Proceeds of Crime: East of England

(asked on 28th November 2014) - View Source

Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what the monetary value was of assets (a) seized and (b) frozen under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 in each police force area in the East of England in each year since 2010.


Answered by
Karen Bradley Portrait
Karen Bradley
This question was answered on 5th December 2014

The amount recovered by each police force under the Proceeds of Crime Act and the previous asset recovery legislation is provided in Table A. There is no provision for police forces to freeze assets under the Proceeds of Crime Act; however we are able to provide force-by-force breakdowns of the amount of cash seized and value of property subjected to a restraint order during a criminal investigation or proceeding. A proportion of this may be deemed by the courts to be subject to forfeiture or confiscation. Table B provides figures for the amounts seized or restrained.

More assets have been recovered since 2010 than ever before, although prosecutors face greater difficulties in obtaining restraint orders following the impact of the Court of Appeal decision in Windsor & Ors v Crown Prosecution Service [2011] EWCA Crim 143. The Government has taken steps to address this by bringing forward provisions in the Serious Crime Bill, which is currently before Parliament, to lower the legal test for restraint in order to make it easier to obtain restraint orders earlier in investigations.We are working with operational partners to ensure that the use of restraint orders is considered at the outset of all appropriate investigations.

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