I did not say, ''retrospectively criminalise''. Unusually for her, the hon. Lady misquotes me. I said that parliamentarians of all parties should be worried when part of a Bill can have a retrospective effect. One of the interesting things about the provision, as she has rightly identified, is that it refers to what happened to the property, rather than, as she would put it, retrospectively criminalising people.

We have debated the problem of cut-off times on previous occasions, and while it would be out of order to repeat our debates, I will touch on them briefly. My hon. Friend the Member for Spelthorne (Mr. Wilshire) gave a hypothetical example about property that had belonged to one of his now deceased relations, which had long ago been the subject of crime. The hon. Member for Glasgow, Pollok, who is sadly not with us at the moment, went into flights of fancy about property that may once have been the proceeds of crime and ended up on the Scottish borders in the hands of the ancestors of my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield. There must be clear signs of where the line is drawn. It might be possible to say that it is immaterial whether the property was the proceeds of crime before or after the Bill was enacted and we have no defined cut-off point.

Let us suppose that some of the proceeds of criminal activity that took place 25 years ago or longer was not recovered at the time. An example could be the great train robbery, or the Brink's-Mat robbery. What if some of those proceeds of crime were to turn up now? Where is the cut-off point? It is that type of retrospection that we must be careful about.