Bribery Bill [HL]

My Lords, I must learn to run rather faster round the corridors of this House because I missed the kind words that the Minister offered me at the beginning of his speech. Thank you for those. As the chairman of the committee, I ought to say thank you to some other people as well, starting with my colleagues. We had two excellent clerks. We had the two professors, who were our expert advisers. We had a first-class back-up team. Where would we have been without the oral and written witnesses, who provided the raw material for what we said? I add to that today’s contribution of the noble Lord, Lord Patten—which was backed up by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf—about the way in which corporate ethos ought to be applied to this sort of thing. There was more detail than I have heard before and I would have hoped that it was very useful for the Government. Perhaps this is an occasion when pre-legislative scrutiny by a Joint Committee has proved itself to be a valuable matter. There have been some comments, particularly by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lyell—who unfortunately is not in his place—about complexity. Most speakers have not complained about the complexity of the criminal offences that have been, or will be, created by the Bill. I remind the House what happened under the previous law. Professor Horder set it out on page two of the evidence book, stating: ""We started with a law governed by a very vague term, the notion of ‘corruptly’, and the courts themselves could not agree what that meant in law. There are decisions saying it involves dishonesty, there are other decisions saying that does not involve honesty"." If that is not complex and confusing, I do not know what is. I would have thought it was better to depart from that sort of approach and look at what we have in the Bill. It is important to have concepts that a jury will easily be able to understand and apply, and it all leads up to that. A jury will have to consider improper performance, and the judge will have to direct them on what that means because there is quite a lot about it in the Bill. The jury will have to look at the question of the good faith of the person providing the funds, and at the expectation point that is set out in one of the clauses. Complexity could be said to arise from the cases that are listed. Those cases are only examples that the prosecutors will have before them. They will choose one or possibly two of them; they will collect the evidence and decide whether to prosecute and, if so, under what case. They will then draft an indictment with the particulars—in Scotland this would be done by the Procurator Fiscal—and present the case to the jury. On the basis of the facts thus presented, the jury will have comparatively simple decisions to take, and that must be a huge advantage in a matter of this sort. I agree with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lyell, that one does not want complexity, but that is not written into the Bill at all. We welcome the Government’s response to the Select Committee’s report. I am glad that they have dropped the question of parliamentary privilege; the Bill was not a good vehicle for that, and it requires more general consideration. I am glad that they have clarified the non-role of the Attorney-General and the handing over of the decisions to the directors of the other prosecuting authorities, which is in their response. I also mention something that I do not think anyone else has: we now include Scotland. After all, the complaint by the OECD related to the United Kingdom. The original project was only in relation to England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and the Select Committee pressed the Government to see if they could not include Scotland as part of the United Kingdom. This has been done, and I am sure the necessary drafting has been correctly put in. Then there is the question of Clause 12. I will say no more about that because it is obvious that Committee stage will be much occupied by that point. I also welcome what has been said about guidance. The way in which companies are going to comply with this legislation is not necessarily going to be immediately obvious to them, and guidance will be very helpful, even if it not in a statutory form. It must, however, be produced before the offences come into force. That is what the Government have promised, and I am sure that they will do what they say. The Bill needs to be passed, and I applaud the Government for putting it into the programme for this short Session of Parliament. We have been under criticism from the OECD for a long time for not including anything, including the foreign public officials offence. We now have it for the whole of the UK. Another matter that the Government might like to apply their minds to is whether it can be extended to the Crown dependencies and the Overseas Territories, because they are also under our jurisdiction to this extent and should occupy the attention of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. It seems that the Government have covered most of the problems raised by the Select Committee, except for Clause 12. I would suggest to your Lordships that the criminal offences have been very carefully drafted and are workable, and I hope that the House will give this Bill the fair wind that everybody seems to have offered it this afternoon.