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Lord Falconer of Thoroton: My Lords, the amendments that I shall move are constructive and will be welcomed by all. Therefore, I have no sense of embarrassment.
On Question, Motion agreed to.
Clause 1 [The Agency and its Director]:
Lord Falconer of Thoroton moved Amendment No. 1:
- Page 2, line 3, at end insert—
The noble and learned Lord said: My Lords, in moving this amendment, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 2 to 6, 146, 221 and 222.
Amendments Nos. 1 to 6 are technical amendments that we have identified as being necessary to confirm the agency's status as a non-ministerial department and the director's employment status as a civil servant. They do not reflect any change in policy.
Amendments Nos. 1, 4 and 5 are required to confirm non-ministerial department status. Amendments Nos. 1 and 4 are needed because it is normal for the Minister for the Civil Service to have a formal role in determining the number of civil servants employed and their terms of employment.
Amendment No. 5 is required because a non-ministerial department must be funded directly rather than via the Home Office vote. The amendment makes
The change will require a consequential amendment to the money resolution that was passed in October in another place. The Government will seek that when the Bill returns there after noble Lords have completed their consideration.
Amendments Nos. 2, 3 and 6 are needed in view of the director's intended status as a civil servant. The nature of the director's role—carrying out public functions on behalf of the state—is such that he will be a civil servant. Whether or not the head of a non-ministerial department is a civil servant depends on the nature of his functions and the relationship with Ministers.
The director of the Serious Fraud Office, the Director of Public Prosecutions and the chairman of the Inland Revenue are all civil servants. Although the heads of some other non-ministerial departments are not civil servants—the chief inspector of schools is one example—the director of the new agency will be more akin to the director of the Serious Fraud Office.
Amendment No. 3 deletes the reference to the director being added to the list of office holders who can be members of the Principal Civil Service Pension Scheme. As the director will be a civil servant, that provision is not needed. Amendment No. 2 requires formal approval from the Minister for the Civil Service of the terms on which the director holds office.
Amendment No. 6 deletes the reference to the director being added to the list of office holders who are disqualified from membership of the Westminster Parliament and the Northern Ireland Assembly. As a civil servant, he will automatically be disqualified from membership. In Committee, the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, moved amendments to disqualify the director from membership of the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. I hope that she will accept that, as a result of these amendments, the director will now be automatically disqualified from being a member of those bodies.
Amendments Nos. 146, 221 and 222 will ensure that there is a proper basis for the secondment of police officers to the new assets recovery agency. Amendments Nos. 221 and 222 provide for the secondment of police officers from England, Wales and Northern Ireland to the agency on standard central service terms. Making the provisions will not require any officers to be seconded to the agency but it will ensure that they can be seconded on terms that protect their conditions of service in appropriate cases.
Amendment No. 146 makes provision in respect of the work that any seconded police officers will be able to undertake at the agency. Clause 1(5) provides generally that anything that the director is authorised or required to do may be done by a member of staff of the agency or a person providing services under
Amendment No. 146 will make a further exception in respect of seconded police officers. Those officers will be seconded on central service terms and will remain constables and retain their police powers. It will not therefore be appropriate to have seconded police officers working on civil recovery cases. The amendment simply provides that seconded officers will not be able to undertake civil recovery work on behalf of the director. I beg to move.
Baroness Buscombe: My Lords, I rise simply to thank the Minister for tabling amendments in response to our debate in Committee. They provide for the automatic disqualification of the director of the assets recovery agency from being a Member of the Scottish Parliament or the Welsh Assembly.
Lord Goodhart: My Lords, I, too, have no objection to the amendments. I intended at this stage to make the same point as that raised by the noble Lord, Lord Ampthill. We are getting back to the bad old days of two or three years ago, when major Bills kept appearing with hundreds of government amendments. That has happened again on this occasion. It suggests serious overload on parliamentary counsel. I hope that we shall not see that happening again.
On Question, amendment agreed to.
Schedule 1 [Assets Recovery Agency]:
Lord Falconer of Thoroton moved Amendments Nos. 2 to 6:
On Question, amendments agreed to.
Baroness Buscombe moved Amendment No. 7:
The noble Baroness said: My Lords, in moving this amendment, I shall speak also to Amendments Nos. 30, 32, 33, 58, 60, 61, 65, 82, 84 and 85.
I shall begin by concentrating on Amendments Nos. 7 and 65, which relate to Clause 6. This issue has been debated at length in your Lordships' House and
Our amendments seek to persuade the Government that there should be in the Bill an element of discretion whereby the court can intervene and prevent proceedings from taking place where there are exceptional circumstances that justify its not doing so, thus preserving a safeguard, albeit a minimal one.
I fully suspect that the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General will respond by saying, as he did in Committee, that there are already sufficient safeguards in Clause 10. I must say that I disagree, particularly in view of the draconian powers contained in the Bill. The defendant is placed in the position of having to satisfy the court that there is a serious risk of injustice. The onus is on him or her rather than the prosecutor or the court. The introduction of exceptional circumstances at an earlier stage is in our view a fairer approach, which does not render the Bill unworkable or ineffective.
On the amendments relating to Clause 6 that were tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Goodhart and Lord Thomas of Gresford, the effect would be roughly the same. Amendment No. 8 and subsequent consequential amendments propose that if there is a serious risk of injustice, proceedings should stop there and then. The threshold is the serious risk of injustice. Our amendment is slightly different in that it expressly refers to "exceptional circumstances". If the Government are not prepared to agree that proceedings should stop when there is a serious risk of injustice, they should, we contend, be prepared to stop at "exceptional circumstances".
I view the amendments tabled by the noble Lords, Lord Goodhart and Lord Thomas of Gresford, as the wicket and our amendments as the long stop. If the amendments proposed by the noble Lords, Lord Goodhart and Lord Thomas of Gresford, are not acceptable, it would be quite absurd to refuse ours.
I turn to the amendment relating to Clause 75. The amendment, which was proposed by the noble Lords, Lord Goodhart and Lord Thomas of Gresford, and to which my name and that of my noble friend Lord Kingsland have been added, deals with the interpretation of a criminal lifestyle. The defendant has a criminal lifestyle if the offence concerned is, first, specified in Schedule 2 under the heading "Lifestyle Offences". In passing, I wonder whether they should be called "criminal lifestyle offences". However, that is clear, and we welcomed the schedule in Committee. Secondly, there is also a criminal lifestyle if it constitutes conduct forming a part of criminal activity or if it is an offence committed over a period of at least six months.
As I said, in Committee we welcomed the inclusion of Schedule 2. However, the list of offences is not conclusive. Notwithstanding that subsection (2)(a) of Clause 75 is clear, paragraphs (b) and (c) allow for a wider test; namely, for conduct forming part of a course of criminal activity or an offence committed over a period of at least six months.
Therefore, in spite of Schedule 2, which we welcome, the concerns remain as expressed by my honourable friend the shadow Home Secretary in another place and by myself concerning minor traffic offences leading to the label "criminal lifestyle" when we both spoke on the matter at Second Reading. Particularly given the Government's continued aversion to judicial discretion, we firmly believe that the taint of a criminal lifestyle should attach only where the course of criminal activity or the offences committed over a period of six months are punishable by imprisonment. I beg to move.
Lord Goodhart: My Lords, the amendments in this group could have been dealt with as two different groups. The first group includes Amendments Nos. 7, 8, 37, 38, 65 and 66. Three are in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, and three are in my name. The second group includes Amendments Nos. 30, 32, 33, 58, 60, 61, 82, 84 and 85, all of which are in my name together with that of my noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford and to which the noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, and the noble Lord, Lord Kingsland, have now added their names.
The noble Baroness, Lady Buscombe, and I thought that it would be for the convenience of the House if the two groups were put down together for debate. They are both concerned with mitigating what we see as the draconian impact of the provisions in Clauses 6 and 75 relating to the question of a criminal lifestyle. As I said, the two groups contain somewhat different approaches.
The first group—that is, the one starting with Amendments Nos. 7 and 8—gives the court power to hold that a defendant does not have a criminal lifestyle, even if the conditions in Clause 75 are certified. The second group says that the offences needed under Clause 75 to constitute a criminal lifestyle must be either the specified offences or other offences which are punishable by imprisonment. Those are different points. They are not, in fact, inconsistent with each other, but each would serve to mitigate the impact of the criminal lifestyle provisions. If the Government could see their way to accepting either amendment, that could well temper the impact of Clauses 6 and 75 to a level that was tolerable.
With regard to Amendments Nos. 7 and 8, we believe that it is right to give the court some degree of discretion. We are not proposing that the discretion would be an absolute one in which the court would have power whenever it thought fit to dispense with the hearing of an application for a confiscation order. But, of course, the finding that a defendant had a criminal
Therefore, the application for a confiscation order is potentially oppressive. It puts a heavy burden on the defendant, even if ultimately he succeeds in proving that none of the property is the proceeds of crime. Surely it is right that the court is able to say, "We have heard what was said at the trial. We have heard what the prosecutor said in opening the application for a confiscation order, but we think that it would be unjust to the defendant to force him to defend his right to property." We say that the court should be able to say that the conditions of Clause 75 were technically satisfied but it would be unjust to require the defendant to go through the process of proving title to assets.
The Government can, of course, say, and no doubt will say, that the prosecutor or director have a discretion not to ask for a confiscation order. But surely it cannot be said that the prosecution will never exercise that power oppressively. The prosecution is not, in a real sense, an impartial party, and the judge, who is impartial, should have the power to stop the application for a confiscation order where it would be unjust to proceed.
Amendment No. 7 is very much to the same effect. It requires not that it should be unjust but that there should be exceptional circumstances. Both are directed at what would no doubt be the rare and unusual—but still possible— event of the prosecution acting oppressively in proceeding to ask for a confiscation order.
The alternative route involves restricting the power to find a criminal lifestyle to cases where offences can be punishable by imprisonment; that is, the three offences—the one which led to the conviction and the two prior ones within the preceding six-year period—which will, under Clause 75, lead to holding that a criminal lifestyle exists. We say that the power should be limited to offences punishable by imprisonment.
We are not suggesting that they should be indictable offences. We accept that some offences are triable either way. Indeed, a few which are triable only summarily could justify a finding of a criminal lifestyle. But if the offence is so minor that it can never lead to prison, then we believe that it should not lead to a confiscation order.
At one stage the Government gave the example of an offence which was not punishable by imprisonment but which could lead to a considerable gain by an offender. They gave the example of a developer who felled protected trees on a development site in order to make it easier to develop the land. That may be an example of a summary offence which may lead to a gain. It is an offence which is not punishable by imprisonment. But surely it is not the type of offence which should lead to the conclusion that there is a
In the case given in the example, the offender may be—probably will be—a corporate body rather than an individual. The question is whether a corporate body can have a criminal lifestyle. That is an important question. Let us suppose that over a six-year period a major supermarket chain with hundreds of stores throughout the country is convicted on three occasions of minor infringements of food safety legislation from which it has benefited, perhaps to the extent of a few pounds. Does that mean that the chain has a criminal lifestyle? Certainly, if a corporate body is capable of having a criminal lifestyle, that would appear to be the case. That conclusion would be rather unwelcome to at least one noble friend of the noble and learned Lord the Attorney-General.
Equally, looked at from the other side, if a corporate body cannot have a criminal lifestyle, there is potentially a major loophole in this legislation. As a matter of ordinary English, I find it hard to see how any legal person can have a lifestyle without being a living and sentient being. That seems to me to be an important issue, which is unclear and which should be considered.
I return to the original point. We ask the Government to accept Amendment No. 7, which we would be happy to support, Amendment No. 8, or our own group of amendments to Clause 75 to make it necessary for an offence to be punishable by imprisonment. In the absence of that, we believe that potentially a serious injustice is waiting to emerge from this legislation.
Lord Carlisle of Bucklow: My Lords, surely Amendment No. 7 raises an issue of principle, which I do not believe the Government have fully answered. It goes to the whole root of the question of the use of judicial discretion. Clause 6 and the powers to make the necessary confiscation orders and findings of criminal lifestyle can be implemented following an application by the prosecutor or the director—who, as the noble Lord, Lord Goodhart, said, are not neutral bodies in this matter—to ask the court so to proceed. If they ask it, the court has no alternative but to make that order or to proceed in that way, whereas if the order is not requested, the court still has a discretion on its own decision to proceed under Clause 6.
If it is right that there should be discretion in the court to proceed under Clause 6 even though an application has not been made, I cannot understand why equally there should not be a discretion in the interests of defendants to refuse to proceed under Clause 6, even if the application has been made, if the
"(4A) But the Director must obtain the approval of the Minister for the Civil Service as to the number of staff appointed under subsection (4)(a)."
Page 267, line 13, at end insert "with the approval of the Minister for the Civil Service"
Page 267, leave out lines 14 to 17.
Page 267, line 28, at end insert "with the approval of the Minister for the Civil Service"
Page 267, line 30, leave out paragraphs 6 and 7 and insert—
"6 (1) These amounts are to be paid out of money provided by Parliament—
(a) the remuneration of the Director and the staff of the Agency;
(b) any expenses incurred by the Director or any of the staff in the exercise of his or their functions.
(2) Subject to anything in this Act any sums received by the Director are to be paid into the Consolidated Fund."
Page 269, leave out lines 12 to 20.
Page 3, line 38, at end insert "unless it is of the opinion that there are exceptional circumstances which justify its not doing so"
3.30 p.m.
3.45 p.m.
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