Clause 4
Fraud Bill [Lords]
12:15 pm
Mike O'Brien (Solicitor General, Law Officers' Department; North Warwickshire, Labour)
Although the Law Commission recommended that there should be an offence of fraud only if the abuse of a person’s position is both dishonest and secret, after considering the arguments advanced during the consultation, the Government decided not to make secrecy part of the offence. It is difficult to define exactly when something is secret and when it is not. How many people have to know about it? What if people can say, “It was secret from me, but it may not have been secret from my colleague at work.”? It difficult to define exactly what secrecy means, and it becomes an unnecessary complication and an over-particularisation. We felt that an offence may well be committed even if the information or the circumstances in which the abuse takes place are not secret. On that basis, and to avoid a lot of technical and legalistic arguments, as well as the problem of over-particularisation, we took the view that we would not include secrecy as an element of the offence.