Assets Recovery Agency a ‘mess’ warn Britain’s spending watchdogs

THE agency set up in Britain to confiscate criminals’ cash and luxury assets was condemned as a ‘mess’ yesterday.

Government spending watchdogs revealed the Assets Recovery Agency (ARA) has cost £65 million since it launched four years ago, but has seized only £23m from crooks.

The National Audit Office (NAO) uncovered a host of failures — and disclosed that some police forces have not referred a single case to the ARA.

More than 700 case files with a total value of £274m have been passed to the agency since it was set up, but just £23m has been seized from 52 of those cases, the report said.

Former home secretary David Blunkett launched the agency with a blaze of publicity and claimed: “We are hitting organised criminals where it really hurts — in their pockets.”

He added that the ARA was a “powerful” new weapon in the fight against crime which would come after crime barons’ homes, yachts, mansions and luxury cars.

But chairman of the Commons’ Public Accounts Committee, Edward Leigh, said after today’s findings: “The criminal fraternity must be lying back on their sun loungers laughing into their champagne glasses at the mess those trying to catch up with them are in.”

In some cases the costs of operating criminals’ assets while cases are pursued are actually costing the ARA more than the assets are worth.

Fees paid by the ARA to receivers to run restrained criminal assets — such as companies — will exceed the assets’ value in 12 cases by March 2008, the report said.

The NAO also found:

* No feasibility study was carried out before the ARA’s creation to assess its likely performance or appropriate targets.

* Four — unnamed — police forces have yet to refer a single case to the agency.

* Case management information is “poor” — there is no central database of cases and staff refer to different systems which hold “contradictory and incomplete” information.

* Staff turnover is high, with almost a quarter leaving in the 12 months to the end of September.

* A third of financial investigators trained by the ARA either retired or left shortly after qualifying.

* Many organisations which can refer cases to the ARA were unclear about the criteria.

* Half of cases adopted before March 2004 were still ongoing in August last year.

The ARA abandoned its target to be self-financing by 2005/06 and set a new target of breaking even by 2009/10, but the NAO concluded there was a risk that even this aim will not be reached.