My Lords, I am grateful for the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Alton, and grouped with the amendment spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Warner. In many ways it might be easier if I sum up by taking the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Warner, first, because it feeds into the principle of—if you like—the hopper, which then comes down to the general fund, which is the subject of the amendment of the noble Lord, Lord Alton.
I shall touch on a few things on the way through. The scale of the proceeds gained through this is widely acknowledged: the noble and learned Baroness, Lady Butler-Sloss, mentioned a figure she found on page 38 of the strategy document that we put out. We used a figure from the ILO, which estimates the global proceeds from this activity at about $150 billion. That equates to something like $34,800 per victim. So the amounts concerned—as we have heard all the way through—are
very sizeable, and that is the underlying reason why organised criminals are moving increasingly towards the trafficking of human beings, rather than the drugs, guns and other weapons that we have seen in the past. It is because it is lucrative.
That is why we are absolutely determined that their financial resources—there is a financial motivation—ought to be the target of our activities. As my noble friend Lady Hamwee mentioned, this debate reflects a significant debate that we had on the Serious Crime Bill, where we talked about the process for doing this and inserted a legal test for obtaining such an order to be reasonable cause to believe that the alleged offender has benefited from his criminal conduct. The noble Lord, Lord Warner, was good enough to recognise that that was a step forward. There was a general feeling that if one applied for the restraint order or the freeze early in the proceedings, that could in some cases alert the perpetrators to the fact that there was an imminent investigation, and perhaps arrests, and that some of the jointly held assets might cause that to happen. That is not to say that this is our final position but it is something that we looked at very carefully before coming up with the current proposal.
The recovery regime, which has been strengthened in the Serious Crime Bill—your Lordships’ amendments to which are currently under consideration in another place—is aimed very much at increasing the resources recovered from organised crime. The noble Lord, Lord Alton, asked about the amount of funds that had been recovered. I think that in the order of £746 million worth of criminal assets have been seized across all four means of recovery, which is a record amount. We expect that to increase.
Noble Lords may also be interested to note that paragraph 4.32 of the strategy document states:
“Over £2 million has been recovered from slave drivers and traffickers in the past four years”.
Compared with the amount which has been earned, that is a pitiful and woefully low sum, and is why this legislation is before us to strengthen the law and to ensure that more assets are recovered. How is that to be done? I am not sure whether the noble Lord, Lord Warner, was at the Home Office when the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 was going through.