| Previous Section | Index | Home Page |
23 Jan 2003 : Column 455—continued
Mr. Deputy Speaker (Sir Michael Lord): Order. Before the Minister responds, perhaps I may say to the House that it contravenes the sub judice rule for hon. Members to refer to any case individually in any detail.
John Healey: The hon. Member for Eddisbury (Mr. O'Brien) started by accusing me of smuggling out the
statement to Parliament when the Attorney-General and I launched the Butterfield review in November, in immediate response to the collapse of the LCB case. We acted immediately; we informed Parliament immediately; we did so under the procedures established by the House for written statements. Let me remind the hon. Gentleman that the problems with which we are dealing now date to the mid-1990s—frauds that were going on at that time, and investigations that were started and largely conducted then.The hon. Gentleman accuses Customs in the broadest terms off the back of one case. [Interruption.] "Customs in chaos" was the phrase that he used. He needs to understand that modern criminal trials are as much about the process of the trial as about the guilt of the defendants. It is entirely wrong to condemn the entire Customs service as he did. In none of the cases that has been halted so far is there any evidence of wider criminal conspiracy or corruption within Customs. The Roques report that we commissioned in 2000 looked into the matter and reached the same conclusion. Butler examined it and said the same.
Perhaps the hon. Gentleman should take some advice from his right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Folkestone and Hythe (Mr. Howard), who is not on the Front Bench. He well understood, back in 1995 when he was Home Secretary, the problems of condemning an entire service off the back of single cases. He stated, in response to my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin):
- "I do not think that it is at all appropriate to infer from particular cases, however serious, generalised allegations about a propensity on the part of the police to behave in the way that the hon. Gentleman has imputed to them."—[Official Report, 16 May 1995; Vol. 260, c. 170.]
The hon. Gentleman also asked me for detailed figures arising from the potential LCB-related cases and the fallout from them. Eight cases have collapsed so far. We are currently reviewing 20 further cases to judge the safety of the convictions. Thirty-two convictions have been overturned so far and no evidence has been offered against a further 15. Potentially, 93 convictions are susceptible if all the cases that we are currently reviewing are found to be unsafe.
The hon. Gentleman raised the point about sensitive cases. The Attorney-General, Customs Ministers and every law enforcement Minister will review sensitive cases. Listing and monitoring them is part of the effective management of the investigation and prosecution procedures—precisely the processes that were not in place in the mid-1990s, which led to many of the problems with which we are now dealing, following the collapse of the cases.
Finally, I confirm—the hon. Gentleman seems to be in some doubt, even though I made it clear in my statement—that Butterfield will consider the issues at
stake in the Stockade case. We set him the deadline of June to report jointly to the Attorney-General and me. A summary of the report and its recommendations will be laid before the House.
Matthew Taylor (Truro and St. Austell): Hon. Members on both Front Benches have reason to be embarrassed about the matter, which dates back to 1995. The Minister's statement was complacent in its reference, for example, to the fact that in complex criminal investigations there will always be some cases that fail. This is not simply a failure of a complex investigation because of the complexities of the case. We all understand that that will happen from time to time. This goes to the heart of the operation and the way in which Customs and Excise embarked on it.
It is ludicrous of the Minister to say that generalised criticisms of Customs and Excise should not be derived from the case, given that those in charge of the department have been changed, the departments' procedures have been changed, and substantive powers have been removed from the department as a result of these cases.
When, as in the present case, Customs and Excise commit to lawbreaking as part of an operation, as a means of trapping suspects, who gives authority for the law to be broken? Does it reach Ministers' desks? In the London City Bond case, the matter commenced in 1994 under the previous Administration, and continued until 1998 under the present Administration. Was ministerial authority sought for the operation, and if it was, who gave it? Was the then Minister made aware of the contingent liabilities through loss of revenue, which in fact occurred on a massive scale?
There have been a number of inquiries into the matter. Has the Minister ensured that the reports are all in the House of Commons Library so that they can be examined? Why will the Butterfield report not be published in full?
Most important of all, since it is the aspect of greatest concern to the taxpayer, is the question of costs. What is the Minister's estimate of the full potential cost if the Government drop the other cases now subject to appeal? At what stage were Ministers consulted on the liabilities when the decisions were taken to continue with those cases, long after—it seems—the Government were aware of the potential for failure of those cases? Is it not time to separate entirely the investigation and prosecution procedures? The Minister noted that some steps have been taken, but there has not yet been a total separation.
Much bigger costs arise from the loss of revenue. Can the Minister explain the apparent discrepancy between the figures provided by Customs and Excise—in the National Audit Office report, the National Investigation Service put the figure at £579 million in total—and by Ms Jan Wanstall, a senior Customs and Excise official, who was one of those who brought the failings of the case to the attention of the Government and others? Her evidence to the court stated that the losses to the Revenue from that fraud were £1.25 billion—a figure that no one disputed. In her testimony in court, she
alleged that that was a matter of the right politics. Will the Minister please explain the difference between those figures?
John Healey: The hon. Gentleman criticises the record of the Opposition and of the Government. I suppose he does so because he has no record of his own in government on which to comment. He accuses me of complacency in the matter. I utterly reject that, after everything that we have done to set up the Butterfield review and to make sure that it gets to the bottom of the lessons that are there to be learned in the LCB-related cases.
More importantly, of course it is right that we try to learn the lessons of what went wrong in the LCB cases, but what interests me more, and what I want to know as the Customs Minister responsible, is whether the steps taken by Customs in respect of investigation and prosecution are good enough. Do they meet the statutory requirements that we now have in place, which were not in place in 1995? Do they meet the best professional standards that are now in place and which may not have been in place in the mid-1990s? In particular, can we improve on what is currently being done?
On the hon. Gentleman's next point, no entrapment was involved in the cases. Using informants while allowing fraud to run, as it were, is an accepted, established and common part of law investigation and enforcement, but a question arises about the balance between allowing a fraud to run in order to pursue the investigation and nail those involved, and the scale of the loss of revenue to the Exchequer. It is the judgments that were made in 1995 and 1996 that were perhaps at fault in that regard. In the court cases that have folded at the moment, none of the techniques used in investigation has been questioned or criticised. It is the disclosure about those techniques that has led to the legal problems and therefore the unsafety of the prosecutions.
On the regime to oversee those issues, regulations are in place on the use of informants and statutory systems are in place on standards of disclosure. Of course, I was not involved in the decisions. It is wrong of the hon. Gentleman to suggest that a Customs Minister should be involved in operational decisions. Indeed, his doing so betrays a failure to understand the nature of law enforcement and the difficulty of such decisions.
The hon. Gentleman asked me a couple of other specific questions. To date, the legal cost in the LCB case is £7.4 million and in the Stockade case it is £760,000. He asked me about prosecution decisions and the handling of the cases—a matter that I explained in my statement. Perhaps he did not read the advance copy or listen carefully enough. From April last year, as the Gower-Hammond report, which we commissioned, recommended, we have separated from Customs responsibility for making decisions about prosecution and accounting for the conduct of the prosecutions
function and given it to the Attorney-General. Thus it is properly placed in the hands of one of the Government's Law Officers.
| Next Section
| Index | Home Page |