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Policing and Crime Bill

I recognise that the power to lay an order under Section 97 of the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 has been in force for four years, but that no order has been laid. There is a little mea culpa here. The noble Lord, Lord Bradshaw, is absolutely right: this has been difficult for a number of reasons. The order would make provision to allow magistrates' courts to make confiscation orders under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. Currently, only the Crown Court has the power to make confiscation orders and it will continue to have this power. Magistrates’ courts would be dealing only with low value cases of less than £10,000, as the noble Lord said. I realise that having order-making powers that remain unused appears to have wasted this House’s time. That is not very clever, but there are reasons. The House scrutinised them in debate. However, that is not the case in relation to Section 97. It is government policy that asset recovery should be an integral part of criminal justice and we are constantly considering options to achieve this. Work has started on drafting an order under Section 97. Separately and importantly, we developed the Asset Recovery Action Plan—a consultation document launched in May 2007, which set out a range of new powers and proposals to ensure that criminals would not profit from crime. Many of these proposals are now included in this Bill. Also contained in that plan was a proposal to create a new, so-called, criminal benefits order, partly because of the problem we were having in getting the order used in magistrates’ courts. We envisaged it as being limited to the benefit from the criminality for which the defendant had been convicted, and it would therefore not require a full financial investigation. It was contemplated that such an order may be made by a magistrate up to a value of £10,000—which made it similar to the last order we were discussing. However, the viability of this possible alternative option to the Section 97 order has not been settled. In the mean time, I can confirm that the option of an order under Section 97 is being progressed—we are now able to move this forward—and that necessary action is being taken. We will aim to ensure, if possible, that the deadline for laying any order is within the spirit of this amendment. Unfortunately, however, I am not in a position at this stage to make that firm commitment although that is what we are moving towards. I cannot make that commitment within these timescales, but with the undertaking that we are moving towards that, I hope that the noble Lord feels that he can withdraw his amendment.