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Al-Yamamah Arms Agreement

The decision to call this debate has proved worth while. The hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) rightly confirmed that the subjects it addresses are worth debating. I will seek to deal with comments made by colleagues in the course of the debate and with other matters that my hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham (Dr. Cable) was criticised for not dealing with, but which he did not deal with because we have adopted a double-handed approach with one Member opening and another winding up so we shared out the work between us. I want to try to establish the reason why we say that the matter under discussion is of important public interest for various reasons. As has been agreed, the matter dates back to a contract first entered into in the mid 1980s. It was a significant contract that turned out to be worth a significant amount of money. My hon. Friend the Member for Twickenham made the case that whether it is in the long-term interests of this country that that deal between BAE Systems and the Saudi authorities was entered into, and then continued as it has been since, was controversial at the time and, like the decisions taken recently, can only be viewed in the round. Of course a contract for jobs in this country in an industry in which we have expertise involving a large employer with a good reputation is potentially beneficial—of course a contract with an ally, whatever its failings, is potentially beneficial. However, from the beginning there was independent evidence—the Bank of England is as good a witness to call as any—that this was not an unqualified bonus: that it was not thought to be an unarguably beneficial contract. At the end of this exercise, only time will tell and only full information being revealed will show us whether the national interest has, on balance, been served by the contract, which began back in the 1980s. Nobody on the Liberal Democrat Benches has ever argued that—where we can do so legitimately and properly, at home or abroad—we should not seek work and contracts for British companies. It is not part of our case that we should not have a defence industry, and we have argued in support of strengthening our conventional defence, not weakening it. Nobody has argued that we should not have dealings with other countries. Our argument is about how matters have progressed, what the public know and whether, in the end, those involved have stayed on the right side of the law. It was not Liberal Democrats who—to use the Solicitor-General’s phrase—started a campaign of innuendo. Allegations surfaced back in the 1980s, which is why the National Audit Office, as the watchdog of public finance, held an inquiry on Parliament’s behalf and brought its report to the Public Accounts Committee. Yes, it was a long time ago, and I accept that it is a decision for Parliament, not the Government, as to whether an NAO report is published. However, it is important to publish the report because, although it may or may not tell us something about the early history of these dealings, this is the only time in the NAO’s history that such a report has not been published. The current Chairman of the Public Accounts Committee said in an intervention that he, having been briefed, believes that nothing suggested that there was corruption or that offences were committed by the Ministry of Defence. If so, that is all the more reason why the report should be released. Our motion calls for the report to be released, and if it is passed, that will be a clear indication that it should be released. I hope that the Conservatives will reflect on the fact that, if they vote against the motion, which we will certainly put to the vote, they will be voting against, among other things, the proposal that the NAO report, which remains secret, should come out into the open. The Serious Fraud Office, having been set up in 1988, started its investigations. There was a preliminary investigation in 2001, and questions and early-day motions were tabled in this House not only by Liberal Democrats, but by colleagues on the Government side who expressed concern about this issue. It was out in the open, and questions were regularly asked of Ministers. In the end, the SFO started a serious investigation, as it should. That is what it is there for, and what Parliament wanted it to do. Colleagues are of course right to say that until 2001, when we passed new legislation on this issue, it was much more difficult to deal with bribery and corruption—to deal with the paying of money outside a contract to achieve a benefit that one would not otherwise get without that wrongful payment, which is a simple principle to understand. So the 2001 legislation that the Labour Government introduced was welcome, and a new regime—a new backcloth—became part of the landscape from then on. I share the view of the hon. Member for Beaconsfield that it is a great frustration to many that it is, however, now nine years since a new bribery Bill was contemplated. I am not blaming the Government entirely for that. I know what happened—such a Bill came up for scrutiny, and the pre-legislative scrutiny Committee rejected the idea of proceeding with it. There has since been a Home Office consultation paper, but our approach to this issue will not appear serious to this country, let alone to the rest of the world, until the other part of the legislative package—serious anti-bribery legislation—is in place. I call on the Government and the Minister for the Middle East to indicate that they will turn the planned anti-bribery Bill into a reality, so that we can have a new anti-bribery Act.