My Lords, I shall speak in support of my amendment, which seeks to achieve two things: an annual review of the funding adequacy of our crime-fighting agencies in this area,
and a report within three months of the Bill, and annually thereafter, to set out how well we are managing this whole area.
I know we will hear warm words from the Minister about various sums of money—£400 million and so on—but the brutal reality is that this whole thing has been abysmally funded; that is the only way we can describe it. The noble Lord, Lord Cromwell, is right that the NCA’s own funding has fallen by some 4% in real terms at a time when international crime has been soaring.
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Our efforts are also so fragmented. The area that is of concern to me, as noble Lords will be aware, is the failure of the bounce back loan programme. One little example highlights the problem of the lack of clarity around funding. When the British Business Bank and BEIS failed to get a grip of the data on the fraud going on with bounce back loans, the counter-fraud team in the Cabinet Office stepped in with a very small sum of money—£2.6 million—to analyse a tranche of loans in the bounce back loan book. It identified £1.5 billion-worth of potentially fraudulent loans. That cost £2.6 million but the funding will run out in about two weeks’ time and the British Business Bank has decided not to continue the exercise, saying that it does not have any money. This gives a sense of the failure, because there is no consistent funding to go after these things. NATIS is similar. A tiny but effective organisation, it goes after some of the most serious crime. It is given tiny sums of money to pursue complex cases but then does not have the money the next year, so it has to drop those cases.
The Treasury will of course hate my proposal for an annual report to Parliament to set out some of these examples, which simply do not get aired, but it is the only way we can be serious about dealing with these issues when we get this and the next Bill through. They will be empty letters if we do not have the resources available to go after these people. I am probably one of the most hawkish politicians when it comes to spending public money but, if there is one area where we will get a dramatic return on investment, it must be this one. Indeed, I expect all the agencies to be held to account on this. If they do not return a dividend of three times what they get, they are not doing the job properly, frankly. In this legislation and ECB 2, we are giving them the tools. They need to know that they need to spend the money well.
That leads me to the second part of my amendment, which is about an annual report to Parliament to account for progress in these areas. The agencies must be candid on the areas in which they are failing but also set out their successes. However, as was mentioned earlier in the debate, there are some 20 different agencies all scrambling around here, with no proper central co-ordination. I pushed for a central body to oversee counter-fraud across government. I hope that it is being thought about, but it does not exist yet. An annual report bringing all this together would start to provide the proper spotlight on this activity.