Letter from the Chairman of the Public
Administration Select Committee (BB 17)
Congratulations on your election as Chairman
of the Joint Committee. I am writing to ensure that you are aware
of my Committee's interest in the draft Bribery Bill, which stems
from our inquiry into Propriety and Peerages, on which we reported
in December 2007. I am attaching a copy of the relevant section
of our Report.
Our focus was the Honours (Sale of Abuses) Act 1925
("the 1925 Act"). We concluded that that the likelihood
of securing prosecutions under this Act would always be very low
even if peerages or honours were covertly traded. To secure a
conviction in practice, the police would almost certainly have
to catch someone red-handed. Given the nature of clandestine deals,
this seemed to us unlikely to happen. We therefore identified
a need to look for ways to improve the law in this area.
We then discussed the potential for increasing
the likelihood of securing convictions, either by criminalising
additional forms of behaviour or by altering the burden of proof.
Our broad view was that, on balance neither course of action was
to be recommended. We did, however, propose that the Law Commission
should consider incorporating the behaviour outlawed by the 1925
Act in their new draft Bill (the one you are now to consider),
and give serious attention to the points we had raised.
We also urged the Government to find time for
a bill in the parliamentary schedule, noting that a modern law
was overdue, and suggested that we should be invited to play some
part in giving pre-legislative scrutiny to the draft Bill—evidently
without success on this occasion!
In our view there are two issues which it would
be well worth the Joint Committee finding the time to pursue:
— Would the Government's proposals
make it any easier in practice to secure a conviction for the
sale or attempted sale of a peerage or an honour? This is well
worth exploring in the light of our concerns about the difficulty
of securing prosecutions under the 1925 Act.
— What would be the practical impact
of allowing the new draft bill and the 1925 Act to sit alongside
one another on the statute book? The Law Commission has decided
not to recommend the repeal of the 1925 Act, but at the same time
it claims that its "recommendations [contained in the draft
Bribery Bill] are sufficiently broad to catch criminal activity
of [the] sort" proscribed by the 1925 Act. This begs the
question of whether offences under the two Acts are essentially
identical or not. Has an opportunity for further consolidation
been missed?
I hope your Committee's work is fruitful and
enjoyable, and I look forward to seeing the results of its inquiries.
Dr Tony Wright MP
June 2009
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