Terrorist Asset-Freezing etc. Bill [HL]

My Lords, I was not able to take part at Second Reading, which I regretted as, when I sat in the seat now occupied by the noble Lord, Lord Davies of Oldham, I covered the terrorist asset emergency legislation earlier in the year. I have of course had an opportunity to read that very good Second Reading debate. Despite the fact that I have now moved to this side of the House, had I taken part in the debate I would have regretted that the Government had not moved on from the formulation of asset freezing bequeathed by the previous Government and my tone would have been probably somewhat critical of my Front Bench. So it is a great delight to me to find that the Government have tabled the amendments in this group. They show that the Government have listened to some of the concerns from the civil liberties groups and from noble Lords and noble and learned Lords. In particular, I believe that the belief formulation is superior to the suspicion formulation, and the interim designation solution is a practical response to the issues that have been raised. The noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, raised an important point on amendments to amendments. My noble friend will be aware that if we accept these amendments in practice without agreement, there can be no further amendments. But the Government tabled these amendments particularly late—even later than normal for a Government to table amendments. Conjoined with the fact that when they were tabled we were still in recess, and for many of us it was difficult to access things, I hope that my noble friend will accept that it is reasonable for your Lordships’ House to discuss the substance and the detail of the points that come up in relation to the amendments, which I am reasonably confident your Lordships' House will accept this afternoon. It would not be right to stand on the formality that, having accepted the amendments, we can no longer discuss them in the later stages of this Bill. Having said that I support the amendments in this group, I have one question for my noble friend. It will be interesting to see how these interim designations are used in practice and whether they are converted to final designations. Under Clause 24, there is to be a regular Treasury report on the use of the powers in the Bill. Will my noble friend assure me that that report will cover the extent to which interim designations are converted into final designations? We would want to have some assurance that the power that is being used in relation to interim designations was sufficiently robust and did not fall significantly short of the standard that we would regard as acceptable for draconian actions to be taken in respect of people’s assets. Finally, picking up on what my noble friend said about the Home Office review, I think he led the House to believe at Second Reading that that review would be available before we returned. He referred specifically to the Commons Summer Recess ending before we returned. It is a considerable disappointment that we do not appear to have that review available for our Committee stage. Is it possible that we will have that Home Office review before finalising the remaining stages of this Bill? It would be disappointing if the Bill left this House without sight of that review. In particular, although my noble friend referred to the fact that it concludes that there are enough significant differences between the control order regime and the asset-freezing regime, many of us remain to be convinced of the translation of that into legal effect. We would value looking at the arguments and analysis that led to that conclusion.