Hansard

I welcome this opportunity to debate one of the major threats facing Scotland today: serious organised crime. Organised crime impacts on us all. For too long, too many people in Scotland have had to live with the cancer that is organised crime. Organised crime undermines legitimate businesses, distorts democracy and threatens the very fabric of our communities. That is intolerable and unacceptable in the 21st century. The Government is determined to root out that evil, to allow honest people and their businesses to prosper and to help our communities be all that they can be. It is what the people of Scotland want, what they deserve and what we must deliver.

It is important to consider what serious organised crime is. We live in an increasingly globalised world. Business is no longer constrained by geographical and political borders. Although that allows legitimate business to grow and flourish, crime is also increasingly globalised. It evolves and flourishes, taking advantage of freedom of movement, past conflicts in the Balkans and elsewhere, the opening up of the former Soviet republics, and cheaper international air travel. Criminal networks operate in many different countries with many spheres of interest, but all exist to make money at the expense of hard-working, law-abiding people. It is those networks that produce and supply the drugs that cause misery on Scotland's streets and cause harm in Scotland's communities.

Drug trafficking remains the single biggest threat to our communities because of the illegal proceeds that it secures and the devastating harm that it causes. The police and the Crown have had significant success in disrupting supply, in seizing assets earned from that illicit activity and in bringing serious criminals to justice. An example of that is the recovery of 170kg of heroin, with an estimated street value of £13.6 million, in the Blochairn area of Glasgow. In October 2007, a 44-year-old man was imprisoned for eight years at the High Court in connection with that operation.

However, organised crime is not about drugs alone. Its tentacles stretch to human trafficking, fraud and pornography and to using legitimate businesses as fronts for money laundering. It is evolving and searching for new ways to make money at the expense of others. That is and remains a serious threat that we must tackle and address.

There are other examples of successful operations against those threats. On 4 October 2007, following a four-year operation in which the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency supported Dumfries and Galloway Constabulary, the Leonardo da Vinci painting "Madonna with the Yarnwinder", which is owned by the Duke of Buccleuch and valued at around £30 million, was recovered. Four males were arrested, have appeared in court in connection with the crime and await trial.

At the conclusion of an SCDEA intelligence-led operation into alleged counterfeit currency production and circulation, seven people were sentenced at the High Court in Edinburgh for a total of 22 years' imprisonment. When officers raided premises during the operation, £496,200-worth of counterfeit notes were being printed. Further investigations led to the recovery of €406,200 in counterfeit €50 notes. A further £672,880 in counterfeit Bank of Scotland notes with the same serial numbers was recovered from the banking system.

What are we doing to address the problem? We have to recognise that we must work in partnership to ensure that Scotland is not seen to provide a safe haven for organised crime. Co-operation between law enforcement agencies in Scotland, the United Kingdom and Europe—and more widely—is key. To provide a strategic focus for that work and to ensure co-ordinated and targeted action, we have established the serious organised crime task force. The task force brings together all the major agencies that are involved in tackling serious organised crime: the Crown Office, the police, the Scottish Crime and Drug Enforcement Agency, the Serious Organised Crime Agency, Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs and the Scottish Prison Service. By working together and pooling information, we will have a better chance of putting the criminal networks out of business.

The task force met for the first time on 22 October and meets again on 28 January. It is already clear that there is a lot that we can do. We can build on our knowledge of organised crime, take action to allow more assets to be seized, increase enforcement powers where necessary, support legitimate business and law-abiding communities and increase co-operation with law enforcement agencies in Europe and elsewhere.

We must build on our knowledge of organised crime. We need to learn more about the scale of the challenge that we face. This Government will provide direct support to the Scottish police service to build a clearer picture of who is up to no good in Scotland, who is orchestrating criminal activity in Scotland and elsewhere and who is supporting them and their criminal enterprises, and to identify the commodities from which they make their illicit and illegal profits.

We also need to seize assets. Asset seizure is one of the clear success stories in the fight against organised crime. We already have powers under both criminal and civil law to seize assets to remove the benefit that criminals have gained from their conduct and to allow the courts truly to balance the justice system. Those powers allow us to target the core of criminality by removing the profits of the criminals and crime groups that impact on Scottish communities.

However, we must look for ways of strengthening the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 further. We will extend the range of offences that are indicative of a criminal lifestyle. A lifetime of crime should be open to a lifetime of asset recovery, so we look to extend the time period for confiscation and asset recovery. If investigators were able to delve further into criminals' past financial records, that would assist in investigations, particularly into well-established organised criminals who have banked their criminal profits over many decades and who are now, sadly, living a life of luxury.

In order to tackle the lower-level offenders who are affiliated to wider and bigger organised criminal networks, l want there to be a reduction in the criminal benefit amount from £5,000 to £1,000, as well as a reduction in the minimum cash seizure threshold. The recent reduction from £5,000 to £1,000 has already been a particular success in Scotland, and there would be benefit in a further reduction. I have today written to the Home Secretary, seeking her support for those measures. Maximising asset recovery requires the proper tools. That is why, for the first time, a proportion of the money that is recovered will be reinvested in experts in financial recovery work to allow us to recover even more assets.