Ian Davidson: Changes must be resisted

The new law proposes the creation of a special agency to pursue criminal assets.

This will have more stringent powers to tackle money laundering and criminals will have to prove in court that they obtained their assets legally.

The National Criminal Intelligence Service estimates that the top 40 crime barons in Britain have assets worth more than �200m.

Mr Davidson, the MP for Glasgow Pollok, said he has attended more than 30 committee sessions on the bill and he believes that previous "milder" proposals have not worked.

"If we want to stamp out drug dealing we have got to get serious and that means we will tread on a few toes," he said:

"Let's remembers that in the Commons all the time we saw amendments coming forward from the Tories that were deliberately designed to make sure that criminals could keep their assets.

'Major provisions'

"The same thing will happen in the Lords but we've just simply not got to accept that."

"If the Lords overturns any of our major provisions, then we've got to reinsert them."

But opponents of the bill, which was published in October, said it runs the risk of breaching human rights.

Rosemarie McIlwhan, Director of the Scottish Human Rights Centre, said some cases will end up being decided at the European Court of Human Rights.

She said: "There will be cases taken and relatively soon. I think there's also real concern that there's potential for abuse here.

"A lot of (the bill) is very discretionary, very arbitrary and we'll be watching very carefully to make sure that those abuses don't occur."