Clause 14 - Effect of order on court's other powers
Proceeds of Crime Bill
2:30 pm
Mr Nick Hawkins (Surrey Heath, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 60, in page 7, line 35, leave out subsection (7).
This is a probing amendment, and I do not want to hear any remarks from the Government Back Benches that it is intended to wreck the Bill.
We are puzzled—in much the same way as my hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne was puzzled about clause 13. My hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) has apologised for his absence from the Committee, but he will return soon. He and I independently came to the same conclusion about subsection (7): it is, to be kind, inelegantly drafted—or, to be critical, it is extremely confusing. It is almost circular in how it operates. If the writers of ``Yes, Minister'' were writing today and wanted to give Sir Humphrey, in one of their famous scripts, a long paragraph to read out that left the Minister, the fictitious Jim Hacker, completely confused, they would choose something just like subsection (7). Hon. Members need only read it to themselves quietly, as I hope they, including Labour Members, are now doing, to realise that it is the sort of thing that baffles ordinary mortals.
I am sure that in a moment the Minister will come up with some good reasons why the Bill must include something along those lines. As I said in relation to a probing amendment, we are not trying to attack the intention in either subsection (7) or clause 14 as a whole. As the Government have made clear, the Bill hugely extends the Government's powers to stop the Mr. Bigs, in particular, as we have all called them—the serious drug dealers—from hanging on to their ill-gotten gains. Undoubtedly such a Bill should contain a clause that is designed to set out the effect on the court's other powers. We have no problem with the basic intention of clause 14, but we believe that there must be a simpler way, and one that would be easier to understand, to set out the point in subsection (7).
My hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield and I came separately to that conclusion. As the Minister and, by now, other Committee members know, we both spent many years in the courts dealing with both criminal law and complex civil matters and are therefore used to abstruse legal drafting. Long before I entered the House in 1992 and my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield entered it in 1997, we often used to find that judges would ask, ``What on earth did Parliament mean when it introduced something as complicated as that?'' Members of the Bar and solicitors are familiar with being puzzled about that.
Following a much more recent decision that was not in force when I did the vast majority of my work in the courts, Pepper v. Hart, judges may now look at what Ministers say in debates in Committee in order to understand what Parliament intended. We must therefore be especially careful in our drafting and in what we say in Committee in order to ensure that points are refined. This is a Pepper v. Hart point.