Clause 70 - Committal by magistrates' court
Proceeds of Crime Bill
3:00 pm
Mr Dominic Grieve (Beaconsfield, Conservative)
As the Minister will be aware, I have tried to approach the matter at this stage of the Committee's discussion differently from the way in which it was approached when we discussed clause 6. Under clause 6, we considered it in relation to magistrates court convictions or either-way offences. As the Minister will appreciate, I have attempted, having taken on board the comments about the Government's issues of principle, to try to find a common meeting point.
I appreciated the Minister's point about either-way or summary offences only, which is why, as I hope he will understand, I came up with this formula. Essentially, the people who would escape would be individuals who had committed offences that attract penalties at level 1 on the standard scale. I seem to recollect—perhaps I will be corrected—that level 1 on a standard scale is £100. We are therefore considering offences that attract fines of up to £100—a category consisting of what I would describe as small-scale administrative offences. I would have thought that that would be a better cut-off point than providing a completely unfettered power.
Ultimately, I suppose that this is an issue of principle. The Minister has fairly put the Government's point, which is that anyone in this country who commits a criminal offence should enter a parallel world in which all sorts of unpleasant things can be done to them. I dare say that the Minister regards that as socially desirable for the prevention of crime. However, the alternative way of looking at it is that we are giving considerable powers to law enforcement agencies, which are extensive, novel to a certain extent, and an infringement of some of the usual rules that have been applied to criminal justice in this country hitherto. That is especially so, as I shall remind the Minister, because later in the Bill a completely different regime is introduced, which allows somebody who has never been convicted of an offence to have proceedings brought against him for the confiscation of his assets under a civil recovery system. This is therefore not an ``all or nothing'' situation. The issue is the extent to which somebody who has a minor conviction or a series of minor convictions that attracted three penalties of £100 might be subject to that process. In those circumstances, it is right that the line is drawn somewhere, because otherwise, I fear that there might be a public perception that in an effort to fight crime, we were producing injustice. It is difficult to know where the line should be drawn.