Why Is The Bribery Act 2010 So Important In The United Kingdom?

The Bribery Act 2010 was the United Kingdom’s response to a series of pressures and scandals that affected it. The previous pieces of legislation that controlled this kind of corruption were the Public Bodies Corrupt Practices Act 1889 and the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906 (Bean and MacGuidwin, 2013). Both acts were over a century old and required revising. Furthermore, other bodies such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) had issued a series of warnings to the UK urging them to improve their legislation (Bean and MacGuidwin, 2013). Corruption in the UK is, compared to most other countries, a rather small issue: it was ranked the 10th cleanest country in terms of corruption by Transparency International

It is introduced in Section 7 (Bribery Act 2010). The law states that relevant commercial organisations may be guilty of a Section 7 offence if an associated person bribes another with the intent of gaining business or a business advantage (Bribery Act 2010 s.7). Section 9 of the act states that the Secretary of State is to release an official document where guidance will be offered to companies on what measures they must adopt in order to (1) prevent bribery from occurring amongst their employees and (2) evading liability if an associated person is guilty of the offence. As mentioned previously, the act’s massive jurisdictional reach is both remarkable and controversial. There are very few territorial limits on the crime of companies failing to prevent bribery (Bean and MacGuidwin,

These kinds of payments are to expedite otherwise lengthy processes; they are not meant to sway opinions, but to simply make the process happen faster. Under BA 2010, these are illegal. The law states that any sort of payment like this would constitute a bribe, and as such trigger a section 1 offence. The UK’s stance on these types of payments is not common, as many other countries actually tolerate them. The United States is one such country. Their Foreign Corrupt Practices Act acknowledges the importance of these kind of payments in certain industries or countries and thus does not criminalize them. The biggest issue in this topic is how common their use is. Even the government acknowledges this and even says that it will not be easy to eradicate them (UK Ministry of Justice, 2011). Still, the government chose to criminalise them. Most of these payments are harmless and, in many countries (especially emerging economies), are often necessary. They usually do more good than harm seeing how they are not meant to change a person’s opinion but simply to expedite a process, hence it could be argued that they should not constitute a bribe and therefore an anti-bribery law is not even the correct tool to outlaw