My Lords, if I may, for the convenience of the Committee, I will group my Amendment 33 with Amendment 32 as my amendment is meant to help fill the pot that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, wants to distribute. I am sorry that I did not group it at an earlier stage.
My amendment is much less ambitious than the noble Lord’s amendment. It follows on from an amendment that my noble friend Lady Smith moved to the Serious Crime Bill. I was a member of the Joint Committee on the draft Modern Slavery Bill. We were concerned to maximise the confiscation of resources from perpetrators of slavery that could go to help victims much more than had happened in the past. Indeed, the confiscation of criminal assets under SOCA had not been one of the most glorious bits of public administration in this country, as I think was recognised by the Government following a PAC report. Therefore, we need to strengthen this.
I am the first to recognise that the Government went some way towards meeting the recommendations from the Joint Committee in this area and I am very grateful to the Government for moving some way. For example, I am glad that the Government have reduced the legislative requirement for a restraint order from reasonable cause to believe to reasonable suspicion. However, I remain concerned that they have not gone further and accepted the committee’s recommendation to remove the test that there must be a risk of dissipation of assets before action is taken by the prosecutor. Frankly, the advice that the Home Secretary seems to have been getting on this issue is a bit fanciful. The characters we are talking about in this area have a track record of dissipating assets. They move very quickly when it is known that they are going to be charged and prosecuted. I think that hanging on to the idea that they need to be protected from gung-ho prosecutors by actually keeping the intention that they have to show that they will dissipate their assets is rather fanciful. The Government need to look again at that area.
I will not spend very long at this late hour talking about the areas where the Government said they were going to look further at two or three of the other
recommendations in paragraph 210 on page 97 of the Joint Committee’s report. Rather than detain the House now, perhaps the Minister could write to us about how things have progressed in those areas that the Government were reviewing further.
What I want to do on this amendment is to persuade the Government that it would be useful to have a consultation to look further at strengthening the arrangements around this very technical area. I understand the difficulties of actually finding technical solutions and I am not someone who is going to try to move complicated technical amendments to the Bill at this late stage in its passage. However, I think the Government need to have another look at this so we can maximise the confiscation of assets to produce the kind of fund that the noble Lord, Lord Alton, is talking about. It is no good having a grand scheme for distribution if there is nothing in the pot to distribute. We have to work a lot harder. The kind of consultation that we are proposing in this amendment is meant to be helpful to the Government so that we can move on and strengthen this area of confiscation to the maximum advantage of victims.