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Bribery Bill [HL]

My Lords, we on these Benches welcome Amendment 19. It is absolutely right to have removed the law enforcement agencies from the Bill. I shall speak to Amendments 20, 21, 23 and 25, which limit the effects of Clause 12. My noble friend Lord Thomas of Gresford will speak to Amendment 29, which proposes the total removal of Clause 12—which is perhaps one way of getting rid of the difficulty that has kept us going for the past hour. Amendment 20 deals with the powers of the security services to commit acts of bribery. The functions of the security services under the Security Service Act are threefold: first, ensuring national security; secondly, protecting the economic well-being of the United Kingdom; and, thirdly, the prevention or detection of serious crime. The effect of this amendment is to limit the functions of the Security Service to the first of those three purposes; that is, ensuring national security. I would have no problem in accepting the extension of legitimate functions for the security services to cover the prevention of serious crime, but that did not get into my amendment. However, there is no justification for allowing bribery to be used for the second purpose of the security services; that is, protecting economic well-being. The Government might well be interested to know about, let us say, Chinese plans to intervene in markets which had up to then been dominated by British businesses. Inside information about Chinese plans and whether they might be damaging to the United Kingdom economy could well be useful to the United Kingdom Government, but they present no threat to national security. The Security Service should not therefore be entitled to pay bribes for information given by some member of this Chinese team. Bribery is after all, as I think we all recognise, a devastating disease in many parts of the world, and it should be used only for national security and the prevention of serious crime. It should not be used where the information is a matter only of preventing economic damage. As chapter 12 of its report shows, the Joint Committee believes that, even if authorisation can legitimately be granted to the secret services to commit bribery, it should be limited to the protection of national security and the detection or prevention of serious crime. I move on to Amendment 21. The equivalent clause in the Bill presented to the Joint Committee permitted the security services, and the security services only, to bribe when necessary for their proper functions. The Joint Committee proposed unanimously the removal of that clause. When this Bill was introduced to Parliament, the legal authority for bribery was not only retained for the purposes of the Security Service but extended to law enforcement agencies and the Armed Forces when on active service. Government Amendment 19 will remove law enforcement agencies from the list of those permitted to bribe, which we welcome, but it does not remove the Armed Forces. It has never been explained why the Armed Forces were added in the first place. I can imagine that the Government have in mind the paying of members of the Taliban to change sides and problems similar to that. I cannot imagine that there would ever be a prosecution, let alone a conviction, for that, so I invite in relation to Amendment 21 the Minister to explain why it is thought necessary to give the Armed Forces a right of bribery and why, if it was important enough to require this legislation, the issue was never raised in either the draft Bill or the evidence presented to the Joint Committee. Amendments 23 and 25 are consequential on Amendment 21. I should give advance warning that, unless we hear satisfactory answers to the issue that I have raised under Amendment 20, we are likely to call a vote, not in the expectation of winning—although we would of course like that—but to make perfectly plain our concern about the way in which the power to legitimate bribery has been overdone.