- The Guardian, Friday October 12 2007
A report from the Commons public accounts committee said the Assets Recovery Agency was given "unachievable delivery aims" by the Home Office.
The agency cost £65m over four years, but only recovered £23m, a National Audit Office report found.
The MPs found that cases took twice as long to go through the courts as expected. The ARA could have had cases referred to it by 696 bodies, including the police, but only one-fifth of the organisations used it. Two police forces did not send the agency a single case.
The agency was created in 2003 by then home secretary David Blunkett, who gave it powers to seize assets even from people who have not been convicted of any crime. It will be disbanded, with the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca) taking over the hunt for criminal assets in April 2008. The MPs found that the ARA spent one out of every four pounds in fees to outside receivers, who charged over £200,000 a time for managing frozen assets. They also said the agency should have employed more negotiated settlements instead of court actions, which usually took four years.
Committee chairman Edward Leigh said: "The Assets Recovery Agency has done a good job in testing through the courts new powers for recovering the proceeds of crime."
But he added that it had been "successful in little else. It was ill-planned and recovered only about a third of its expenditure."
