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Bribery Bill [HL]

My Lords, these amendments concern Clause 7, which introduces a new offence of failure of a commercial organisation to prevent bribery. A commercial organisation will be guilty of the offence if a person associated with the organisation bribes another person intending to obtain or retain business or an advantage in the conduct of business for the organisation. It will be a defence for the organisation to prove that it had in place adequate procedures designed to prevent persons associated with it from undertaking such conduct. We have made it clear, in response to the Joint Committee that considered the draft Bribery Bill and subsequently, that we agree that guidance should be available to commercial organisations. We are committed to publishing such guidance well in advance of the coming into force of Clause 7. It was clear from our debate in Committee that many noble Lords did not consider such an undertaking to go quite far enough. Clearly, no Government can bind their successor and I can understand that there might be nervousness on the part of the business sector that guidance may not, in the event, be available to them. Having listened to the arguments, we are content to include in the Bill a requirement on the Secretary of State to publish guidance. Our approach is to place a duty on the Secretary of State to publish guidance on what procedures commercial organisations can put in place to prevent bribery. We have also included provision for the guidance to be updated from time to time at the discretion of the Secretary of State. Our new clause will also require the Secretary of State to consult Scottish Ministers before any guidance is published. That is important, as the guidance will relate to the prevention of bribery by commercial organisations operating in Scotland as well as other parts of the United Kingdom. We remain of the view that any guidance should not be prescriptive. It is not the role of the Government to provide guidance for commercial organisations on how to resist a criminal charge or to provide, in essence, a tick-box approach for organisations on how to stay within the law. As I mentioned in Committee, the Ministry of Justice and the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills have been working closely with business groups and non-governmental organisations to come up with a set of key anti-bribery principles that will form the basis of our guidance document. Preparation of the guidance in discussion with a group of stakeholders is ongoing and, to be fair to them, we should give them an opportunity to consider a first draft before we circulate it more widely. However, we expect the guidance to describe the new offence and the adequate procedures defence. We also expect that it will set out a number of key principles that, if adopted by commercial organisations, would go a long way towards preventing bribery. These principles, which we anticipate will be considered in more detail in the latter parts of the guidance, are expected to focus on the responsibility of an organisation’s board of directors to design, implement and regularly review policies for preventing bribery within that organisation. I can assure the House that we remain committed to publishing the guidance well in advance of the Act coming into force. I trust that these government amendments will be welcomed. I beg to move.