Serious organised Crime - More must be done!

12.00.00am GMT Mon 15th Mar 2010

The Scottish Government are "too complacent" in their attitude to certain types of serious and organised crime. This was the claim made by Glasgow Liberal Democrat MSP Robert Brown in a debate on the subject last Thursday in the Scottish Parliament.

Mr. Brown said that it was unacceptable that, while there had been 113 prosecutions in England and Wales for trafficking for sexual exploitation, there had been none at all in Scotland.

Robert Brown also said much more could be done to seize the assets of serious criminals under the Proceeds of Crime 2002 than was being done at present. During the debate, the Community Safety Minister revealed that £27 million had been recovered since the Act came into force but Mr. Brown said that was a fairly small amount overall.

The Scottish Parliament accepted a Liberal Democrat amendment calling for more to be done on both issues.

Robert Brown said:

"The insidious and corroding effect on communities and the destruction of lives through drugs, trafficking of women or general exploitation, and the consequences of the dominance by serious gangs on certain parts of our national life and economy are in a different league altogether from ordinary crime. They demand the most rigorous and focused attention of Government.

The Scottish serious organised crime mapping project was a wake-up call. It identified 367 serious organised crime groups that operate across Scotland and some 4,000-plus individuals involved in a serious way.

The issue of people trafficking is likely to grow in the lead up to the Glasgow Commonwealth Games of 2014. It is inevitably a twilight activity but an Amnesty International report on trafficking in Scotland estimates that there are 4,000 victims of trafficking for prostitution in the United Kingdom at any one time. The Association of Chief Police Officers in Scotland believe that Scotland has 13.5 per cent of the human trafficking trade-well above our population share. Glasgow also has the highest number of sex workers in the UK outside London.

Research from the 2000 Sydney Olympics found that about 10,000 sex workers had been operating in that area. After the 2004 Athens games, the Greek Government spoke of a 95 per cent increase in the number of human trafficking victims. The Metropolitan Police has a specialist team in place with funding of £600,000 in anticipation of such issues in the lead up to the 2012 games in London.

The Scottish Government says, however:

"there is no intelligence to suggest that human trafficking is occurring in association with the 2014 Commonwealth Games".-[Official Report, Written Answers, 24 November 2009; S3W-28988.]

This is a little complacent. Since 2005, TARA, the trafficking awareness-raising alliance, in Glasgow has supported 103 foreign women who have been trafficked into or within the UK.

The serious organised gangs that were identified by the survey that was carried out included 19 that were involved in sexual offences and 15 that were involved in immigration crime, including 10 in human trafficking, so we have at least some idea of who these people are and where they are operating.

The Proceeds of Crime Act 2002, which is a powerful tool in helping to disrupt serious organised criminals has not been fully utilised. The joint inspection of the Act by the Inspectorates in October 2009 found that more could be done to use the act to its full extent. That was echoed by a "Panorama" report in March last year, which reported that the civil recovery unit, which is responsible for criminal prosecution, had frozen £60 million of assets but had managed to collect only £6 million of it. There is considerable disruptive potential in hitting criminals in their pockets and stopping them from continuing to operate from jail. I ask the minister how much has been recovered under the scheme each year, whether the Scottish Government has a target level of recovery and what is being done to boost the effectiveness of the arrangements, not least following the inspection report from October last year."

Ends