be more useful in terms of public relations than policing, improving perceptions more than reality. Trimming down suspected money laundering fronts may have improved the image of the law enforcement agencies involved but, without sustained and holistic changes, regrowth is inevitable.

© RUSI, 2025.

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