Clause 70 - Committal by magistrates' court
Proceeds of Crime Bill
3:00 pm
Mr Bob Ainsworth (Parliamentary Under-Secretary, Home Office; Coventry North East, Labour)
The hon. Gentleman is right to say that we have had this conversation before. The amendment would prevent the prosecutor from having a case referred to the Crown court for confiscation unless the offence attracted a penalty of imprisonment or a fine at level 2 or above on the standard scale. The Committee will recall that the Government consider it a point of principle that confiscation should be available after conviction for any offence. We do not want to chase small amounts of money around, but as I have tried to indicate to the Committee, it is not necessarily the scale of the crime that dictates the level of profit that has been made as a result.
The main advantage of providing a threshold is that we would target more serious criminals. The main worry, however, is that we would provide a loophole through which those serious criminals would be only too clever, and only too quick, to climb. The clause is intended as a catch-all provision to ensure that any case that a magistrates court may not be sending to a Crown court can be sent there anyway, for confiscation to be considered. The amendment would restrict the circumstances under which that could be done. I ask hon. Members not to go down that route, for the reasons that I have just given, and for the reasons that I gave before. We could not do that without providing loopholes, and the amount of remuneration is not in any way aligned to the seriousness of the offence.