Schedule 1 - Assets Recovery Agency
Proceeds of Crime Bill
11:00 am
Mr Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 7, in page 257, line 27, leave out from `targets' to end of line 28 and insert
`and the basis of such performance targets;'.
I join the other hon. Members who have welcomed your chairmanship of our proceedings, Mr. McWilliam. The Opposition feel that there is a need to amend paragraph 8(3)(b), on page 257, because we are concerned about the way in which performance targets are used, and what performance targets there should be. We have bitter experience of the way in which the Government have used—or, as we would say, misused—performance targets. That relates to some of the concerns expressed in the previous debate by my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster. Like him, I worked for several years in the City of London and in business generally before coming into this House in 1992, and I have stayed in close touch with the business world during my nine and a half years in the House. Anybody who has experience of business, at whatever level, knows that any sensible business might have three, four, five or six performance targets that the senior management would be asked to pursue. It is crazy for any organisation to be given 58 performance targets.
Labour Members, especially those who are new to this House, may wonder why I chose that number. There is a very good reason: 58 is precisely the number of performance targets that the previous Home Secretary gave chief constables and police authorities. The chief constable in Surrey said to me, ``This is crazy. No sensible organisation should have 58 performance targets.'' Chief constables all over the country said the same thing to the previous Home Secretary a year or so ago. To be fair to him, I must add that the previous Home Secretary, who is now Foreign Secretary, responded. He agreed to reduce the number of performance targets. However, instead of reducing them to a sensible number—three, four, five or six—he reduced them from 58 to 43. As the chief constables would say, that was a distinction without a real difference. It was still nonsense.
In no way can any sensible organisation respond to 43 performance targets. History is going to repeat itself—and, as everyone knows, it repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. There should be a control in the schedule to ensure that there are not too many performance targets. What is the basis of them all? Parliament should have some opportunity to scrutinise them. When the Minister responds to my remarks in his usual dignified way, he will no doubt say, ``Of course it will all be dealt with sensibly, and everything will be motherhood and apple pie.'' However, we are suspicious, and we have good recent reason to be. We need to know a great deal more about what the Government are providing, because one of our worries, to which we shall return repeatedly, is that the Bill gives wide powers and discretion. One problem is that much of what it does throughout its 444 clauses and its schedules is to provide for powers that we shall come to know about later.
My hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield rightly thanked the Minister for providing us with some guidance, albeit at a late stage—although we had sight of it before our sitting started, which was helpful. However, we want more safeguards written into the Bill. Conservative Members are always suspicious about Home Secretaries or directors being given draconian powers that Parliament will not have the right to scrutinise, and which may appear later in the form of guidance, much of which will be administrative and will not require a debate in the House, not even on a statutory instrument. It is true that some aspects of the Bill will give the Home Secretary the power to introduce further measures in the House under statutory instrument procedure, but by no means all of them will do that.