I beg to move amendment No. 7, in page 257, line 27, leave out from `targets' to end of line 28 and insert

`and the basis of such performance targets;'.

I join the other hon. Members who have welcomed your chairmanship of our proceedings, Mr. McWilliam. The Opposition feel that there is a need to amend paragraph 8(3)(b), on page 257, because we are concerned about the way in which performance targets are used, and what performance targets there should be. We have bitter experience of the way in which the Government have used—or, as we would say, misused—performance targets. That relates to some of the concerns expressed in the previous debate by my hon. Friend the Member for Cities of London and Westminster. Like him, I worked for several years in the City of London and in business generally before coming into this House in 1992, and I have stayed in close touch with the business world during my nine and a half years in the House. Anybody who has experience of business, at whatever level, knows that any sensible business might have three, four, five or six performance targets that the senior management would be asked to pursue. It is crazy for any organisation to be given 58 performance targets.

Labour Members, especially those who are new to this House, may wonder why I chose that number. There is a very good reason: 58 is precisely the number of performance targets that the previous Home Secretary gave chief constables and police authorities. The chief constable in Surrey said to me, ``This is crazy. No sensible organisation should have 58 performance targets.'' Chief constables all over the country said the same thing to the previous Home Secretary a year or so ago. To be fair to him, I must add that the previous Home Secretary, who is now Foreign Secretary, responded. He agreed to reduce the number of performance targets. However, instead of reducing them to a sensible number—three, four, five or six—he reduced them from 58 to 43. As the chief constables would say, that was a distinction without a real difference. It was still nonsense.

In no way can any sensible organisation respond to 43 performance targets. History is going to repeat itself—and, as everyone knows, it repeats itself first as tragedy and then as farce. There should be a control in the schedule to ensure that there are not too many performance targets. What is the basis of them all? Parliament should have some opportunity to scrutinise them. When the Minister responds to my remarks in his usual dignified way, he will no doubt say, ``Of course it will all be dealt with sensibly, and everything will be motherhood and apple pie.'' However, we are suspicious, and we have good recent reason to be. We need to know a great deal more about what the Government are providing, because one of our worries, to which we shall return repeatedly, is that the Bill gives wide powers and discretion. One problem is that much of what it does throughout its 444 clauses and its schedules is to provide for powers that we shall come to know about later.

My hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield rightly thanked the Minister for providing us with some guidance, albeit at a late stage—although we had sight of it before our sitting started, which was helpful. However, we want more safeguards written into the Bill. Conservative Members are always suspicious about Home Secretaries or directors being given draconian powers that Parliament will not have the right to scrutinise, and which may appear later in the form of guidance, much of which will be administrative and will not require a debate in the House, not even on a statutory instrument. It is true that some aspects of the Bill will give the Home Secretary the power to introduce further measures in the House under statutory instrument procedure, but by no means all of them will do that.

Order. I have listened carefully to the hon. Gentleman, and I have given him a lot of latitude—but the amendment would not result in the measures for which he is arguing.

As always, I am grateful for your guidance, Mr. McWilliam. I shall return to the specific terms of the amendment, but we should all flag up some of our general concerns in the early stages of the Committee, after which we shall restrict ourselves more tightly to the Bill.

Order. I am bound by Standing Order, and unfortunately, I cannot follow the hon. Gentleman down the seductive road along down which he is trying to lead me. I reiterate the fact that the amendment would not result in the measures for which he is arguing.

I am trying to explain our concern that there should be an explanation about the basis of the performance targets. The amendment would bring that about. However, I shall stick to your guidance, Mr. McWilliam. I am sure that the Minister will reassure us, but we are worried about such matters and we shall stress our concern whenever the wording in the Bill is too wide. We shall be interested in whether the hon. Gentleman can give us some comfort for the future and say that he is willing for the Bill to be more specific. If the Government cannot accept our amendment today, we hope that further consideration will lead to their reflecting on the matter and agreeing that we are right. The amendment may be accepted in another place or on Third Reading. We shall return to the issue.

I welcome you to the Chair, Mr. McWilliam, on behalf of my Liberal Democrat colleagues. I wish to propose a radical way forward. Given that the Bill is so exhaustive and detailed, I want members of the Committee to spend the limited time that we have on matters of substance rather than on amendments that would not take us very far forward. We should not feel obliged to table amendments to clauses or schedules if none are required. We should restrain ourselves, and use our time as best we can by concentrating on issues of real substance that relate to the Bill. I hope that we shall adopt such an approach this morning, and in subsequent sittings.

I accept what the hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Mr. Hawkins) said about the number of targets and potential difficulties. However, he should reflect on the fact that the Government whom he supported presided over a doubling of criminal activities. Perhaps things might have been different if they had had a few targets.

The amendment would require the director to include the basis for any performance targets in his annual plan, which may or may not be for the financial year covered by the annual plan as well as the targets themselves. The value to organisations of an annual plan is increasingly recognised. It is common practice, when new bodies such as the Assets Recovery Agency are established, for legislation to include provisions for drawing up annual plans. It is accepted that organisations should have performance targets as part of the plan, some of which are likely to be related to the key objectives of the organisation. Other targets may be related to the performance of ancillary tasks, such as dealing with correspondence.

The performance targets in the Assets Recovery Agency's annual plan will be set by the director, but must be approved by the Secretary of State. The targets will have to take into account the wider work of the assets recovery committee, including successive assets recovery strategies. We may expect the inclusion of a target that relates to the number of criminal confiscation hearings that are conducted and the number of civil recovery actions that are brought. Initially, we anticipate that in any full year the agency might have a caseload of 15 to 20 civil recovery cases, 250 criminal confiscation cases, for which the agency is responsible, and 25 to 30 tax cases. However, the number and spread of cases may vary from those figures.

Performance targets set in annual plans are usually challenging but achievable. The Secretary of State will bear that in mind when approving the director's annual plan. However, the director should not be required to set out the basis for the performance targets in his plan. The director may include it if he wishes, but there is no reason why he should be required to. The Secretary of State must approve the plan. If he is not satisfied with the targets or requires further information about their basis, he can request further information from the director.

Is there not a potential problem? We want such an organisation to be proactive, and, as far as is possible, to seek to recover assets. However, if targets are fixed on the basis of sums of money recovered, there is a risk that that will be the first step on the path to injustice. A burden would be placed on the director to seize assets when that might not be justifiable.

I understand the hon. Gentleman's worries. On Second Reading he mentioned the Child Support Agency's problems . I ask him to accept that the agency will be a different animal, and will operate in a different field. It will not have nearly as wide a remit as the CSA. To be frank, there are no easy targets. Legislation that supposedly allows us to confiscate the proceeds of crime has existed for some time, and it was passed by Governments that the hon. Gentleman supported. That legislation has not been effective, and it is widely recognised that there is a need to settle the matter.

The agency will not deal with thousands upon thousands of cases submitted by the general public. Overwhelmingly, it will deal with the cases that the law enforcement agencies refer to it. Such cases will be few and none will be easy. The guidance to the director is designed to ensure both that everybody is satisfied with the relevant hierarchy of powers for law enforcement agencies and powers for this agency, and that recovering the proceeds of crime does not have a higher priority than the prosecution of criminal cases. The annual plan should give us the opportunity to make the agency accountable not only to the Secretary of State but to Parliament, because the plan will be lodged in Parliament for everyone to see.

We should set aside the interests of those who, at this early stage, are laying the ground for a political assault on the agency. I am concerned because paragraph 8(3)(b) states that performance targets need not be consistent with the objectives set by the director in the annual plan. That raises a query: what kind of circumstances could produce considerable variance between the director's objectives in the annual plan, and the performance targets? If such a variance occurred regularly, would not it require some explanation?

I hope that there will be no variance between performance targets and the director's objectives, but some performance targets will have a wider scope and will be relevant to more than just the agency. The agency will form only a small part of the assets recovery strategy. It will not pursue the overwhelming majority of compensation cases that occur; most cases will be taken up by prosecuting authorities, and the agency will become involved with such cases only when those authorities want its involvement.

The annual plan will provide a mechanism that annually oversees the agency's actions, and that plan will provide for input from the Secretary of State. It will be placed before Parliament so that we can see the targets that the Secretary of State sets for the agency. With regard to concerns that the agency may set easy targets, I do not believe that the agency could get the courts' approval unless it convinced them that the threshold set by the targets was high enough to allow it to investigate and confiscate the proceeds of crime.

The Minister will have received advice from his officials, no doubt, so is he prepared to tell us the number of performance targets that a director might be given in an annual plan? Will he give a formal assurance now, so that it is recorded in Hansard, that the director will be set no more than 10 performance targets? The Home Secretary could then set that figure before Parliament. That would allay many of our concerns.

No, I do not want to give a set number of performance targets. I can reassure the hon. Gentleman that I will state how we shall set the targets—both those that will be the agency's direct responsibility, and those that will have a far wider reach—before we discuss the relevant passages of the Bill. I laid that out in the note that I provided for the Committee. It gives our current thinking on the subject, but we do not want to pre-empt the agency before it is set up or has appointed its director.

I am grateful to the Minister for allowing us to discuss this subject. Opposition Members have not got the slightest idea—

Hear, hear.

We have not the slightest idea what sums the Minister thinks the agency can recover. It is all very well to set up such a structure, but there are similarities with the Child Support Agency. Some of those similarities are shared with the subject of drug recovery. I used to practise law on the subject of drug trafficking offences, and the amounts ordered to be seized were consistently larger than the amounts eventually seized. That is an important issue.

The Minister must enlighten the Committee as to how the agency will work in practice. How many millions of pounds per annum should the director try to seize? The Minister has the intelligence to answer—[Interruption.] At least, I think he does. I do not have the intelligence to do so—

In every sense of the word.

Not in every sense of the word. We need guidance from the Minister.

Order. Sedentary interventions are unwelcome—however much the Minister of State, Scotland Office and I may have indulged in them in our previous incarnations.

There has been no attempt to hide the information on the basis of which the policy has been developed. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield has had an opportunity to read the performance and innovation unit's report: it shows international comparisons with regard to potential capability, and the failure of past performance is apparent.

I suspect that the hon. Gentleman and I will disagree about the reasons why confiscation orders were not enforced as often as they should have been, and the extent to which the agency will be able to fill the gap by ensuring that confiscation takes place more frequently. I have not attempted to hide the basis on which the Government have taken their decisions and chosen which road to go down, and I will try to ensure that the Committee is informed about our thinking on such matters as it reaches the relevant stages of the Bill.

I support the thrust of the amendment, especially with regard to one subject. Certain aspects of the ARA's remit will extend to Scotland as well as to England and Wales, and in such circumstances, a single set of targets will cover the entire United Kingdom. However, in England and Wales the director of the ARA will pursue objectives that in Scotland are handled by other organisations. Will those Scottish organisations also be obliged to produce annual plans, objectives and targets? If so, they might be worded in a slightly different way, because of the different jurisdictions, and it would be helpful to ensure that they were compatible. That could only be ensured if the basis of such performance targets were listed. Therefore, I want the Minister to confirm three matters: first, that equivalent objectives and targets will have to be produced for Scotland; secondly, that they will, as far as possible, be compatible; and thirdly, that if that is not entirely the case, the basis of such performance targets in England and Wales, and in Scotland, will be made publicly available, to allow comparisons.

Mr. Ainsworth rose—

I am not sure whether the Minister wishes to respond to that—but he has already spoken, so it would be unconventional for him to respond to his hon. Friend's speech. It might be more appropriate if the hon. Gentleman were to ask him a question. Although the procedure is unconventional, Opposition members would be happy for the Minister to respond.

Members of the Committee can speak as often as they wish.

I confess to my hon. Friend that I am not au fait with the details of how, north of the border, the Lord Advocate or Ministers make themselves accountable for performance targets. However, it will be necessary to ensure that the Act is correctly operated in every part of the United Kingdom, and I will try to come up swiftly with satisfactory answers to his questions.

The Minister is doing his best to help Opposition members—as I knew he would. He realises that the Committee is discussing a serious matter, which has not been raised for frivolous reasons.

I am also grateful to the hon. Member for Glasgow, Pollok for supporting the spirit of the amendment. He and I play on the wings for the Lords and Commons rugby club, and we also frequently take a similar approach to issues such as that which the Committee is now discussing. I look forward to further co-operation between those on the Opposition Front Bench and those on the Labour Back Benches as the Committee proceeds. The hon. Member for Glasgow, Pollok always takes an independent view of such matters. He does not slavishly follow his Front Bench but always speaks for himself. That is one of the reasons why he is so widely respected in the House.

I remind the hon. Gentleman that when we both played on Saturday, I scored a try in each half. On the one occasion in the past when I was minded to give him a scoring pass, he dropped it.

I certainly remember the hon. Gentleman's two tries. He failed to inform the Committee that he managed the unique experience of scoring a try for each side, switching his jersey and playing one half for one side and the other half for the other. I would not dream of suggesting that the switching of jerseys is replicated in the hon. Gentleman's political career—but the word ``turncoat'' was mentioned by the Liberal Democrat peer who captained our team for the day. While playing for the Lords and Commons we have both dropped a multitude of scoring passes, and I do not believe that the experience to which the hon. Gentleman refers is unique.

We are discussing serious matters. Opposition Members are prepared to accept the Minister's kind offer to provide the Committee with guidance, and I am sure that he will write not only to us but to all members of the Committee. When we have seen that guidance, we may want to return to the point later, either on Report or in another place. For the moment, however, in light of the Minister's helpful offer, I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Schedule 1 agreed to.

Before we discuss the next amendment, I give some guidance to the many hon. Members for whom this is the first major Standing Committee in this Parliament. We must speak to the amendments or clauses that are before the Committee. Matters that go wider than that are, strictly speaking, out of order. I have been lenient this morning, but do not be led into bad habits by the Front Benchers, who, by their very nature, have bad habits. Clause 2 Director's functions: general