Lord Woolf’s report on ethical standards at BAE Systems highlights the intense pressure for reform of Britain’s archaic anti-corruption laws, amid growing embarrassment at the lack of successful prosecutions.

The Law Commission has proposed a long-awaited overhaul of the rules, but critics accuse the government of hypocrisy for lecturing other countries on the evils of bribery while failing to pursue the very British companies that are suspected of paying the money.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the leading force in international anti-bribery work, is due soon to unveil the results of a high-profile probe into why London’s efforts lag behind those of the US and even ­historically poor performers such as France and Germany.

The Woolf report urges ministers to bring forward long-promised anti-corruption law changes that it described as “slow, difficult and contentious”. Transparency International, the anti-corruption pressure group, echoed the report’s calls, adding that re­forms to bribery rules had been “scandalously delayed”.

Many involved in anti-corruption efforts have grown ever more alarmed by Britain’s failure to bring a prosecution under a 2001 law that for the first time explicitly made it an offence for a British national or business to bribe public officials overseas.

A key problem is the framing of rules passed a century or more ago to deal with private sector corruption scandals that have little affinity with bribery by modern-day multinationals.

Under existing rules, prosecutors have to prove that foreign officials receiving the alleged bribes – known as “agents” – have acted without the consent of their superiors, known as “principals”. This can lead to problems in cases relating to countries in which governments are riddled with a culture of corruption, with “principals” such as top civil servants, prime ministers and presidents complicit in the bribery.

London’s continued failure to honour a long-standing promise to reform anti-corruption laws is widely condemned by investigators, lawyers and activists, many of whom see it as reflecting a wider political reluctance to jeopardise commercial and strategic interests.

A proposed corruption bill in 2003 was scrapped amid near-universal criticism, to be followed by a Home Office consultation that concluded there were “fundamental disagreements between stakeholders” over devising a workable plan for change.

The government farmed out responsibility for reform to the Law Commission, which in November said it would devise a new offence of bribery to capture behaviour not covered by the existing rules. In the interim, the government has dismayed anti-graft campaigners and lawyers invol­ved in corruption cases by pushing through proposals to give the attorney-general unprecedented statutory powers to block corruption probes and prosecutions on national security grounds.

The basket of proposed legal reforms will be one of many factors reviewed by the OECD, which launched its probe into Britain’s performance on corruption last year after expressing concern over whether the decision to drop the BAE-Saudi case broke a key international bribery treaty.