Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Baroness Williams of Crosby and Lord Jay of Ewelme

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Jay of Ewelme (CB)]

My Lords, I follow the noble Lord, Lord Judd, with as much trepidation as I did some 40 years ago when as a young civil servant I followed him round some rather poor parts of west Africa on a ministerial swing, a trip that I suspect may have influenced both him and me in spending a good part of the rest of our lives in dealing with development issues.

I would like briefly to comment on Parts 1 and 2 of the Bill, and on procedure. On Part 1, first, I echo what some others have said this evening: lobbying, whether by NGOs, churches or companies, can be a valuable, necessary and, indeed, inevitable part of our democracy. In my own experience, much legislation and some policies with which I have been involved have been brought forward without consultation and as a result have been flawed. I have to say that Part 2 of this Bill is rather a good example of that.

However, such lobbying must be open and transparent and must be made public. I am not talking about just lobbying by consultant lobbyists. Like others, I am puzzled by the Bill’s exclusive focus on consultant lobbyists. The coverage surely needs to be wider than that. I am also puzzled by the exclusive focus on Permanent Secretaries and Ministers. I have a certain respect for both Permanent Secretaries and Ministers but I am not naive and the focus surely needs to be much wider than that, and include political advisers, directors-general, directors and, for example, anyone in a team working on a new Bill who might be instructed to report any approaches from lobbyists to their director or director-general. The important thing is that this is done.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby (LD)]

I apologise for interrupting the noble Lord but does he agree that the Permanent Secretary is probably almost the last civil servant to be lobbied in a controversial situation?

[Lord Jay of Ewelme]

I entirely agree. Indeed, any lobbyist worth his or her salt is going to make quite certain that they lobby somebody slightly lower down the scale, and by the time the piece of legislation or the policy gets to the Permanent Secretary or the Minister, the damage may well have been done. I entirely agree with the noble Baroness.

In this context, I particularly liked the idea of the noble Lord, Lord Norton—if I have understood him rightly—of shifting the focus in this part of the Bill from the lobbyist to the person being lobbied, with some mechanism to ensure that that lobbying is made public when the Bill or the policy is made public. That seems a rather simpler approach than that in the Bill at the moment. I look forward to the Minister’s comments on that and I hope that that idea can be considered further.

On Part 3 of the Bill, if the aim is to catch the transatlantic political sharks of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, as they approach our shores, as seems to be the case, we must find some way of ensuring that our NGOs do not get caught in that net. I recognise that the Government have tried to reflect some of the concerns that NGOs have expressed but, as our e-mail inboxes have shown in the past few days, they have not succeeded. To leave open the possibility that NGOs decide not to continue their activity in a full year before an election or have to spend on complying with new bureaucracy time and money which donors rightly expect should be going to the front line—to the poor, the sick, the elderly and the homeless—is quite simply wrong and contrary to some basic constitutional principles of freedom of expression and freedom of speech.

On procedure, I much regret that the Bill was not subject to pre-legislative scrutiny. A Bill with clear constitutional—indeed, electoral—implications is just the sort of Bill that deserves and requires full and proper pre-legislative scrutiny. It is perhaps too late for that to happen now, but I ask the Minister to think seriously about ensuring that Part 2, at least, even at this late stage, gets the kind of proper consultation with those whom it may seriously affect that it so badly needs. That would surely be time well spent.