Clause 6 - Making of order
Proceeds of Crime Bill
9:30 am
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield, Conservative)
The Committee system operates in such a way that we do not have the luxury of being able to examine large groups of amendments together.
Amendments can achieve a similar goal in different ways. Later amendments will deal with, for example, the removal of certain categories of offence. Other amendments are intended to probe. Their purpose is to improve the Bill in its totality. One way of achieving that is to give a general discretion. If the Under-Secretary is saying that the Government wish the Bill to be all-encompassing in terms of the range of offences covered, there is a compelling argument for giving the general discretion. If he says that he has reflected on the matter—and the Minister of State has also been through reflective processes as the Bill has progressed—and that he has decided that certain categories of offences might be deleted, and that the Secretary of State's powers under statutory instrument to specify offences will be removed, I would be less worried, and I might press the amendments less hard. However, I cannot predict what might happen further on in our proceedings, which is why it is important to focus on the provisions that mirror those that were thought to be acceptable for Scotland, which give a general judicial discretion about whether to embark on the process.