Corruption Bill [HL]

My Lords, I declare an interest as a member of Transparency International UK’s advisory council, which I thank for its high-calibre work on the Bill. I support the Bill very warmly. A coherent law of corruption has been a long time coming and, as your Lordships have heard, the Government’s eventual attempt in 2003 was not found to be up to the task by the scrutiny committee of which I was a member. As the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, said, we found that the 2003 draft Bill was neither adequate in scope, nor, most importantly, intelligible to the business community that would have to operate it. It also shared the narrow perception of corruption in the Law Commission paper, which was that the principal issue was the domestic UK dimension. It was as if globalisation did not exist, as if post-colonial western interests had never shored up greedy dictators and enabled them to loot their countries’ Exchequers, as if powerful, rich companies had never colluded with developing countries’ public officials to produce white elephants of public expenditure or to reinforce a clientele culture where petty bribery is necessary to obtain any service, as the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, so powerfully described. These are the real and far-reaching issues of present-day corruption worldwide. I add another figure to those cited. The World Bank estimates that, globally, bribery for public procurement bids is at least $200 billion a year and that total bribery of the public sector from private sector companies and individuals might be as much as $1,000 billion. That would pay for a lot of roads, health centres and schools. It would save many lives. Another casualty of such pervasive corruption is democracy itself: public goods and services are not transparently and equitably delivered and redress through the systems of justice is barely available. That much larger consideration of the harm done by corruption is why the international organisations such as the OECD and the UN brought forward instruments, universally supported and adopted. We modernised our law to criminalise bribery overseas, which is welcome, but the OECD review committee still finds that UK implementation of the convention is impaired, as we have heard, and whatever our re-arrangement of enforcement machinery, there has not been one prosecution under such legislation as we have. This is why the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Africa, in our report The Other Side of the Coin recommended a new Bill by the end of last year. The Tanzanian Government have had sufficient political will to enact legislation and prosecuted 50 of their677 investigations in 2005. Well, that did not happen here, as noble Lords have explained. Why do the Government not realise the importance of this? If it is because the Home Office, the lead department, quite understandably, has little experience of the devastating consequences of corruption overseas, this should have been changed by drawing more on the experience of the Department for International Development—another recommendation of The Other Side of the Coin. Optimists hoped that the Government’s very positive response to this report would result in a new corruption Bill, of the sort that the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, has so eloquently described, not another postponement and a referral to the same organisation. I see that consultation with business is not included in the new terms of reference and I hope that the Minster can assure us that this will be remedied. We owe speedy, intelligible legislation to our many transnational companies that observe the provisions of the OECD convention, to those that want to preserve the good reputation of the City of London, and to those that want to increase investment potential everywhere. I quote Ms Karina Litvack, a senior executive of F&C, on whose committee of reference I sit: "““for long-term investors, bribery and corruption distortand destabilise markets, expose companies to legal liabilities and reputational damage, disadvantage non-corrupt companies and reduce transparency for investors seeking investment opportunities””." The director of the Serious Fraud Office himself, who had to decide to scrap the investigation into the activities of BAE Systems’ in Saudi Arabia, is reported in the Financial Times less than a month ago as saying that our anti-corruption laws urgently need to be reformed to cope with modem international business practice. Does not that make the case of the noble Lord, Lord Chidgey, compelling?