Serious Crime Bill [HL]

My Lords, before I do anything else, I must offer my abject apology. I was listening to my noble and learned friend, but I came downstairs to find that the debate had ended. I am deeply sorry to have kept the House waiting even for one second. I beg to move that this Bill be now read a second time. This Bill is important and significant. It gives us a major opportunity to address a number of serious issues. In moving that the Serious Crime Bill be given a Second Reading, I want to emphasise the difficulties with which, as your Lordships will be aware, we deal every day. Teenage girls are taken from their homes in eastern Europe and trafficked into the UK for the purpose of forcing them into prostitution, while drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine make their way on to our streets, destroying lives and communities and causing harm that costs more than £15 billion a year. Criminals are living comfortably off the proceeds of all these crimes. These issues are what this Bill is about. As my right honourable friend the Home Secretary has made clear, the Home Office is committed first and foremost to ensuring the safety and security of the citizens of the United Kingdom. We are bringing forward a legislative programme with this principle at its heart, and an essential part of that is the Bill now before noble Lords. Its measures will help law enforcement agencies to prevent and, we hope, reduce such harm, take away the profits made from the suffering of those trafficked for sex or addicted to drugs, and put a stop to the types of fraud that cost the taxpayers of this country billions of pounds. The Bill results largely from a consultation on the Green Paper, New Powers Against Organised and Financial Crime, published last July. We received a broad range of responses, the majority of which were supportive of the policy ideas set out. We have listened to the comments made and I and my ministerial colleagues have met a range of stakeholders and interested parties—including, for example, the Information Commissioner, Liberty and the Law Society—to listen to their views and to ensure that the need to protect us all is balanced with appropriate safeguards. Developing on the Green Paper, the Bill sets out four key areas where we felt that improvements could be made: the creation of a new civil order, to be targeted at those involved in serious crime and designed to prevent their involvement in serious crime in the future; taking forward the work undertaken by the Law Commission on the law in relation to encouraging or assisting crime; improving the prevention of fraud through the sharing of data across both the public and private sectors; and, finally, improving the current regime for recovering the proceeds of crime. A key area contained in the Bill but which was not contained in the consultation paper is the provision to merge the Assets Recovery Agency with the Serious Organised Crime Agency. This is being done to maximise the skills and expertise of both agencies in going after the profits of criminals. An additional area for which the Bill makes provision but which was not included in the Green Paper is an extension of the surveillance powers available to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, which are currently available only for tackling serious crime relating to ex-Customs and Excise matters, to serious crime relating to ex-Inland Revenue matters as well. This is necessary to address emerging patterns of criminality targeting the direct taxation system. These proposals take further the new approach to tackling organised crime first outlined in the 2004 White Paper, One Step Ahead. While the provisions in the Bill are targeted at different elements of serious criminality, they have common features. First, they reflect a commitment to reducing the harm caused by serious crime. Rather than focusing on particular outputs such as prosecutions or seizures, they focus on preventing crime wherever possible. Secondly, they reflect careful work with law enforcement practitioners, identifying the key gaps in the current system and giving them the tools that they need for the job while ensuring that these tools are truly necessary and, most important, proportionate. I will take your Lordships through these measures a little more comprehensively and provide some clarification in certain areas that seem initially to have caused some confusion and mistaken reporting in the media. I hope that your Lordships will feel content after these matters are explored more fully. Part 1 of the Bill creates the serious crime prevention orders, the SCPOs. These are aimed at the prevention of the kinds of crimes that I mentioned at the outset. The people who commit crimes of this nature are often very skilled, very intelligent and very adept at adapting their processes. In short, they are not stupid and will try to distance themselves from criminality while still raking in the profits. They will often coerce those weaker than themselves into taking risks and they will constantly seek to find new ways of making money while avoiding detection by law enforcement agencies. The Government must be similarly flexible and innovative in providing new law enforcement tools that will help to prevent this. As a result, we are proposing the creation of the orders that I am about to explore with your Lordships. These will add another string to the bow of law enforcement agencies which is flexible enough to prevent those involved in serious crime from carrying on, but which can only be granted by the courts where it is reasonable and proportionate to do so. Perhaps I can reassure your Lordships on a few elements of the orders. First, these orders will be able to be applied for only by the three applicant authorities set out in the Bill: the Director of Public Prosecutions, including the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland; the director of the Serious Fraud Office; and the director of Revenue and Customs prosecutions. This reflects the fact that the orders will be sought only where appropriate and in a targeted way as a result of specific investigations by law enforcement agencies into serious criminal activity. I make it clear that serious crime prevention orders are not simply a soft alternative to prosecution. The Government are committed to ensuring that those who commit serious crimes are caught, brought to justice and punished appropriately. It is highly significant that the applicant authorities also have the responsibility for deciding whether it would be appropriate in a particular circumstance to bring a prosecution. The principle behind the orders, though, is that there will be times when it is possible, through the imposition of reasonable restrictions or obligations, to prevent those involved in serious crime from committing further acts that will bring harm to others. Prevention is a key issue that we seek to address in these provisions. Secondly, I know that in the press coverage of the publication of the Bill there has been much mistaken comment about these orders being a way for law enforcement agencies to get around troublesome prosecutions. I assure the House that that is not the intention. When deciding whether to make an order, the courts will apply a two-part test. First, there is a backward-looking element, in that it relates to a person’s previous behaviour. The court will have to be satisfied that a person has been involved in serious crime, which will be the case if they have committed a serious offence, facilitated the commission of a serious offence by someone else or acted in a way that was likely to facilitate the commission of a serious offence, either by themselves or someone else. These are civil orders, so this involvement will have to be proved to a civil standard. But I know that many of your Lordships will be only too aware—so I hope that noble Lords will forgive me if I emphasise it—that where serious assertions are made, the civil standard can be virtually the same on certain issues as the criminal standard. Recent case law has stated clearly that in proceedings like these the court will look at the civil standard as a sliding scale, with the likely standard of proof for these orders being very close to the criminal standard of ““beyond reasonable doubt””.