Lord Davies of Gower (Con)

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, for moving this amendment. Economic crime is one of the most pervasive threats to public trust and business confidence in the UK. In the year ending March 2024, fraud accounted for around a third of all crime recorded by police. Industry estimates suggest that economic crime costs the UK economy tens of billions of pounds per year, according to police statistics. These staggering statistics underscore the need for effective enforcement and resourcing. In this context, the need to seek more sustainable and predictable resourcing for economic crime enforcement is understandable. The proposal to assess the viability of an economic crime fighting fund based on reinvesting a proportion of receipts from enforcement reflects a desire to tackle this persistent and widespread issue. I recognise that there may be merits to an approach that allows specialist technology and expertise to be built and retained over multiple years. The amendment also calls for an examination of the impact of budget exchange rules on the functioning of the asset recovery incentivisation scheme. There have been reports that recovered assets sometimes cannot easily be redeployed by front-line investigators and that incentives can be blunted by accounting constraints. If funds that are recovered through enforcement cannot, in practice, be retained or redeployed effectively by those doing the work, it is sensible to ask whether the current framework is optimally aligned with the policy objective of strengthening economic crime capability. However, I recognise that any move towards hypothecation of enforcement receipts raises potential governance issues, and there is also the question of how such a fund would sit alongside existing funding streams and the Government’s wider strategy in this area. I therefore look forward to the Minister’s response to this amendment. I would be grateful if he could outline what steps the Government are currently taking to fight economic crime and whether they believe that any further action is required.