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Mr. Eric Forth (Bromley and Chislehurst) (Con): You can change it if you want.
Mr. Blunkett: That is for later in the week, I think.
We will ensure that Customs, special branch and the immigration service work together effectively. My right hon. Friend the Chancellor of the Exchequer and I will direct the heads of all those services to develop more closely aligned objectives and priorities through their individual business plans. That will ensure co-ordinated, strategically driven operational activity. The arrangements will not interfere with any existing structures of accountability.
Nowhere is that co-ordinated approach more important than in the battle against terrorism. At present, each of the 43 police forces maintains a separate special branch. Terrorists respect no such boundaries. I believe that we can significantly enhance effectiveness through greater co-ordination of activity, so I am creating a new national system to pool intelligence and co-ordinate operations. My announcement on 19 March of an extra £15 million, together with the strengthening of the counter-terrorism branch of the Metropolitan police, will enable us to achieve that goal more readily.
Defeating organised crime is not just about structures and effective operations. The powers available to our agencies to deter, disrupt and protect are critical. We need to make the best possible use of our existing powers, whether they are probation licence conditions or asset recovery, immigration or tax powers. It was, after all, Elliot Ness from the Revenue who was crucial in achieving the conviction of Al Capone.
The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 is significant in our efforts to deprive criminals of their assets. The new cash seizure powers are netting £1 million a week, and we are on track to meet this year's overall target of recovering £45 million, but there is still much that we can do. We will ensure better use of intelligence and the better management of information, and we will make sure that prosecutors are involved at an early stage. Recent changes to the law have provided a more effective framework, but no group of defendants is more adept at manipulating legal safeguards. Such people make corruption and intimidation part of their system of defence.
As organised crime becomes more complex and organised criminals more sophisticated, the need grows for new powers to gather evidence and for effective
incentives for defendants to testify against their criminal associates. We will therefore build on the powers in the Criminal Justice Act 2003.With my right hon. Friend the Attorney-General and other colleagues I have fundamentally reviewed the powers of our law enforcement agencies. As a result, we propose to create Serious Fraud Office powers to compel the production of documents and information and to put Queen's evidence on a statutory footing to encourage defendants to plead guilty and testify against co-defendants. We are also taking forward the idea of a national witness protection programme, and we will create new licence conditions to ensure that the finances of serious criminals are kept under close scrutiny after their release.
Other reviews are relevant to this work, including that on the use of intercept material in court, on which we will provide a definitive proposal shortly; that on the law on conspiracy and secondary participation; and, of course, Sir Michael Bichard's review of data retention and information sharing among police forces. With my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Constitutional Affairs, I shall also ask the Sentencing Guidelines Council to review the existing sentencing regime to produce sentences that match more clearly the gravity of the underlying offences and the harm caused.
Finally, we need to ensure a clear focus on our protection of areas of organised crime where most damage is done. That means transforming the quality of our intelligence-driven effort. We must increase the risks and reduce the benefits of operating in that field.
The United Kingdom has never before produced a comprehensive strategy to tackle organised crime. With a new ministerial committee, under my chairmanship, and a better understanding of the harm caused, we have the building blocks to adopt a focused approach. The proposals that I am publishing today will define a new approach for the 21st century that will match the threat and the sophistication that we face. Defeating organised criminals is an objective that I know we all share. I commend the White Paper to the House.
David Davis (Haltemprice and Howden) (Con): I thank the Home Secretary for giving us advance sight of his statement. I want to put it on the record that I support the principles contained in the Home Secretary's announcement. We have advocated for a long time the creation of an agency such as he has described, but my concern, as ever, is that a policy that enjoys all-party support in this House can turn out very badly if, as a result, it is not subjected to rigorous scrutiny. Indeed, that is particularly important where civil liberties are concerned.
I want to raise several specific points, the first of which concerns plea bargaining, as the Home Secretary described the issue of Queen's evidence. We support his announcement, and the introduction of such a measure is overdue. Plea bargaining has worked well in countries such as Australia and America, but there have been problems historically in Northern Ireland. It creates a situation whereby it is to the advantage of a criminal to, as the jargon has it, fit somebody up. There can be no greater miscarriage of justice than an innocent man being jailed so that a criminal can go free. How will the Home Secretary ensure that that will not happen?
We welcome the Home Secretary's announcement on intercepts. We are on the record as calling for the Government to lift the UK's self-imposed ban on the use of telephone intercepts in court, but, again, there are dangers. Obviously, we must ensure that we do not compromise the intelligence services. Moreover, intelligence information is, by its very nature, difficult to verify. It is imperative that we take steps to ensure that innocent people are not convicted on intelligence that turns out to be wrong. How does the Home Secretary intend to deal with that problem?
I want to ask the Home Secretary about more general concerns relating to civil liberties. He did not refer to them today, but they have been discussed in the press in the past few weeks. Will the burden of proof in cases involving organised crime be lowered, as the Prime Minister suggested a few weeks ago? Furthermore, does the Home Secretary agree that any proposal that envisages convicting an individual on the basis of his own silence, and when there is no other evidence, would have serious implications for civil liberties?
The Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Don Valley (Caroline Flint), has said that 5,000 people will work in the new agency. Does that involve any extra people, or are they being brought in from existing organisations? The head of the National Crime Squad has said that the agency will recruit officers from the police, and the Home Secretary is on record describing it as “an elite squad”. Can he assure the House that the brightest and best in the police force will not be creamed off to fill places in the new agency? Does he agree that many extremely dedicated and talented people work in conventional policing, and that portraying them as somehow second class could damage police morale?
The Home Secretary rightly pointed out that terrorism depends on organised crime. Has he received representations on whether SOCA as I presume we will call it should cover terrorism? If it is not to include terrorism, how will it work with the counter-terrorist agencies that cover an enormous amount of exactly the same ground? Can he outline in more detail how SOCA will co-ordinate its work with the police? In particular, what impact will it have on the autonomy of chief constables, which is so vital to the independence of our police forces?
We support the general thrust of the proposal, but I remind the Home Secretary he doubtless already knows that the devil is in the detail, and particularly in the implementation.
Mr. Blunkett: I welcome the right hon. Gentleman's response and his appreciation for what we are doing. He is right to say that the devil is in the detail, and that the Opposition should scrutinise not only today's announcement but the policy's implementation. Yes, we intend to have clear safeguards on plea bargaining, and it is vital that we learn any lessons that we can from Northern Ireland about injustices that have been perpetrated. Putting Queen's evidence on a statutory footing will help in that regard: such activity has been at the very fringes in this country, accounting for only approximately 1 per cent. of cases. That compares with the United States, in which such activity accounts for more than a quarter of similar cases.
It is also crucial that we get intercept evidence right. The right hon. Gentleman's colleague who deals with counter-terrorism made a useful contribution to our debate a month ago. As was said, we must ensure that we use such evidence for the right purpose in the right areas, which is why we are taking our time.
We will not recruit additional staff. We will pull together over 1,000 Customs and Excise staff to deal with the issues that I have described as well as staff from the National Criminal Intelligence Service, the National Crime Squad and the immigration service. There has been a problem with secondments to the National Crime Squad, which is why it requested, and we granted it, the opportunity to recruit directly. The new agency will also do that and will try to secure the right people. It is possible for someone to be brilliant at community policing, but not at dealing with the sort of activities that are relevant to the investigations of the new body, and vice versa.
It is vital to work closely with the police without threatening existing arrangements or the autonomy of chief constables. The president of the Association of Chief Police Officers has welcomed the new moves on the basis of the reassurances that we have given.
The right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (David Davis) asked about the threshold of evidence. When we originally announced the creation of the serious organised crime agency in February, the Prime Minister made it clear that we were talking about circumstances in which civil evidence was appropriate. That applies under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, which confers the ability to seize assets and move on from that into other activity. As I spelled out a month ago in our useful debate on counter-terrorism, some aspects are relevant to terrorism, and they could be applied to serious crime where civil evidence for a civil order is appropriate.
The licensing arrangements for post release I mentioned them in my statement, and the White Paper covers them are part of the process. Without threatening the evidence base for criminal law or the “beyond reasonable doubt” conditions, they will help us to be able to use our imagination in new ways to achieve new goals.
Overall, given that £375 million is at its disposal, it is important that the agency adds value in the sense of enabling us to tackle problems that we have not been able to tackle in the past. When I meet chief constables, such as the one in Merseyside, I find that they are crying out for a co-ordinated approach, which links intelligence in the new agency to the intelligence in the security services and the work of the counter-terrorism branch of the Metropolitan police. There is already close working on operational matters, but there should be a real thrust to backing operations at local policing level to deal with not just national but international activities of organised criminals. That is how we can achieve what I described in the statement and make the environment of Britain deeply unwelcome for those who ruin our lives.
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