Serious Crime Bill [HL]

My Lords, I share many of the reservations expressed in your Lordships’ House this evening, but the Minister’s opening words, that this is a significant Bill, should be emphasised. The title itself, simple though it is, should focus our attention on a nationally serious problem. I am generally comfortable with Part 2 of the Bill, certainly in so far as it covers the encouragement of, or assistance in, crime; inchoate liability, as many of us in this House know, has been a subject demanding address for some time. I am also comfortable with a good deal of Part 3, certainly in so far as it applies to the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 and the suggested absorption of the Asset Recovery Agency into SOCA. The ARA has been a failure and has not recovered the sorts of sums that it should. One hopes that the projected move will improve that position considerably. However, I, too, have serious reservations about Part 1 and the aspects of Part 3 concerned with data mining—a term that I had not come across before, but which I have no doubt we will explore later. I look at this issue as two sides of the same coin: the obverse and the reverse. On the obverse, it is one of those rare and strange coincidences that almost exactly 10 years ago, when I was leaving my post as Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, I saw the launch of an operation against a then target criminal, Terry Adams. This morning, the newspapers are full of his conviction. Unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail had perhaps the biggest headline: "““Downfall of Britain’s ‘Godfather’ of crime””." It said that, after a £50 million, 10-year investigation, the head of Britain’s most feared crime family finally—““finally”” was in capital letters—faces jail. During those 10 years, it is conservatively estimated that Adams racked up a £200 million criminal empire. Reading the newspapers, you would believe that he is the only major criminal—one name that shone out in that pantheon of criminality above all others. To balance that, one could talk about Kenneth Noye, Curtis Warren, the Charrington brothers or many others. All of them, in my ex-professional experience, have a series of typical attributes. They were and are all ruthless. They are violent to the point of using torture, extortion and murder as an easy recourse. They are avaricious, cunning and corrupting, and, above all, they are wealthy and they swagger. They swagger because they believe, often rightly, that they are impregnable to the deprecations of the law. They put in mechanisms and layers around and beneath them to prevent the legal process from getting to them. They cause mega-billions of damage to our economy, and a great deal of suffering. I will come to the other side of the coin in a moment, but it is not just that these criminals operate in the stratosphere of crime. One would see two results at street level. First, it is their drugs, large numbers of pirate DVDs, prostitutes, imported firearms, illegal immigrants and protection rackets that affect all of us at street level. That is the scope of the problem. Secondly, small criminals are imitative. Little criminals, naturally enough, aspire to be bigger criminals. They look up at those with bigger cars, better suits and all the trappings of criminal wealth, and they aspire to move up. The higher the level at which we allow the top criminal to operate, the greater the ladder of criminal opportunity. The Serious Organised Crime Agency was created to deal with core criminals—a very small number of very large fish. It is a multi-agency organisation, and it is not likely to be involved in ordinary, run-of-the-mill investigations. It will not deal with somebody who comes into its office and asks for a crime to investigated, which would happen in the average CID office. It is in the business of being pre-emptive and it tries to prevent, rather than detect, crime. It is in the business of thwarting, disrupting, dismantling and destroying criminal empires, and it goes without saying that it does so within the law. Prevention orders and data sharing could be the way forward but, as has been eloquently expressed from all parts of the House, we must not lose a sense of proportion in this debate. There is too much elasticity in parts of the Bill. There is too great a risk to the innocent and the Bill could be another assault on the central pillars of our constitution and our criminal justice system. I shall keep my remarks short because the ground has already been covered. Part 1 bothers me as it bothers many other noble Lords. ASBOs have been mentioned; ““too many”” and ““too loose”” are epithets that could be attached to them, as they could be to serious crime prevention orders. I have no quarrel with the title—serious crime prevention is what this House and the whole of society should be involved in—but they come suspiciously close to control orders. I believe that the degree of legal uncertainty in the Bill is unacceptable. There is a need for greater specificity within Part 1. There are too few limits on the type and scope of its terms. We have already explored Part 3. I am not altogether sure what data mining means, but it seems to me that we would have no problem with exchanging data on a target organisation or person. It might have been a good idea to have had that resource to target the criminal enterprise of Adams, the man I mentioned who filled the newspapers this morning. Joint police operations with HM Revenue and Customs sharing information in that way are presumably a good idea. However, we should not go on fishing expeditions—with my tongue firmly in my cheek, I say that I, too, was surprised to see salmon and trout fishing in Schedule 1 to the Act. As I am a man who spends much of his spare time standing up to his waist in Scottish rivers looking for fish that do not exist, noble Lords might expect to find me in Committee arguing very strongly to keep that provision in the Bill—but, seriously, I share the doubts about some of the examples in Schedule 1. To go on a data-sharing fishing expedition infringing the privacy of millions on the off-chance of catching a few, admittedly quite big, fish would be a step too far. Not so very long ago, the Information Commissioner said that as a society we are, "““sleepwalking into a surveillance society that is already all around us””." We are talking about means and ends. So far as the end is concerned—combating serious organised crime—let none of us lose sight of the fact that it is a real and dangerous problem. The end set out in the Bill has to be sensible and supportable. It is critical to the social stability and well-being of this nation. We have to give support to SOCA, as it is currently set up. At the same time, we must address very serious questions, in Committee and after, on the means that we use to achieve those ends. I share many of the doubts about how the Bill is drafted so far as means are concerned. I look forward to a full exposure and critical examination in Committee.