In yet another example of this government burying anything that doesn’t work, the Asset Recovery Agency (ARA) has been abolished and responsibility passed to the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA). Yes, the ARA failed to achieve its objectives, having collected just £23m from criminals whilst costing the taxpayer £65m over 4 years, but this is hardly the way forward. All that will happen now is that the seizure of assets gained through criminal activity will receive much less attention and will, eventually, be lost amongst the myriad of other priorities within SOCA. It sickens me when I see failed government initiatives buried rather than being fixed, particuarly when the government basked in the glory of the original announcement. The government statement suggest that this is to “streamline” the work by law and order agencies, but we know the truth, it is simply to hide their failure from the public.
The ARA was originally set up by David Blunkett in 2003 to act as the enforcement arm designed to support the new legislation introduced under the Proceeds of Crime Act (PoCA). At the time, David Blunkett said, “We are hitting organised criminals where it really hurts - in their pockets.” Yet, four year later, this is what Conservative MP Edward Leigh, had to say about ARA: “It was ill-planned and recovered only about a third of its expenditure. Far too few cases were ever referred to it, its management information systems were in a mess, it prioritised cases badly and it underestimated the time it would take to pursue them.”
In an interview with BBC Panorama, David Blunkett said that at this juncture, he would have expected the ARA to be seizing between £500m and £800m a year instead of the paltry £137m siezed this year. Of equal concern must be the fact that a 2007 National Audit Office enquiry found more than £16m had been spent on receivers fees and that in 12 cases the fees amounted to more than the assets frozen, leaving the taxpayer to pick up the difference. This is a clear and utter failure.
What is not lost on me is the irony of this Government’s approach to crime. Even though there is existing legislation in place (PoCA) to target and seize the assets of criminals, which is not working, they continue to introduce even more draconian legislation. However, this time the legislation targets everyone of us, all 61m!
According to the government, in the fight against crime, we must all be spied on and treated as ‘potential’ criminals. We are having every email we send, every text and every mobile phone call monitored and recorded; we must accept that our internet browsing history will be recorded; we must now accept that our travel arrangements have to be registered and recorded, including names (and who we travelled with), addresses, telephone numbers, seat reservations, travel itineraries and the credit card details of travellers; Oyster cards, both in their current format and that proposed, which can track our movements on any form of public transport; ANPR and CCTV cameras that monitor our every move, there are some 4.2m CCTV cameras in the UK, many on the road networks, so our journeys can literally be tracked from camera to camera. ANPR can be used to track individual cars using number plate recognition; ID cards with full biometrics; a massive DNA database; ContactPoint which records every aspect of our children’s behaviour, education and well-being up to the school leaving age…the list just goes on and on. It is as if each and everyone of us is on probation, everything we do, say and write is recorded on at least one Government database.
The bottom line is that the UK IS turning into a Police State, but instead of targeting criminal and terrorists, the Government is going for ’soft targets’, by targeting each and everyone of us just in case we do something naughty. Surely the answer is to target our finite resources on known criminals, the Police know who they are and the same with potential terrorists, the Police and MI5 also know who the majority of them are? The truth is Government’s consistently lie to us. For example, when Margaret Thatcher introduced the Child Support Agency, she made a great play on the fact that its first priority would be to target “errant father” who were not supporting their children, in fact they did nothing of the sort, instead, they went after all those that were paying and simply re-assessed their payments using a ‘one size fits all’ calculation that brought many families to their knees, just so that they could hit targets. This current Government is doing the same thing, justifying draconian, Police State type laws, which will be applied to each and everyone of us, whilst demonstrating an impotence in the utilisation of existing (new) legislation that was supposed to target serious, career criminals.
The State runs the very real risk of turning the majority of people in this country into criminals for some relative misdemeanor, whilst ignoring those that can and should be targeted. Criminalising the majority is not the way to solve major crime, surely even our inept and contemptuous Government can understand that?
