Making time for the Fraud Bill

One piece of legislation that the industry is anxious to see get through Parliament is the Fraud Bill but it is getting worried that it seems to have slipped down the government's priorities.

The Bill, which creates a single, clearly defined offence of financial fraud, started its legislative journey in the House of Lords. This is common for bills that are relatively non-contentious, leaving the potentially troublesome stuff to the House of Commons. The Bill made it through the House of Lords at the turn of the year - since then a deathly silence has descended on its fate, as the government has been battered by unforeseen political storms that have demanded valuable Commons' time.

Pressure is building on the new Leader of the House of Commons, Jack Straw, to find time for the Bill this side of the summer recess. With all party support it should sail through but will still require two to three days to clear all its hurdles.

There is hardly a soul who has a bad word to say about the Bill, which makes the definitions of fraud simpler and clears away most of the technical provisions of current fraud legislation that skilled defence lawyers use to get their clients off in what to most of us seem open and shut cases. A vast array of powerful organisations, including the Financial Services Authority, are waiting impatiently for the Bill to pass so they can re-double the pressure on the government to provide the resources to meet the objectives behind the Bill - to put more fraudsters behind bars.

Key to this debate is the evidence of the vast array of links between financial fraud and organised crime. Few political hearts will bleed for banks, insurance and credit card companies when they lose millions of pounds to fraudsters but when that money is proven to go into terrorism, the drugs trade, people smuggling and so on, politicians sit up and take note.

It will be an anxious few weeks as we await the re-appearance of the Bill. If it does not appear before the summer recess then the government will probably try to squeeze it in to the tail end of the current session. The danger is that it will need only one crisis to knock out the time allocated to it, and will have to start over again, delaying its implementation by a year.