In Glasgow, the old rule was simple: you don’t talk.
For decades, that code held firm across housing schemes and smoky backrooms, in pubs where deals were struck with nods instead of signatures. But in 2025, the silence is cracking — and the price of breaking it is publicly funded.
Police Scotland spent £342,730 last year paying criminal informants. The year before, it was £303,610. In 2014, the figure sat at £136,703. Over twelve years, more than £3.3 million has gone into the pockets of people embedded in the very underworld officers are trying to dismantle.
Officially, they’re called Covert Human Intelligence Sources — CHIS. On the streets, they’re known by a harsher word: supergrasses.
The surge in spending comes against the backdrop of a long-running, city-wide feud that has flared again into violence. Firebombings, machete attacks, shootings — the kind of tit-for-tat escalation that turns minor players into collateral damage and side streets into crime scenes. In March, police launched a major operation aimed at containing the outbreak. More than 60 arrests followed. Several men are now serving lengthy prison terms.
Behind those arrests sits a quieter strategy: pay the insiders.
Surveillance can only go so far. It’s expensive, manpower-heavy, and in tight-knit communities, instantly obvious. Undercover officers take years to cultivate and even longer to deploy. But someone already in the circle? They can pick up a phone and say where the meeting is happening, who’s in attendance, what car they’re using, and whether the talk is bluster or bloodshed.
Former senior law enforcement figures argue it’s simple economics. An informant can deliver in minutes what traditional policing methods might take weeks to piece together. Intelligence fills gaps that CCTV and phone data can’t. It can stop a weapon being lifted or a door being kicked in. Used correctly, it’s precision work.
But intelligence has a moral cost.
An informant is rarely a reformed soul seeking redemption. More often, they’re still active — still dealing, still associating, still benefiting from the same criminal ecosystem they’re feeding information about. The state manages that contradiction through risk assessments and handler oversight. Critics call it a necessary evil. Others call it state-sponsored hypocrisy.
What’s changed in Glasgow isn’t just the spending — it’s the culture.
The more police rely on human sources, the more suspicion infects the underworld. Meetings get smaller. Phones are swapped out weekly. New faces are treated as threats. Violence can become quicker, more impulsive — because paranoia leaves no room for drawn-out negotiation.
Trust erodes. Alliances fracture. Loyalty, once absolute, becomes transactional.
And money talks.
£342,730 might not sound like much in the context of a national policing budget, but to someone facing a prison sentence or mounting debts, it can be life-changing. The system doesn’t advertise rates, but cooperation can mean reduced charges, financial payments, or simply leverage in a game where leverage is everything.
Since 2014, informant spending has more than doubled. That trajectory tells its own story. Human intelligence isn’t a supplementary tactic anymore — it’s central infrastructure in the fight against organised crime.
The term CHIS entered the public imagination through Line of Duty, where informants were volatile, compromised and morally tangled. In real life, the drama is less glossy and more bureaucratic — but no less fraught. Every piece of intelligence arrives with questions: Why are they telling us? What do they want? What are they hiding?
Because nobody talks for free.
The current crackdown may cool the temperature for now. Arrests make headlines. Sentences send signals. But as long as violence remains cyclical and criminal networks regenerate, there will be a market for inside information.
In Glasgow’s underworld, the old code hasn’t vanished. It’s just been repriced.
Silence used to be survival.
