Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)

My Lords, I do not normally get involved with money issues because they are too messy and convoluted. The last time I recommended any sort of money being given to the police was when I was on the Metropolitan Police Authority. It was going to scrap the wildlife crime unit, and I argued strongly that we should keep it. It was not about naughty squirrels; it was about people committing crimes against wildlife. I felt it was an incredibly important unit, but that is by the by. This is a growing crime. I can remember discussing it 20 years ago and people saying, “We need more money to fund the work and we need better systems”, and all that sort of thing, so it is surprising that we need this now after so long. It addresses a persistent weakness in our response to economic crime—the lack of stable long-term funding. Economic crime undermines public trust and causes real harm to individuals and communities, yet the agencies tasked with tackling it are often operating on short-term budgets, dependent on annual settlements and unable to plan effectively. This amendment asks the Government to undertake a serious assessment of whether a proportion of the proceeds recovered from economic crime could be reinvested into a fund to strengthen enforcement. That strikes me as an incredibly sensible approach; it would also stop the Treasury from grabbing the money and using it in even worse ways.