Police ‘catastrophically under-resourced’ to fight cybercrime

Police funding does not match the threat posed by cybercrime, a top UK cyber executive has warned.

Speaking at Holyrood’s Public Sector Cyber Scotland event in Edinburgh, Tim Court, head of cyber operations at the National Crime Agency, told delegates policing authorities are not appropriately equipped to fight the growing rate of cybercrime.

He said: “There is no more funding for the amount of crime that there is. So, we are catastrophically under-resourced.

“The only way you fix that is to make your workforce able to manage both. But to recruit somebody that is able to run down a high street, disarm and disengage a violent scenario, deal with a victim of an awful crime sensitively, and be good on the internet is quite demanding. 

“But that's ultimately where this has to go because we are not going to have another 218,000 people to deal with the other 50 per cent of crime that's emerged in our lifetime. There is no money.”

It comes amidst continued concern about the impact of resourcing pressures on Scotland's single force. Although there was a slight improvement in numbers over the last quarter of 2024, there are still around 800 fewer officers compared to pre-pandemic levels.

Last year Police Scotland launched a cyber and fraud division in a bid to match the increasing rate of cyber-crime north of the border, which the force said was likely to increase in complexity by 2030.

Basil Manoussos, digital evidence and cybercrime expert witness, also pointed out that the law had not “caught up” with technology, citing the Computing Misuse Act, which came into force three decades ago.

There have been various attempts to update the act to match current threats but these have failed to progress across scrutiny stages. In December, two amendments aimed at modernising the act to protect security professionals and ethical hackers from prosecution were rejected by a House of Lords committee.