Bribery Bill [Lords]

In welcoming the Bill and in the light of the comments made by the Lord Chancellor, I do not think that I can start my remarks without echoing the sadness on the Conservative side of the House at the death of Michael Foot. Although, having entered the House in 1997, I never had the privilege of being in the House at the same time as he was, as a schoolboy at Westminster it was my habit as a boarder to slip over the road at 4 o'clock in the afternoon and, my father having given me a very good tea, to go up into the Public Gallery and watch the debates. There is no doubt that one of the most entertaining orators was Michael Foot. I have vivid memories of displays of pure genius at the Dispatch Box. I was also present a little later at that famous vote when the Government lost their majority in 1979, during the debate on no confidence, when he wound up for the Government in a performance that was simply brilliant, extremely entertaining and mordant—I seem to remember some extremely barbed comments at the expense of the nationalists. It was a great display of political skills. Looking around the House today, one has that rather sinking feeling when one thinks about the eccentricities in his character, which were regarded as great marks of his quality, and the fact that we have perhaps lost something today in that we are no longer capable of accommodating such eccentricities in our political process. In fact, we might be greatly advantaged if we were better able to do so. I echo from this side of the House the remarks made by the Lord Chancellor and say that I can only look back on it as a formative experience in my life to have had the privilege of witnessing Michael Foot in action. We welcome the Bill, as we have made abundantly clear—and not only in the welcome that, I hope, has been apparent from our interventions. It has been too long in coming. I think that the Government promised in 1997 that we would have such a Bill. I certainly do not criticise the Secretary of State, but we only got something in 2003, there was a consultation in 2005 and the process has dragged on for a very long time. We now have a Bill, but we also have the anxiety that it is up against the wire of the end period of this Parliament. There must be some public anxiety that it might founder before it can get on the statute book. At the outset, I want to tell the right hon. Gentleman that we will do our best to help to ensure that it gets on the statute book. I would like to think, because of the degree of consensus that surrounds so many aspects of it, it should be possible to do that, although I hope that the Government will listen to some of the hopefully few but nevertheless significant areas of anxiety that we might still have about it. We also recognise that the issue is very important. International corruption, and national corruption, ought to be of concern to everybody in this House and, indeed, to the wider public. We should be troubled both by the fact that we know that the World Bank's estimates that the sums involved run at $1 trillion annually and by the fact that over recent years the UK has come in for increasing criticism about whether it has sufficiently robust procedures and processes in place to prevent corruption. The Secretary of State will remember the episode surrounding British Aerospace. I do not wish to get bogged down in a piece of history, but that highlighted very clearly that inadequate procedures were in place to prevent bribery abroad. It also highlighted the fact that the law was so grey in its scope that it was always inevitable, in my judgment, that the Attorney-General and the Serious Fraud Office would come to the conclusion that there was no possible basis on which a prosecution could have been brought in the first place. National security issues are another consideration. Those issues have without doubt redounded to our disadvantage on the world stage. Indeed, as the Secretary of State will be aware, Britain's rating on preventing corruption has slipped consistently in recent years. It is high time that we did something about that. The Bill is broadly welcome. It covers all the main aspects of bribery and the ways in which it might be carried out, and that is exactly what we need to take matters forward. I certainly do not wish to labour my remarks, and having made a general welcome, I hope simply to highlight the areas about which we continue to be anxious regarding the methods that the Government have adopted. Let me start with what I recognise to be perhaps the most controversial or difficult area: how consents are given for prosecutions. This is a difficult issue for the House, and there has certainly been anxiety in the past that consents to prosecutions, particularly if they lie in the hands of the Attorney-General, may be manipulated politically, or for some political reason, independently of what the wider interests of justice might be. The Lord Chancellor will know that that is never a position to which I personally subscribe because my view is that previous Attorneys-General, over many years and across many Administrations, have not been tainted by party political considerations or gaining narrow political advantage in taking their decisions, and that they have always found it quite easy to uphold public interest principles. The problem is that the Government have taken the view, in the Bill, that the necessary consents should lie with the directors of prosecution departments. Rather than assert a standpoint on this matter, I want simply to pose a question. The difficulty that I perceive with the Government's approach is that some such decisions will be of great public controversy and that once such a decision has been taken, particularly one that no prosecution should be brought, we are going to face difficulties regarding public anxiety about how that decision was arrived at and who in this place is answerable for it. The Lord Chancellor will be aware that the buck tends to stop in this Chamber, and it will undoubtedly be the Attorney-General—or, if he is another place, the Solicitor-General, I suppose—who will stand answerable. I wonder whether there would be the advantage that the Liberal Democrats and some others perceive that there would be to leaving final decisions in such cases to heads of departments who are not in a position to answer to the House directly. I want simply to flag this issue up, and I do so without reaching any conclusion as to where we should go. I know that this matter has been the subject of wider anxiety. Indeed, the Liberal Democrats tabled amendments to the Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill yesterday, seeking to remove the role of the Attorney-General in all prosecutorial decisions. I happen to think that that is the wrong thing to do. That is not to say that the Attorney-General should have a say in every prosecutorial area, but this area is likely to attract a lot of public attention, and the old principle behind having the Attorney-General take the final decision is that he is answerable to Parliament. We will lose that with the system that we are setting up.