The government has finally put its weight behind a new centralised police unit tasked with leading a coordinated national response to e-crime.

The proposed Police Central E-crime Unit (PCEU), which has been awaiting funding for over a year, will act as a national coordination centre and work to improve the specialist e-crime skills of police officers in regional forces.

The unit is also set to work closely with the National Fraud Reporting Centre and National Fraud Intelligence Bureau once both organisations are fully launched.

"It is widely recognised that e-crime is the most rapidly expanding form of criminality and knows no borders," said attorney general Baroness Scotland in a statement.

"The network is a good example of the UK leading on an international initiative which improves our capability to prosecute e-crime."

The launch of the PCEU will be seen by many as an admission of the gap left by the National Hi-Tech Crime Unit when it was absorbed into the Serious Organised Crime Agency over two years ago.

The PCEU will receive £3.5m of government funding and £3.9m from the Metropolitan Police Service.

The unit was welcomed by Dave Martin, managing security consultant at IT services firm Logica.

"It is good to see UK leading with this and hopefully good relations with foreign equivalents will flourish, as there is of course still the problem of the international aspect of computer crime where some other countries are not as advanced as we are," he said.

However, there was a more skeptical response from industry association The Corporate IT Forum.

"£7m over three years seems a very small sum for a very large problem. We doubt whether that it will be enough to tackle an issue that the Home Office itself calls a ‘global menace’ – something our own members know all too well," argued chief executive David Roberts.

He added that it was still unclear whether the new organisation would provide a single line of reporting for hi-tech crime.

The PCEU is set to become operational in spring 2009.