Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, what progress he has made on Action 36 of the UK Anti-Corruption Plan; and when he expects corporate criminal liability to be introduced.

The UK has corporate criminal liability and commercial organisations can be, and are, prosecuted for wrongdoing. The UK Anti-Corruption Plan tasked the Ministry of Justice to examine the case for a new offence of a corporate failure to prevent economic crime and the rules on establishing corporate criminal liability more widely. Ministers have decided not to carry out further work at this stage as there have been no prosecutions under the model Bribery Act offence and there is little evidence of corporate economic wrongdoing going unpunished.