Bribery Bill [Lords]

I, too, welcome the Bill. I pay tribute to the hon. Member for City of York (Hugh Bayley) for his work over the years in bringing us to this point, and to my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath) for his sterling efforts. In light of what the Secretary of State and the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) said about the late Mr. Michael Foot at the start of their speeches, I should like to share their tributes. He was a very distinguished member of a very great west country radical family, even though his most famous political insult was aimed at the leader of the party that many other members of his family had served for many years. He said of David Steel, in that 1979 debate to which the hon. and learned Gentleman referred, that he had""passed from rising hope to elder statesman without any intervening period whatsoever."—[Official Report, 28 March 1979; Vol. 965, c. 577.]" He will be sadly missed. As the Secretary of State said, the Bill reforms and clarifies the law on bribery in several important ways. I shall not go through them all, but it is important to realise that the Bill removes many uncertainties in the present complicated mixture of statute and common law. It removes the complications about the relevance or non-relevance of "principal" and "agent", and those created by the legislation's use of the vague word "corruptly". Importantly, we now have clear definitions; we have a concentration on business and the state and a clear definition of when companies will be held responsible for bribery undertaken by people who are associated with them, including their employees. I understand that the Conservatives have some difficulty with clause 7, but I do not; I think that it is well done, and I hope that it continues its passage unaffected. Importantly, we now have a separate and clear offence of bribing a foreign official. That is a development of immense significance.