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Bribery Bill [HL]

The noble Lord must know a great deal more about these things than I do, but that is not the way that I understood that it worked at all. It seems to me that what has happened in this case has been identified, as my noble and learned friend said, by your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Constitution. The Government could have done two things. They could either have gone for authorisation before the event, as is the case with the secret services and the intelligence services, which are also covered under this system—covered twice, therefore—or they could have left it to what is called a post-event assessment. I would prefer to stay with a single system for the security services and the intelligence services, rather than to have two systems, which is what we will have under the Bill. What is really happening, as the noble Lord, Lord Bach, told us last time that we discussed the Bill, is that the whole concept has been developing more or less as we go along. There was no reference to some of those things in the draft Bill which went before the Joint Select Committee. The Minister explained that that is because they were not yet ready. I think that what happened—I ask the Minister to comment on this—is that the Government decided to include the law enforcement agencies. Now they are taking them out again by a later amendment, which I wholly applaud, but the proposition of having to give a prior authorisation or warrant for all the operations of the law enforcement agencies—and there are many of them—presumably led to concern that the whole thing would become unmanageable. That was the trouble, as I understood it, which caused the change from prior authorisation to the defence scheme in Clause 12. If the law enforcement agencies are to be removed again—and I assume that they are, because I am sure that that amendment will be accepted—it seems to me that the argument drops away. Why do we not have a single system for all the people concerned? That would give them the opportunity of knowing beforehand that they can do what they have been tasked to do and are unlikely to be prosecuted for it; whereas under the post-event assessment, they will not know that. I should have thought that that would be thoroughly unsatisfactory. The Minister has never really explained why that change took place, except that it grew. I should have thought that, for the reasons given by other speakers in the short debate, we should retain the prior authorisation system. My amendment is an attempt to do that. I am sure that it is not as elegant as the lead amendment, but it has that effect.