---

Terrorist Asset-Freezing (Temporary Provisions) Bill

I shall speak also to Amendment 9. The noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, has Amendment 11A in this group. My amendments are lifted directly from the draft full Bill, which is being published in the form of the Command Paper. They deal with reports to Parliament and independent review. If the Government think that these issues are appropriate for the fuller legislation and are measures that should be applied in future, why not now? The first of the amendments, Amendment eight, requires a report from the Treasury to Parliament on the exercise of the powers within 28 days and then on a three-monthly basis. The clause in the draft Bill refers to a report. That might bear a little expansion, and I have therefore added subsection (4), which gives some idea of what might be included in such a report. That is information regarding designations made, licences granted and proceedings taken for an offence. The noble Baroness’s Amendment 11A requires a monthly report. My instinctive reaction is that that is a bit often and a bit of a heavy imposition, but I look forward to her arguments. Amendment 9, on the independent review of the operation of the Act, says that the Treasury must appoint somebody to undertake reviews of the operation, and the periods for review would align with the periods in my Amendment 8. Other than that, it is lifted very directly from the draft Bill. We are in the difficult position that we all know about, and I heard the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, say—I paraphrase—that we should not be too ambitious with this Bill in trying to import detail. Nevertheless, it seems that these are safeguards which the Government have seen fit to propose, and which we might well have been debating today, and there is no reason why they should not apply to the interim regime which we are now considering. I beg to move.