Clause 6 - Making of order
Proceeds of Crime Bill
2:30 pm
Mr Bob Ainsworth (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Home Office; Coventry North East, Labour)
I welcome you back to the Chair, Mr. Gale. You will be unaware that with you has come a slight increase in the temperature of the Room, which has made it more comfortable. I do not know whether that is a coincidence or whether it is the warm glow that you bring to our proceedings.
At the end of our sitting this morning, I was responding to a wide-ranging debate on the first set of amendments to clause 6. I was stopping up the holes down which Opposition Members were diving in order to move away from the consequences of the amendments. I shall continue stopping up the first hole, which was that such a draconian and unfair proposal was invented by the Labour Government without any precedent having been set for it. That is incorrect. A precedent was set by the Conservative Administration that Opposition Members supported.
Under the Drug Trafficking Offences Act 1986, the Crown court had to hold a confiscation hearing in each case in which a convicted drug trafficker appeared before it for sentence. However, assumptions were discretionary. That regime gave rise to many confiscation orders for small amounts. In the interests of the better targeting of resources, the Criminal Justice Act 1993 changed the scheme to make a confiscation hearing for drug trafficking mandatory on the application of the prosecutor, and made the assumptions mandatory, too. The changes were brought into force under the Drug Trafficking Act 1994, which remains in force.
For non-drug crime, confiscation hearings under the Criminal Justice Act 1988 have always been held on the application of the prosecutor. The 1988 Act originally gave the court the discretion to confiscate benefits from the offences of which the person was convicted in the current proceedings, and to take them into consideration for sentencing purposes. There were no assumptions. The Proceeds of Crime Act 1995 amended the 1988 Act to require the court to confiscate the proceeds of offences on the charge sheet, and it gave the court discretionary assumptions.
The principle underlying mandatory confiscation hearings is simple. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) must explain his justification for wanting to give the court the discretion to allow criminals to keep the proceeds of their crimes. In practical terms, a discretionary regime would without doubt significantly reduce the amounts that would be confiscated.