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Bribery Bill [HL]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, in his exposition of the reasons why the amendment in our names should commend itself to the House. I want to make three brief points. First, I express the gratitude of members of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Constitution to the noble Lord, Lord Bach, and his ministerial colleagues for their unfailing courtesy in briefing us on the Bill’s potential consequences. Secondly, it has been said to me—my noble and learned friend Lord Mackay of Clashfern referred to this—that there is already statutory provision for prior ministerial authorisation of bribery on the part of the armed services and the security services. It has also been said that this is impractical. Both propositions cannot possibly be true. Therefore, the Minister will no doubt wish to say whether there is already statutory provision, as my noble and learned friend says, in which case it ought, clearly, to be in the Bill, or whether prior authorisation is impractical. Many government transactions require ministerial authority. One thinks of the millions of transactions involved in social security. We are not here envisaging a very large number of transactions—quite a lot, but not an enormous number. However, the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, with whom I agree on a surprising number of things, failed to point out that not every transaction falls within the provisions of the Bill. Class authorisations are available to the Secretary of State. It is up to him to decide. Therefore, it is not a matter of authorising hundreds of thousands of transactions; it can, if he or she so judges, be a class action. My final point has not been previously deployed. If we are to ask people in our armed services and the security services to continue to engage in acts of bribery on behalf of the state, we must do so because there is no alternative, and we must protect them in other jurisdictions where they may well be prosecuted. We do not know, nor can we know, what other jurisdictions say or are going to say. If they are grabbed in another country and prosecuted, we must give them the protection of being able to say that they have the authorisation of the Government. Therefore, I wholeheartedly endorse what the noble Lord, Lord Pannick, has said. I very much hope that the Minister, with his unfailing courtesy, will address these points.