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Bribery Bill [HL]

My Lords, it is about time that we on these Benches came into the battle. The noble Lord, Lord Henley, started by dealing with Amendment 6. In my view, it would be a wrecking amendment if it were ever adopted. As the noble Lord said, it takes us back to Clause 5 in the draft Bill as presented for pre-legislative scrutiny. The Joint Committee unanimously rejected that clause. The principal reason for that was that if any prosecution has to identify a single individual or a number of specific individuals who were negligent in failing to prevent bribery, it would make it almost impossible to obtain a conviction. The failure to prevent bribery is much more likely to be due to the failure of the management or board of directors as a body to take proper steps to prevent bribery. Bribery, or the absence of any objection to bribery, is more often due to the slackness of the company as a whole rather than to any negligence that can be tied to specific directors or managers. In many cases, it may be clear that the company has failed to take proper steps to stop bribery and deserves punishment for that failure, but the evidence of negligence by any one individual director or manager cannot be proved beyond reasonable doubt, so there will be no conviction. Therefore, if the amendment is passed, one of the central purposes of the Bill will be destroyed and the Bill will become unacceptable as meeting the duties of the United Kingdom to try to reduce the dangers of bribery across the world. Amendment 8 is not quite a wrecking amendment, but it is not far off it. Without Amendment 8, a company has to prove that it has adopted adequate procedures. Since all the relevant information will be in the hands of the company, and it only has to prove that on the balance of probabilities, requiring the company to prove that is fair enough. However, if this amendment is accepted, the prosecution will have to prove beyond reasonable doubt that the company has failed to adopt reasonable procedures. That will again make it extremely difficult to get effective convictions. Perhaps there would be a few more than if Amendment 6 were adopted, but not many more. Amendments 7, 9 and 11 are less seriously damaging to the Bill, but I nevertheless oppose them. Amendment 7 states that, ""it is a defence for C to prove that C had in place reasonable procedures in all the circumstances, including taking into account the extent of C’s influence over A"." That is unsatisfactory because one of the jobs that C—the company—must carry out is to make sure that it exercises influence over its agent and does not employ or hire agents it cannot control. Those words, and the similar words in Amendment 11, are unacceptable. On the question of whether "adequate procedures" should be replaced by "reasonable procedures", I have very little to say. This is an important group of amendments and, by and large, they are a considerable threat to the effectiveness of the Bill.