The Assets Recovery Agency, which was set up with the lofty aim of separating criminals from their ill-gotten gains, is to be scrapped.
The purpose of the Agency was to take civil court action seeking the seizure of money and goods obtained through criminality. With effect from April 2008, it will be merged with the Serious Organised Crime Agency.
Turns out that while the Agency has incurred costs of around £90m, it has only been able to recover around £8m from the bad men.
But why the poor results? The Agency’s head, Jane Earl, blames the crooks. Rather than obligingly handing over the money, these criminals were instead employing stalling tactics, ensuring that the court cases took a lot longer than necessary.
Such touching naivete. What exactly did Ms Earl expect a criminal to do? Write out a cheque and hand it over to the Agency as soon as a demand was made? One would think that an agency set up to deal with people convicted of serious crime would take a more hard-nosed approach to their work.
Apparently not. So that’s £90m of taxpayers’ money thrown away. I certainly consider that a crime.
January 12th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
…..aaaaah now we could have used that 90 million for my Third Age University programme.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:07 pm
This makes me laugh until (thinking of our taxes) I weep.
January 12th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
And by the way, how can you possibly spend £90m setting up an office? What the hell is going on?!?!?
January 12th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
OnyxStone, to answer your question, when it comes to other people’s money, sound economic sense does not apply. How many of these people have even worked in a commercial concern before, even a small shop. They have no idea of the value of money, of markets, of competition. Money is to be thrown around and wasted, the more the better.
January 13th, 2007 at 5:11 pm
Too true, Bel. For much of the bureaucracy, the notion of a business cycle remains an unfathomable abstraction.
January 14th, 2007 at 10:59 am
And Labour wonder where the Tories say they are going to find all the waste!
January 14th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Naive indeed, they have been.
January 15th, 2007 at 7:02 pm
Yes, it is a crime and now let’s see the perpetrators separated from their wealth, to the tune of the money they themselves authorized to be squandered.