CIA: Torture

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Tuesday 16th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government set up the Gibson inquiry in July 2010. It was asked to produce an interim report when police investigations into a number of potential criminal charges were instituted in 2012. The Gibson committee’s interim report raised 27 questions for further investigation. They have been taken up by the Intelligence and Security Committee, which has now been working for a year with some additional staff on that inquiry. When that inquiry is complete, it will be for the next Government to decide whether a further judicial inquiry is necessary. On the question of Shaker Aamer, the Government are engaged at the highest levels for his release as a matter of urgency.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Bach (Lab)]

My Lords—

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I think that the Back-Benchers come first.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Geneva Convention condemns torture; that is very clearly set out in the Geneva Convention. We certainly condemn torture, and we will watch with interest the response of public opinion in the United States to the Senate committee’s report, including that within the Senate, where there are very divided opinions.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords—

[Lord Avebury (LD)]

My Lords—

[The Lord Privy Seal (Baroness Stowell of Beeston)]

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, has been very patient. We will allow him to ask his question and then we should have time for at least one more noble Lord.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, does this difficult question not take us back to the problem that stands at the heart of the operation of the Intelligence and Security Committee? A witness before that committee who does not tell the truth cannot be held in contempt of Parliament because that committee, while it is described as a committee of Parliament, is not a full Select Committee and does not enjoy parliamentary privileges.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I take the noble Lord’s point and I encourage him to read the short 500-page executive summary of the US Senate committee’s report which has, from the summary of the summary that I have read, some rather shocking things in it. We very much hope that British officials were in no way associated with some of those actions.

Political Parties: Funding

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Grand Committee

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, I am very pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, has raised this debate today, because it is a debate that is very close to my heart, going back over some 30 years. I am also glad that he raised the issue of IPSA, because I am utterly convinced that IPSA has effectively destroyed Parliament for many parliamentarians. It has so circumscribed the rules on expenses now in the Commons that many people—worthy people—who should be attracted to Parliament will no longer stand for Parliament. I know people who will not come to Parliament any more, because they believe that the way in which the new regime has been set up, effectively based on distrusting Members of Parliament, leaves them exposed to media attack for the smallest of sins, if you might call them that. They are not prepared to risk their family and professional reputations, or indeed their careers, on the basis of something where they can be removed on a whim. If I was starting off again in my first election as a candidate, all those years ago in 1974, I would have second thoughts about coming into Parliament in the light of developments that have taken place following the introduction of IPSA.

In my view, one of IPSA’s biggest sins was to presume that it could propose a substantial increase in Members’ salaries and justify it on the basis that it was cutting back on the expenses regime. What it did not realise, and what a schoolboy with an elementary knowledge of politics could have told it, was that the moment you talk about a 10% increase for MPs prior to a general election, MPs get bombarded with letters asking whether they are going to take the increase. I know that MPs are currently writing back to their constituents and saying, “No, I am not going to take the increase”. What a ludicrous position we are in whereby MPs, because of the power of the press and concerns about the ballot box, are now turning down increases that should legitimately be accepted. I completely blame IPSA for that, along with those who proposed the idea of this monstrous organisation four or five years ago.

I now want to speak specifically to this debate. I believe that the issue of political funding is a festering sore undermining the credibility of Parliament, parliamentarians, the political process and the political parties. I do not think we should underestimate the level of cynicism in the mind of an electorate following articles alleging impropriety in the relationship between politicians and money.

People are becoming heartily sick of these stories and wonder what is going on in Westminster. In fact, very little is going on in Westminster that should worry them. The facts are that they read these stories and believe that something is fundamentally wrong. I do not believe that people necessarily follow policy when they vote in general elections. I actually think that people make an instinctive judgment, very often not on the basis of their knowledge of a particular party’s political posturing but on their feelings of trust and distrust. They make up their minds on the basis of an aggregate series of stories they hear over a period of time that undermine their trust in political institutions. This is one of the areas influencing public judgments.

When I first stood for Parliament in the early 1970s, we used to regularly get turnouts of 70-odd per cent. In my by-election in Workington in 1976, the turnout was nearly 73%. We regularly had turnouts of nearly 80% in the general elections up to and throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Now, when one looks at general election results nationally, one sees a collapse in the vote in almost every constituency in the country. We have to ask ourselves why. It is because of this disconnect and distrust that has built up between the public outside and this institution. It is often the case that bad headlines have swamped all the good that we do in this institution. Bad donor stories damage the whole political process.

We read stories about trade unions, and they somehow are condemned for the donations they make. Again there is a misunderstanding. Trade unions and their contributions reflect the collective giving by millions for their collective interest in collective provision. One cannot liken that to the donations of individuals, whether they be companies or people making single donations. Those single donations by companies and individuals are more often than not about personal advancement and advantage. That was the Oakeshott analysis. He and we knew that there are Members of the House of Lords who are here because they paid money to their political parties. It is a fact, and we know it. I know a particular case, not in my party. I know the sum that was paid, the chap is no longer with us, he almost never spoke and he was here because he paid. The police may carry out their inquiries and may find nothing, but the facts are that this system is wrong and has to change. The power of big money and big donations has to be brought to an end.

It was with all that background in mind that I put up, during the passage of the then Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Bill, a proposal to change this system. I want to take down the contribution I made on that occasion off the shelf where it still sits unnoticed and bring it once again before this Committee to consider, because I believe that it would help resolve the difficulty. What I proposed at the time was a system that would have incentivised systems of donations by individuals by allowing taxpayers to reclaim the basic rate of tax on their donations to political parties. It would have limited the relief to the standard rate and operate in the same way as gift aid to charities or covenanting to one’s local church. It was not my idea; it was done in America. Obama had hundreds of thousands of small donors who were tax-relieved. I cannot see why we could not have done something similar in this country. Then we would have mass financial contributions and membership of political parties. This issue has had much support over the years from all political parties and all the organisations that are associated with political debate. The Committee on Standards in Public Life, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Neill of Bladen, recommended essentially the proposal I made when we were dealing with the legislation. He suggested that 15 years ago. The Electoral Commission’s report of 2004 on the funding of political parties recommended a similar change in the law, with a £200 cap per individual on their tax relief.

In 2006, the Constitutional Affairs Committee of the House of Commons made a similar recommendation in line with my proposal at the time. The Conservative Party’s Tyrie report of 2006, entitled Clean Politics, also made reference to an amendment of the nature of what I was moving. In 2004, the Liberal Democrats called for a scheme of tax relief of a similar nature, and in 2009 moved an amendment very similar to the one that I was moving during proceedings on the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Bill. When the Labour Government established the Hayden Phillips inquiry in 2007, they recommended a tax relief match-funding scheme that bore a close resemblance to the scheme that I was proposing. Why was it blocked when we tried to introduce it into the legislation? It was blocked because we were told that negotiations were going on between the political parties. That simply was not true. Mr Clegg told us quite clearly from the Dispatch Box in the House of Commons that negotiations had finished, so that was not an obstacle. The negotiations had ended and therefore we were free, if we wished, to proceed on the basis of changing the law in favour of what I was proposing.

It was also put to me, sadly by people in my own party, that a single party—in this case it was targeting the Conservative Party—might gain by increasing the low tax relief contribution cap that I had set. It may have done, but it would never have set it so high that it was not credible in terms of what the public would accept. Anyhow, the Conservative Party never has trouble raising money; it is always raising money. It is the other parties that have great trouble raising funds from individuals. Therefore, that someone might at some stage in the future be inclined to raise the cap slightly higher than the one I propose is irrelevant to me. I was interested in ensuring that, in raising funds, the smaller parties were in a position to develop this contributory financial base. Finally I was told that the cost was too much. I proposed a cap in the third year of £96 per annum per contributing taxpayer. We could not cost it but we gave an estimate of approximately £3 million per year. It would have begun the process of tax-relieved small sums widening the base of contributions, narrowing the base of big donors and ultimately giving us the much wider contributing base that we all believe is necessary if we are to develop a more healthy politics.

If, indeed, there are negotiations of the conditions of a minority Government next year, I hope that, whatever happens, at least those who are in a minority will demand this change. They will be in a position to do so. If no party has an overall majority next year there may well not be a coalition but there will certainly be a minority Government, and those who can influence that minority Government should use their power to begin to secure that elementary change, which will not cost a lot of money, in the culture of financial contributions in British politics.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I wish my party had paid me. The first time I worked for my party, in the 1966 general election, when I took four weeks off from writing my PhD to be the party’s assistant press officer, I worked flat out—probably 14 to 16 hours a day for four weeks. At the end of it, Lord Byers, who was then the party’s chair, presented me with a £50 note, which I had never seen before and which in those days was a substantial sum of money. I and a friend spent a very enjoyable holiday in France on the basis of that £50 note. That is the only occasion on which I have benefited from money flowing the other way.

There is a consensus on the need to limit the impact of money on politics. There is also a particularly negative campaign from the right-wing media that we are all in politics only for the money. All I say on that is that I would encourage the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, who pursues many very effective campaigns in politics, also to campaign to ensure that those right-wing newspapers pay their full taxes in the country which they seek to defend because we all know that they do their utmost to avoid that.

The problem for all of us is that political campaigning costs money and the public, as consumers of politics, expect the parties to put leaflets through their doors, to phone them and to maintain websites, Twitter feeds and so on. When I was out in Hull two or three weeks ago, people told me on the doorstep, “How good to see you. Hardly anyone ever comes round and asks us about our political attitudes”. I was glad that we were doing it there, but in quite a lot of constituencies, no parties really manage to do that actively. We know that it does not come for free and that maintaining a basic constituency organisation requires a level of funding. Voters complain vigorously when parties do not maintain contact with them but show no willingness to help pay for those activities.

That pushes us towards the question of donors. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, and other noble Lords asked whether all the political parties could manage on less money and depend more on volunteers—but we all face similar problems in how many volunteers we can attract. Perish the thought, but if UKIP had three or four really major donors, that might drive the three parties together to an eventual consensus on this issue.

We all know the context for this debate. The Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 introduced some important changes in the field of party funding. It established the Electoral Commission, about which the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, has rightly raised issues today and on previous occasions. It required political parties to register with the Electoral Commission, set down accounting requirements for parties, introduced controls on donations to parties and their members, and controlled campaign expenditure within certain periods, both for parties and third parties in national election campaigns. I stress “control periods” because I suspect that all three parties have spent a fair amount of money in the last four weeks. We are just about to start the control period for the election; that is part of the problem. The Act set down rules on the donations received and expenses incurred in election campaigns and required companies to obtain approval before making political donations. These provisions are useful and important. Political parties have to keep records of donations over £500, and donations over £7,500 have to be declared to the Electoral Commission, which publishes details every quarter of donations received by political parties. That information is published on its website and is accessible to all—so far, so good. Parties can only receive donations from permissible sources: individuals who are on the electoral register, UK-registered companies—I stress “registered” as that raises a number of questions of definition—trade unions, building societies and other bodies such as unincorporated associations and limited liability partnerships.

The Electoral Administration Act 2006 introduced further provisions on the disclosure of loans to political parties. Since these reforms, there have been continued public and media attacks on large donations and on trade union funding—to which I shall return—which have led to further reports. These include the 2004 review by the Electoral Commission, reports by Sir Hayden Phillips and the Constitutional Affairs Select Committee in 2006 and, most recently, in 2011, a report from the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which recommended, among other things, a £10,000 annual cap on donations, trade union members having to opt in to fees paid to political parties if donations are to be counted individually—I stress that was a proposal from the Committee on Standards in Public Life; it was not a partisan proposal by other political parties—and an increase in public funding.

The problem is in getting consensus among the political parties on this. We all have different interests and we all have different sources of donations. My party has proudly said on its website that when the Electoral Commission has published the number of donations to political parties, over the past three years we have received on several occasions more individual donations than the Labour Party. The problem is that we have not received half as many large corporate donations or donations from other collectivities known as trade unions, or indeed any other large donations—let alone those received by the Conservative Party. In that sense, it does us good as a democratic principle, but it does not provide us with the money we need to employ staff, work on our website and do all the other things that need to be done.

We had a further round of discussions in the light of the report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life which the Deputy Prime Minister convened in 2012-13. Seven meetings were held and the Deputy Prime Minister made one thing clear in setting out the remit, which was that in the current circumstances of a squeeze on public spending, there was no possibility of increasing state funding for political parties. After those discussions, the group failed to agree, and it is quite clear that between now and the next election we are not going to make any progress. Over the past 25 years we have established a whole set of additional funding for political parties—Short money, Cranborne money and the like—which has been very useful and has helped us to carry out our parliamentary functions and to raise the quality of our political research. However, public support for the expansion of political public funding is clearly absent at the present moment. So those talks broke down and we are stuck. We need to fund political parties and we benefit enormously from not having to pay for radio and television advertising, but politics and political campaigning cost money.

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, raised the question of the extent to which the harsh regulation that we all suffer, including under IPSA once you are elected, discourages political recruitment and political retention. I think that that is an enormous problem and we will all need to address it once the election is out of the way and we have seen many good MPs from all parties retire rather than continue. I think that the noble Lord and I would probably agree that some of the best of the new Conservative intake are retiring after one period in Parliament, regrettably, because they really do not want to put up with the situation in which they live. That is a loss to us all in terms of democratic politics as much as those retiring from other parties.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I have listened very carefully to the noble Lord. Is he suggesting that there will be discussions about reform of the regime? Has he heard something that we have not heard?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, for many of us, the world in its current form ends on 8 May 2015. If anyone here knows what the shape of the new Government will be, I would love them to tell me so that I can put down a large sum with the bookmakers and donate the winnings to my political party. I have no knowledge of that. What I am saying is that awkward people like the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, should insist, as soon as they come back, that it is put back on the agenda because it is a very important question and we cannot get away from it. I therefore encourage him to continue to stir on all of this.

I am not entirely sure that I agree with the noble Lord that trade unions act as virtuous collectivities, which I think is what he was saying, with benign general secretaries representing the enlightened interests of their diverse memberships. That is not quite how I see all the general secretaries of trade unions, so there are some questions around that.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the coalition Government have no policy on that, so I had better not comment. I think that that covers all the issues which have been raised. I encourage the noble Lords, Lord Campbell-Savours and Lord Dykes, to continue to press this. It is an issue to which we will all have to return after the next election.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

The Minister referred to my amendment on this question of foreign donations, over which, if I remember rightly, we defeated the Labour Government. He has given the Committee an explanation, although I did not raise the issue. Could we have a written explanation as to exactly why we have had difficulty in implementing that particular area of the law?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I will see what can be done in that respect and, if possible, I will write to the noble Lord.

Chilcot Inquiry

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, we are all indebted to the noble Lord, Lord Dykes, and welcome this opportunity to debate the timing of publication of the Chilcot report. It provides us with an opportunity to plead the case for a report that is comprehensive in content and fully exploits the inquiry’s original remit as set out by the Government.

Last week, on 25 June, I spoke on Iraq. I understand that my contribution was followed by an avalanche on the internet of vitriol, venom, accusation and language bordering on threat. It all followed an article in the Mail Online which, accompanied by a picture of me suitably clad in a provocative Peer’s robe, accurately reported half my contribution in which I had set out the position of those of us who had supported intervention in Iraq. What, sadly, the article did not reveal was that the thrust of my speech was to oppose further intervention and also to set out a strategy for us to pursue at the United Nations to deal with militant Islam.

I make no complaint. Indeed, in today's debate, I intend to go further and give those self-same critics a further dose of my thoughts in the context of Chilcot and further cause for them to express their anger by setting out another truth over the debate on Iraq—a truth that they conveniently ignore. It is a truth that I hope Chilcot draws on during the course of his inquiry.

In my view, the whole debate on Iraq has been dominated by ignorance of the background, misrepresentation of the facts and public attitudes to the conflict determined by totally inadequate reporting in the media. There are men and women today walking the streets of London, Paris, Washington, Amman and Istanbul who are the real criminals in the story of Iraq. There are hundreds if not thousands of them. They have built their fortunes on the back of sanctions-busting in breach of international law, but because they represented business and financial institutions, they have been left untouched. They have almost never been prosecuted because it was deemed not to be in the public interest in various countries concerned, while they have laughed all the way to their banks as politicians have taken the rap. It is they who are responsible for the war in Iraq and only they.

Blair and the nonsense of WMD divert us from the truth and if Chilcot fails to deal with their criminal activity he will, in my view, have failed. To establish the truth, we need to consider the Volcker report, a UN-sponsored report of 2005, which followed a detailed investigation over 18 months into allegations of bribery, corruption, illegal commission taking and the complete undermining of the Iraqi sanctions regime established under international law. Paul A Volcker, a former chairman of the Board of Governors of the United States Federal Reserve, led the inquiry that identified more than 2,000 cases of abuse and criminal activity. That report offers us a real insight into the scale of international criminal operations, which completely undermined the sanctions regime set in place to bring the Saddam Hussein regime to heel. But the western media gave the whole report a wide berth and scant attention as the story told was simply not sexy enough. The media needed someone to blame for what has turned out to be a qualified failure. I believe that Blair’s unfortunate and, in my view, wrong use of WMD in justification for the war gave them that person to blame.

As I explained last week, I, along with others, had repeatedly appealed to the powers that be in our visits to Washington for action on sanctions-busting. The Americans were just not interested and we could do nothing as they were calling the shots. I remember telling them that unless they acted military intervention to bring Saddam’s brutality to an end was inevitable. On one occasion I led an Anglo-American parliamentary group delegation to Washington and recall discussing sanctions-breaching with State Department officials. The noble Lord, Lord Howard of Rising, was there and he will remember what happened. In the critical years prior to the invasion I repeatedly raised in Parliament the issue of sanctions-busting and I understand that British civil servants had no more luck with the Americans than I did. I repeat: it was the failure to stop that criminal activity that made war inevitable. If the sanctions regime had been enforced, Saddam would have been contained.

In the many forums in which we made our case on the need to enforce the sanctions policy, particularly in the case of oil exports, we were able to draw on the extensive work that we had done in the early years of Saddam’s revenue-raising from illegal oil sales. In the 1990s, at a time when I was very closely following events in Iraq on an almost daily basis, I sent my former Commons researcher Jim Mahon to Iraq to investigate the scale of illicit oil trading with Turkey. He replied back at the time in the following words: “Trucks, bumper to bumper, in a line as far back as the eye could see, thousands of them, crossing the border into Turkey; some trucks just converted with large containers carrying oil on their backs”. It was the lack of monitoring of humanitarian imports under the UN sanctions regime, with the rake-off of commissions and Saddam’s oil revenues, that funded the whole machinery of Iraqi government and kept the upper echelons of Saddam’s murderous regime and republican guard in place.

With the failure to act on the sanctions-busters, I saw no alternatives to war, although I now believe that the war option failed for the reasons that I set out last week. I now look to Chilcot to establish the truth. At the time I challenged the Chilcot inquiry remit as being too limited. Nevertheless, they tell me that Chilcot is a wise old owl and if he deploys his wisdom, he should find a way of addressing the important issues that I am raising. Believe me, if Saddam’s revenues had been cut off, that regime would never have survived. There would have been no war in Iraq. Those who insist on attacking those of us who supported intervention as a last resort to end Saddam’s brutality would do well to consider the facts and ignore the media-generated stories that even some politicians have swallowed. I hope that Chilcot will do just that.

The irony in all this is that many of us who supported intervention in Iraq were totally opposed to intervention both in Afghanistan and Syria—unlike the Liberal Democrats. The noble Lord, Lord Dykes, mentioned the position of his party. His party supported the intervention in Afghanistan. I opposed it in Afghanistan and Syria. Perhaps on the next occasion it will be us who are on the streets of London, demonstrating for the enforcement of sanctions against the rogue regimes in an attempt to avoid some war in the future.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, that is precisely the sort of thing that the inquiry will be looking at. I do not know how far it will go into the question of the evasion of sanctions in the period running up to war. Neither do I know whether the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, gave evidence to the inquiry; that is something else that might be covered.

The noble Lord, Lord Morgan, raised some large constitutional questions, which of course will be there. When the report is published, we will dive into it and draw what conclusions we can. The parliamentary vote on Syria was itself partly a reflection of the sense in Parliament that the Government were not entirely to be trusted on some of these issues.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, evidence was given on the question of sanctions. It was given by Ann Clwyd MP.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I thank the noble Lord for that. I hope that the inquiry may have touched in some detail on that issue.

The noble Lord, Lord Morgan, said in a very strong way that we need to expose and bring to justice the guilty men. This—as Sir John Chilcot has said on a number of occasions—is not a judicial inquiry; it is a historical inquiry intended to get at the evidence as far as possible. The question of guilt is one which perhaps a number of other people, such as the noble Lord, may wish to push once they have the evidence in front of them.

I hope that I have covered most of the issues. It is ungenerous to say that Sir John Chilcot could have been bullied by the Cabinet Secretary. He and his team have been remarkably robust on this.

National Voter Registration Day

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Tuesday 1st July 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, online electoral registration was introduced four weeks ago. I have the figures only for the first week and we were extremely encouraged by how many people had registered. We hope that we will have the figures for the first month by next week. That is part of why we think that we have moved on from the Northern Ireland experience, in which electoral registration officers took paper forms into schools. We think that young people are much more likely to register online. The experience of 2010 suggests that the registration rate rises rapidly in the few months before a general election. It rose by 700,000 in early 2010. We expect that to happen again.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, is it not a simple truth that electoral registration is a waste of public and taxpayers’ money, and that we should have dedicated expenditure to the areas where there was an abuse of the electoral system?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am not entirely sure that I understand that. There are a number of problems with electoral registration. We have various categories of voters, including the substantial number of people in London who are citizens of the European Union but not of the UK. I have been very impressed by the sheer difficulty of getting access to some of the dwellings that are now behind gated communities, so we must spread our effort into them. Of course we are focusing on the vulnerable categories, with which we are well familiar.

House of Lords: Labour Peers’ Working Group Report

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Thursday 19th June 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stephen (LD)]

My Lords, when I first came to this Chamber I expected quite quickly, as I hoped, to vote for and deliver radical reform of the House of Lords, and now I wonder. I thought that in voting for that radical reform I would have the support of the Labour Party, and now I wonder.

The Labour Party has a pretty reasonable track record in some areas of constitutional reform but a less dynamic record in others. In 1999, there was a good year with the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and the introduction of PR for the European elections, but in 2007 I fought an election campaign in Scotland where Labour said, “This far but no further”. If a different, more flexible approach had been taken in that election, I wonder whether we would have ended up where we are just now in terms of the future of the United Kingdom. These issues are really important, as is the view of the Labour Party. With a bit of encouragement, Labour did deliver PR for local government in Scotland, which was a very good thing.

This report, however, is not at the leading edge of Labour’s radical thinking. Its tenor is also as though little or no thinking about reforming your Lordships’ House had taken place in the past 15 years or so and as though the suggested convention would be able to reveal new answers which the nine cross-party committees and commissions that have examined this issue since 1999 have been unable to proffer. The noble Lord, Lord Richard, quoted from the 2010 Labour Party manifesto. I will not repeat that, but one can go back as far as 1992, when the party committed to a package of reforms,

“leading to the replacement of the House of Lords with a new elected Second Chamber”.

In 1997, it promised to,

“make the House of Lords more democratic and representative”.

In 2001, it said:

“We are committed to completing House of Lords reform, including removal of the remaining hereditary peers, to make it more representative and democratic”.

In 2005, it said:

“In our next term we will complete the reform of the House of Lords so that it is a modern and effective revising Chamber”.

Labour won that election, so there was a next term.

Surely the Labour Party’s policy forum, when it comes to consider this issue, will not be fooled by this prospectus of yet more navel-gazing around a committee table. Surely this is not the Labour way; either Labour is committed to democracy or it is not. If it reneges on that commitment now, it will be abandoning a very long history of manifesto pledges with a long tradition within the party, as if the noble Lord, Lord Kinnock, along with Smith, Blair and Brown, have all been ditched for some pretty soft and flexible wording about a convention.

If this House is to be reformed so that it is electors and not party leaders who put people here, then there is little alternative better than the 2012 Bill. It was developed over a decade, with its key principle of retaining always a more powerful mandate in the Commons than in this House, while ensuring that this place had real democratic legitimacy. The architecture of the Bill was based almost brick for brick on that suggested by Jack Straw in his White Paper in 2008. That presumably is one reason why an overwhelming majority of Labour MPs—more than 200 of them—voted in support of the Government’s Bill in 2012. Despite their reservations, it also attracted a more than two to one majority of the elected Members of Parliament from the Conservative Party in the House of Commons. All Liberal Democrat MPs supported it. What is so astonishing is that with that huge mandate, Peers at this end were threatening to torpedo the Bill with blocking tactics, while expressing their deep concern for the vital primacy of the House of Commons.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

If that is the case, why did Clegg agree for the Bill to be withdrawn? Why did he not insist within the coalition on that Bill being brought forward to this House?

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[Baroness Northover]

My Lords, I will let the noble Lord continue, but I remind the House that noble Lords who have signed up for this all have an opportunity to put their case. They should therefore be chary of eating into the time of other people.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

It is a debate.

[Baroness Northover]

Noble Lords will have their time. I will let the noble Lord continue his point, but I point out that noble Lords will have their opportunities later on to make the case that they wish to make and that they should be chary of eating into other people’s time.

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[Lord Dubs]

I thought that we were against the death penalty, but it is an interesting suggestion.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Says the Minister!

[Lord Dubs]

Well, he is a Lib Dem. Anyway, I genuinely believe that the House will become unmanageable if it goes on being made larger and larger. We have to find some way to control its size. That is why we on the working group looked at a retirement age of 80, coupled with people who do not play their part in this House no longer being Members. Those two things have to go together. I still think, even if I have to fall on my own sword, that that is at least one option for reducing the size of the House.

My noble friend mentioned that all First Readings of Bills should be in the Commons, even if half the Second Readings then come here. That would ensure that the Parliament Act would bite on all legislation. As for giving only a delaying power for orders or statutory instruments, that seems sensible. All of us when in opposition have wrestled with disliking an order and not wishing, as an unelected House, to actually kill it; we have all had that difficulty. So a three-month delay period would be sensible.

As for reviewing the role of the Lord Speaker, although this is not a debate about that important role, the way in which Questions work in this House means that those who are more pushy—I hate to call my fellow Peers bullies, but those who act like bullies—push out other noble Lords in getting supplementary questions. That is not satisfactory, and we know that it does not work. We know that some of us are reluctant to push in with supplementaries simply for that reason.

I noted what the right reverend Prelate said about robes. His argument would be that we should wear them all the time—heaven forbid. The problem, as my noble friend said, is that whenever there is a photograph of Members of this House, we are always wearing those robes and we look totally out of date for modern times. Frankly, it is just not a sensible way forward. I should like to add to that the suggestion that we get rid of titles. If one is introduced or if one introduces oneself with a title, the other person—if they are a normal human being—looks at us as if we are complete nerds, or they become entirely deferential. Neither is a sensible way to have a rapport with anybody. It stands in the way of our dealing and engaging with ordinary people.

I put forward one suggestion before without getting much acclaim, which was that anyone who wants to stay in this House should drop the title and, if they want to keep the title, they should retire for good. That would sort out those who say that they keep their titles only because their wives demand it, which I have heard on more than one occasion.

I support the idea of a constitutional commission, provided that it is not a long-grass job and that there is a time limit, because there are too many difficult issues that need to be resolved. I wanted the report to steer the constitutional commission towards working out how best to achieve an elected second Chamber, but I was dissuaded from that by my noble friend on the very sensible grounds that, if we tell a constitutional convention or commission what it should do, it will hardly be able to do its job properly. We would simply be ordering what should happen.

Yes, many hereditary Peers make a fantastic contribution to this House, but I think that the time for having them is over.

I shall just tiptoe on thin ice on the subject of Bishops. I believe that many of them make an enormously useful contribution to this House, but they do it because of the individuals they are. If Bishops are to continue to sit in this House, I should like them to be appointed or elected to it in the same way as everyone else.

I fear that my next comment will offend the right reverend Prelate. He criticised lobbyists. That is fair enough. However, I fear that I shall make a lot of enemies by saying that the only paid lobbyists in this House are the Bishops. That is an anomaly.

Voting: Young People

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are looking at the Northern Ireland Schools initiative that took electoral registration officers and others into schools, with forms, and that is one of the things that we will need to consider. We are also talking with teachers from the Association for Citizenship Teaching and others about how to energise students in schools and in further education colleges, to make sure that they are reminded that they have the opportunity and the duty to register to vote.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, is not underregistration among young people only a symptom of the disconnect between the politicians and the people? Does not the sight of a Cabinet Minister hanging on when she should go only aggravate that condition and that disconnect?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the noble Lord is absolutely right. We all know that there is a broader and long-term problem, which did not arise simply with this Government, of popular alienation from politics, and a sense that national politics and Westminster have little to do with the lives of young people in particular. All of us here and in the other place have a shared interest in combating that, rebuilding trust in politics, and regaining a sense of shared citizenship and political values. The Government cannot do that on their own.

Intelligence and Security Committee

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Tuesday 4th March 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am conscious that for some time the only Member of this House on the Intelligence and Security Committee was indeed the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, and then it expanded to two. There is no reference in the Justice and Security Act to the division of the current nine members between the two Houses. Noble Lords will be aware that yesterday Yvette Cooper made a speech on further reforms and that this morning the Deputy Prime Minister made a speech in which he suggested that we should move from the current nine members to a future membership of 11, as with other Select Committees. However, he made no specific reference to the division between the two Houses.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

Would not greater accountability to the ISC and Parliament be provided if the chairman of the ISC was given unrestricted access to all operational material in the agencies, with the safeguard that, where such information exceeds what is currently permissible within the law, it is provided to the wider membership of the ISC committee by the chairman only with the permission of the agency chiefs concerned? That would really increase accountability to Parliament.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, there were a number of questions about increasing the capacity of the committee. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, as on previous occasions, mentioned the thinness of the staff assisting the committee. That is now being strengthened. In both Ms Cooper’s speech yesterday and the Deputy Prime Minister’s speech this morning, the suggestion was made to strengthen further the size and capabilities of the staff. The question of whether the chair should be drawn from the governing party or one of the opposition parties is also out there in the open. There is nothing in the Act that says whether the chair of the committee should be a member of one party or another.

Electoral Fraud

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Thursday 6th February 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, is it not interesting to note in the detail of the report that the Electoral Commission is finally prepared to recognise that there are high-risk areas, which it identifies and lists, which are identifiable as having ethnic minority populations, where it believes that there is a particular problem? Is it not true that if the commission had been prepared to admit that four years ago, when the legislation was introduced, we could have avoided spending tens of millions of pounds on an individual registration scheme, which is a total waste of public money, and could have targeted that resource on the areas where there is a particular problem? We are wasting public money on a scheme which is utterly ridiculous.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I entirely disagree with the noble Lord on that. We are one of the few democracies that clings to the 19th century approach of household registration. Individual electoral registration is much more appropriate to the population we now have.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I am well aware of this; indeed, the noble Lord has made sure that I am well aware of it. I am conscious that the Cabinet Office owes him a letter, which is in process, in reply to his previous Question.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, does the Minister accept that this whole debate is riddled with political correctness? For the great majority in the United Kingdom, there is no problem whatever of electoral fraud. Why are we wasting tens of millions of pounds?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I am not quite as confident that there is no problem of electoral fraud outside the South Asian Muslim community, which I think the noble Lord was getting close to saying. As a young Liberal, I listened to many people talking about quite considerable electoral fraud among the white population during elections held in the 1940s and 1950s. I am not entirely sure that it has completely disappeared today.

Internet: Copycat Websites

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Thursday 21st November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I spent some time on Tuesday afternoon looking at some of these sites. I confirm I had not realised—no doubt a number of noble Lords have not realised—that the first two or three sites to come up on the list are sponsored ads, which is indicated in very, very small print. In all cases, the top site of the non-sponsored ads was the gov.uk website. I also checked a number of the sponsored ads, which are extremely well designed. They all say that they are not an official website, but it is quite easy if you are in a hurry to miss that paragraph. Perhaps I should add that Transport for London also suffers from this if you are paying your congestion charge. I suspect that one or two noble Lords have paid more than they should for their congestion charge on one or two occasions.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, if that be the case, what can the Government do about it?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the Government could pay, as the noble Lord, Lord Brabazon, suggested, which perhaps would drive up the cost of sponsored ads—or perhaps they could intervene and forbid search engines from carrying sponsored ads in that place. I think that we would be hesitant to do that. The Government are in constant dialogue with Google. We look at these sites and check on the number of complaints—and after agreement with Google a number of these sites have been removed. The subtle design of them clearly is improving.

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

Lord Campbell-Savours Excerpts

Tuesday 5th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Martin of Springburn (CB)]

My Lords, I know that the noble Lord put this amendment down in good faith. I can see the negative aspect of consulting with the Speaker and the Lord Speaker. First, the legislation states that the person who shall appoint the registrar is the Minister, not the Speakers of both Houses. There is an old saying that if you hire the person, the unpleasant task of firing them is also yours. Things would need to get very serious indeed for a Minister to find that the registrar was so unfit that he or she would have to be removed.

There is a danger, which has happened with other appointees to the House, where the individual concerned could appear on the face of it to have a good personality and to be a likeable person; they strike up a rapport with the media and use the media against the authority that has decided to remove them. It is easy for the media to indulge in a good person/bad person scenario.

I think that the question that the media would ask is: have the Speaker of the House of Commons and the Speaker of the House of Lords been consulted? The Minister might find it quite easy to say, “Yes, they have been consulted”. If dismissal is to take place, it goes without saying that the Speakers of both Houses have agreed with that proposition. If the responsibility is given to the Minister via the Bill, any difficulties should be left at the Minister’s door.

I think that the parliamentary commissioner, whom we have for both Houses, is appointed for either four or five years nonrenewable. That is a satisfactory way to deal with the matter: the registrar gets a five-year nonrenewable appointment—I know that that is not what the amendment provides. Then, when there is a parting of the ways, there are no hard feelings, whereas the Bill talks about a third renewed appointment. I have not looked fully into the responsibilities of the registrar, but I know about the parliamentary commissioner. If the third reappointment is not given, it would be considered a slur on the incumbent.

I understand that in the 1950s and prior to that, no one bothered the Speaker or the Lord Chancellor—they did not have a Lord Speaker. In recent years, the Speaker has been attacked for many reasons, and he or she is an easy target because the rule for a Speaker is that you do not respond to a press attack. That makes him or her a very easy target. I would be happier if the Minister who made the appointment made the decision. It would take a genius of a registrar to get things so badly wrong as to get him or herself sacked. In such a controversial situation, we should leave both high offices out of the legislation.

[Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)]

My Lords, in a sentence, I oppose the amendment. The registrar is not an officer of Parliament. If the registrar had been an officer of Parliament, I would be in favour of the amendment.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I recognise that this amendment, like some of those we were discussing in the previous group, is concerned with reinforcing the independence of the registrar in appointment, accountability to parliamentary committees and obstacles to what might be challengeable dismissal. Let me reassure noble Lords that the Government are committed to ensuring the independence of the registrar. The registrar’s ability to operate independently is clearly essential for the successful operation of the register.

The amendment specifically concerns potential dismissal. The Government are confident that the provisions as drafted will assure the independence of the registrar without those reinforcements. We will, however, continue to listen to and explore all suggestions for reiterating and firmly establishing that independence. Having given that assurance, I urge the noble Lord to withdraw the amendment.

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[Lord Norton of Louth (Con)]

My Lords, my Amendment 115 is in this group. From my point of view, it is the core amendment in terms of shifting the emphasis of the Bill. As I have drafted it, the clause is designed to be integrated in the Bill, but essentially it seeks to advance an alternative to what the Government propose. If the Government insist on the current provisions of the Bill then, as today has increasingly shown, it will achieve little by way of making lobbying of Government transparent; if anything, we are establishing that it may serve to obscure rather than enlighten.

As we have heard, the focus of Part 1 as it stands is on those who lobby. As I argued at Second Reading, a more comprehensive approach, achieving transparency without the need for a clunky bureaucratic framework, is to focus on those who are lobbied. That would shift the emphasis far more to the actual activity. My amendment is designed to give effect to what I argued at Second Reading.

If one placed a statutory requirement on Ministers when making statements of the sort enumerated in Clause 3 to publish at the same time details of those who lobbied them on the matter, that would ensure that the public were aware of all those who had lobbied the department. I stress the department because the amendment encompasses civil servants, special advisers and PPSs. Any representations made to anyone in the department would be shown. It would not matter who the lobbyists were: full-time independent lobbyists, in-house lobbyists, part-time lobbyists or individuals making representations on that particular issue—all would be caught. We would thus have true, comprehensive transparency. That is the key point, and it is important that we establish the principle.

I know what the Government’s response will be because the Minister kindly replied to my amendment earlier, before I had spoken to it. It is clear what the Government’s position is: “We believe in transparency as long as it’s not too much trouble”. That is essentially what was advanced. Yet we have already heard today a fair amount of material that suggests that it is doable. My noble friend Lord Tyler has made a powerful case for a database and has explained how it could be done—it is manageable. My amendment would take us somewhat further than that in terms of the amount of information that would be produced, and perhaps the time when it was produced because it would be drawn together at a particular point, but, as my noble friend has demonstrated, putting that material together is not that difficult.

At Second Reading I made the case, and I will revert to it, about what Select Committees do. The Minister was saying, “When a Minister brings forward a Bill, good heavens, he might receive lots of representations. If he had to produce and publish those, my goodness, the workload would be horrendous. How could it be achievable?”. Well, what would happen if a Select Committee received lots of representation, perhaps in three figures, when it was conducting an inquiry, and then when it was doing its report actually had to list those who had made representations and then publish the evidence? Oh, my goodness—it already does. Select Committees manage that sort of exercise on very lean resources, so the Government should be able to undertake a similar exercise with the resources at their disposal. As my noble friend Lord Tyler has indicated, it is no longer a case of putting together lots of papers from different sources; much can be done electronically, such as recording meetings for the database and publishing Ministers’ diaries the day after the event, so we are already getting there. That is not the obstacle that the Minister was suggesting, so it is not really credible now to argue that it is not doable; it is.

The problem is not the practicality but the political will. If the political will were there to achieve it then it could be done, and it would achieve the Government’s stated aim in a way that Part 1 simply does not do. As it is drafted, it would not achieve a great deal at all; it would create a burden of bureaucracy that would not add much by way of transparency. If we believe in the transparency of lobbying—in other words, if we actually want to give effect to the first words of the Short Title—then this is the route to go. I look forward to the Minister’s second response.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I support wholeheartedly the amendment spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, although I have slight reservations as it is debatable whether PPSs should be included.

I shall speak to Amendments 68 and 69, which stand in my name in this group. Amendment 68 is to press Ministers on whether they feel the Bill adequately covers the possibility that lobbyists may, for whatever reason, seek to hide the name of the recipient of the payment. There is a reference in Schedule 1, Part 2 to the beneficiaries of payments, but I do not think it is absolutely clear what the intention is there. A person lobbying may be acting on behalf of another whose identity as a lobbyist is not to be revealed, but where the person whose name or company name is not to be revealed is the recipient of the financial consideration. There may be circumstances where a lobbyist has been subcontracted by another lobbyist to carry out work where the subcontractor has an expertise which the main contractor lacks, but where the main contractor does not wish to lose their client account due to a lack of expertise. There may be circumstances where a lobbyist subcontracts the work for a particular client to avoid revealing to another client that the main contractor lobbyist has other clients in the same commercial sector. There may be circumstances where a lobbyist hires a subcontractor for Client A to avoid revealing to his or her client that he is also representing Client B, whose interests are diametrically opposed. These are but a few scenarios that could include the avoidance of registrar penalties, potential disqualification as a registered person or even matters relating to liability to the Inland Revenue.

Amendment 69 brings us to the heart of the legislation. It dominated debate in the Commons. It would require the name of the person lobbied and the subject of the lobbying, which we have been dealing with extensively this evening. It follows broadly the case made by Graham Allen MP, chair of Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, in his Amendment 100 during Report stage in the Commons. His committee had recommended:

“The information that the registrar requires to be listed should be expanded to include the subject matter and purpose of the lobbying, when this is not already clear from a company’s name. To be clear, this should not involve the disclosure of detailed information about the content of the meeting—just a broad outline of the subject matter and the intended outcome”.

The Government’s response to that recommendation is just not credible. It talks of the availability of information, which I raised on an earlier amendment on ministerial diaries. We know that that system does not work because it is a congested system. The truth is that we have a huge gap in transparency and, sadly, the Government are doing very little to bridge it. The register is useless if all it does is list a few names that are already on the lists of the professional bodies. We need real hard information on who is lobbying, when they lobby, on what issue and on whose account.

[Lord Aberdare (CB)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 115, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Norton. If the Government are not willing to go for a comprehensive register covering a wider range of lobbyists and those who are lobbied than currently envisaged, this seems a much simpler and more sensible approach that will be cheaper for the public purse and for the relatively small number of consultancy companies that would otherwise have to bear the not-insignificant costs of the registration system.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I will certainly take it away, and I am very happy to do so.

An amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, would alter Clause 4 to require lobbyists to disclose the recipient of the payment for lobbying and the focus and subject of lobbying activity. The Opposition’s further amendments would require that lobbyists disclose the approximate value of spending on lobbying activity during a quarter. I suppose that I should welcome the pressure that is coming across the room for even greater transparency than we propose in the Bill; that is a splendid step forward. Under the previous Government there was some considerable resistance to this level of transparency.

We have been very clear that the objective of the register is limited, in our view, to the identification of the interests that are represented by consultant lobbying firms. Consultant lobbyists should therefore be required to disclose their clients. We are not yet persuaded that the burden that would be imposed on both the industry and the regulator of requiring further information—for example, spending and financial data—is justified by the limited insight it will provide. That sounds to me like something else we may discuss in the Corridors. However, we are not yet persuaded that that provides a proportionate approach to the problem identified. It is not necessary to require the disclosure of the subject or target due to the Government’s transparency regime, whereby Ministers’ and Permanent Secretaries’ meetings with external organisations are already declared.

I compliment the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, on the detail and care with which he has prepared a large number of amendments. His new clause proposed in Amendment 81 would establish a second register—the register of lobbying activities, as he has explained—which would run in parallel to the register of lobbyists. He has tabled a number of consequential amendments with that. The register would record information both from lobbyists and from public officials in receipt of lobbying communications.

The Government are not persuaded that a register of lobbying activities is necessary, nor do we think it necessary to require that both the maker and the recipient of a lobbying communication submit a report on that activity. The noble and learned Lord’s register would duplicate existing information—that provided in government transparency reporting—and the information requirements of the register appear to duplicate each other: both the lobbyist and the recipient of the lobbying would have to report any interaction. Even the American system does not come close to imposing such onerous requirements on industry and public officials. The administrative cost of complying with such a scheme would be high, both for industry and for public bodies. The cost of regulating it could be ever more expensive—costs which would surely fall either on the industry or the public purse.

Amendment 112, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, would provide that the subscription charge be set as a percentage of the lobbyist’s turnover. The noble Lord does not specify at what percentage the charge should be set and instead provides that the level could be set in regulations. As outlined in our impact assessment, we anticipate that the charge will be approximately £650. That figure should not prove too burdensome on any organisations that undertake professional consultant lobbying. Indeed, it compares favourably with the fee charged by the host of the industry’s voluntary register. The fee will be set to recover the full costs of the registrar’s activities—including those in relation to enforcement—and will ensure that the register is not funded by public money.

The noble Lord may be concerned that such a charge should be minimised for the smallest businesses. However, as I commented earlier, the VAT exemption is intended to exempt the smallest businesses from the requirement to register.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

Does the Minister accept that, if the charge is going to be £650, some companies may well simply deregister and the professional lobbyists’ lists may no longer exist? In so far as those lists have more information than what is currently provided by the Bill, would that be helpful to the issue of transparency?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I think that that is unlikely, but this is obviously something on which we should perhaps consult informally with the industry, to see whether there are any serious concerns. I am not aware that there are and, as I have said, the current voluntary register is in the same league but slightly more expensive.

Amendment 113, from the Opposition, would amend the reference to the setting of the subscription charge from one that requires the Minister to seek to recover the full costs to one that would require the Minister to ensure that the charge is set so as to recover the full costs of the registrar’s activities. I recognise that it is intended to emphasise the importance of ensuring that the charge recoups completely the cost of the register, but assure the Opposition that the Government are very well aware of the importance of ensuring that the register is fully funded by the industry.

We expect that the register will cost around £200,000 a year to run and that that cost will be borne not by the taxpayer but by the lobbying industry. The register that the Opposition have suggested would cost a great deal more—possibly nearer the £3 million that it costs to operate the Canadian register. Perhaps they would like to consider how they would ensure that those costs were recovered from the much larger number of individuals and organisations that they intend to capture.

The Opposition’s Amendment 114A would remove subsection (2) from Clause 24, thereby affecting the regulation-making powers under that part. The Joint Committee on Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform has recently published a very thorough and thoughtful report on the delegated powers included in the Bill. The Government are giving the committee’s recommendations careful consideration and will respond formally shortly.

I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Norton, that I responded to his Amendment 115 before he had spoken to it. Rather too many meetings over the past day left me less well organised than ideally I should have been. I took him down as saying that the Government believe in transparency but not too far. I would say that the Government believe in transparency, but want to be proportionate in our approach. I fear that some of the amendments that have been floated today have suggested that we move from a situation of extremely moderate transparency to one in which there will be a very burdensome set of regulations, which would go further than we need to at this time.

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Moved by

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

72: Clause 4, page 3, line 31, at end insert—
“( ) A person, company or partnership (including a limited liability partnership) listed on the register of consultant lobbyists shall not in any communication issued use the image of the portcullis or any other image representing Parliament.”

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, this amendment is about the use of the portcullis. This is an issue that concentrated the minds of Members of the House of Commons Select Committee who considered the issue of lobbying during the 1980s, nearly 30 years ago. That inquiry followed the previous inquiries of 1969 and 1974 by the Select Committee on Members’ Interests (Declaration). At that time in the 1980s, we had been considering a register for those in the industry who had access to Parliament, not government. In an attempt to think through the consequences of adopting such a register, we visited Canada, a country that at the time had only recently introduced a system that included registering lobbying activity, thereby going further than the Government’s current proposals.

What quickly became obvious to us during the course of our inquiry and from what we learnt in Canada was that many in the lobbying industry saw registered access to Parliament as a marketing tool. As Sir Trevor Lloyd-Hughes, a leading influence in the industry at the time, said in his evidence:

“Some of the PR people may announce claims in their glossy brochures of all kinds of entrée to the House of Commons and their ability to do this and that and the other, which I think are almost against the fair trading description legislation”.

He went on to say that he did not do that himself, although he added:

“If you are in business, surely you are entitled to say, we can do this and in my case as quite a few of you know I have been here since 1949. I say I have got experience and contacts. I have. It is true”.

Now I recognise that we are not talking here about Parliament but about government. However, there is an element of overlap. The moment that an organisation receives registration approval, that approval will bring with it an element of public recognition. The assumption will be made, particularly abroad, that a code exists and standards are being met. For many, government and Parliament will be indistinguishable. They will be regarded as the same, perhaps even by some here at home. I am in my amendment simply seeking, in the absence of a proper code of conduct, to lay down a requirement that at least the portcullis, a symbol of Parliament, is not used to promote a particular lobbying operation or organisation.

As Gavin Devine, chief executive of MHP Communications, said in his evidence to the House of Commons Political and Constitutional Reform Committee during its inquiry:

“There is a real danger that a register by itself may make the situation worse, since it is likely those on the register will describe themselves as a ‘registered’ or ‘approved’ lobbyists, without having to meet at least some minimum standards. In short, there is a risk that the register will give a kitemark or endorsement to some who do not deserve it”.

Again I say that I recognise that Parliament is tangential to the Bill. Nevertheless, we need to make it clear in the Bill that we will not tolerate the use of the portcullis as a marketing tool in what, in effect, is to be an unregulated marketplace. I beg to move.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, I shall speak to my Amendment 73 but, before doing so, I wish to say that I fully endorse the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, in relation to Amendment 72. He may recall that one particular Member of Parliament decided to publish a book—an act of fiction—on the front cover of which was the portcullis. It was clearly there to try to give the impression that the book was authorised by the House. The Member would not listen but the publisher did, to the extent that the royal crown—I think it was the prince’s crown—was taken off the second edition, although the portcullis gate was left on. That, at least, was something. It is right and fitting that the portcullis should be the symbol of both our Houses and not of any individual organisation.

Turning to Amendment 73, I recall the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, saying in an earlier debate that you have to know whom you are dealing with. That has to be clear. Those who hold press cards in the House of Commons are very well looked after, but it is the taxpayer, not their newspaper, who provides them with a desk and facilities. In fact, I believe that some journalists do not even have a place to hang their hat at their newspaper’s head office. I recall that only about five years ago the health and safety situation here was so bad for journalists—some of the senior reporters were using portakabins—that it was put to me that it was time we did something. Both Houses paid a share of £8 million to refurbish the Press Gallery. We even opened a restaurant, which is named after a highly respected journalist called Chris Moncrieff—it is called Moncrieff’s bar. We did all that and it is lovely. I was there to officiate at the opening, and so was Chris Moncrieff. I said, “It’s not bad that two teetotallers have opened up a drinking place”.

There was not one bad piece of publicity about that £8 million but nor was there one good piece of publicity about it. Nothing was said about it. Even now, I get very angry when I read pieces by journalists who are taking cheap shots. I also hear them doing it on Sky News. They say, “Oh, they’re getting subsidised drink”, but they do not tell you that they are partaking of the subsidised food and drink.

That brings me to my concern, which is dual membership. You have to know whom you are dealing with. I could be in one of the cafeterias here having a cup of tea or whatever and bump into someone who I think is a journalist. If we enter into a discussion, I know whom I am dealing with. However, it would not do if the journalist were both a journalist and a lobbyist. You might ask whether that is possible. It is. Some people in the Press Gallery have been there for years and years, and they are entitled to be there, but sometimes their newspaper will say, “We’re sorry but you’re no longer required. You’re redundant”. That must have happened to the boys on the News of the World and there are others in that category. Some of them get to like this place so much that they will go to a regional newspaper or a publication and say, “I will be your reporter”. That would allow them to retain their press status, although not the salary.

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[Lord Gardiner of Kimble (Con)]

My Lords, first I thank the noble Lord for initiating what has been an interesting debate. I entirely agree with the noble Lord that parliamentary images should not be used inappropriately. At present the use of the Crowned Portcullis is governed by the following statement:

“The principal emblem of the House is the Crowned Portcullis. It is a royal badge and its use by the House has been formally authorised by licence granted by Her Majesty the Queen. The designs and symbols of the House should not be used for purposes to which such authentication is inappropriate, or where there is a risk that their use might wrongly be regarded, or represented, as having the authority of the House. The House symbol is primarily used to authenticate communications from Members”.

It is clear that the use of parliamentary images is the prerogative of the House authorities, and for that reason the Government do not wish to intrude on the existing arrangements, although I understand entirely the point that the noble Lord is making.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, is the Minister saying that the House is in a position to enforce an arrangement whereby the symbol is not used?

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

My understanding is that, if someone was wrongly using the emblem, following this statement, they would certainly be taken to task for using it inappropriately.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I am sorry, but that does not answer my question. Can the authorities enforce the non-use of it? If the Minister does not know, I understand that, and I am sure that he will find out. However, if the authorities do not have the power to enforce it, my amendment stands.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

I think it is important to get chapter and verse for the noble Lord and, indeed, for myself, because I would not want to mislead him in any way. That is the reason the Government, having thought about this particular point, felt that the House authorities should have continued to have the prerogative.

I turn now to the amendment spoken to by the noble Lord, Lord Martin. Again, it is designed to address the problem he has identified in relation to accredited parliamentary lobby journalists, specifically that some are acting as lobbyists and/or are servicing all-party groups. As my noble friend Lord Younger of Leckie observed in his letter to the noble Lord following his intervention in the debate on Second Reading, matters relating to the conduct of accredited lobby journalists and to the administration of all-party groups are the prerogative of the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. I understand, however, that a core requirement of many of the voluntary codes of conduct that lobbyists currently already sign up to require that they do not hold parliamentary passes.

I also understand that, pursuant to a resolution of the other place, holders of photo-identity passes as lobby journalists accredited to the Parliamentary Press Gallery or for parliamentary broadcasting are required to declare relevant interests on the register of journalists’ interests. That register is compiled and maintained by the Office of the Parliamentary Commissioner for Standards. The commissioner also has responsibility for the rules governing all-party groups and hosts the register of groups recognised by Parliament, who their officers are, and information about the source and extent of financial and material assistance received by groups from outside Parliament.

Given the oversight of these matters by the House authorities, I suggest that it would not be appropriate for the Government to legislate quite in the manner that the noble Lord has presented in his well meaning amendment. However, I will consider the points made by both noble Lords on their amendments and I shall certainly clarify the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours. In the circumstances I have outlined, I hope that he will feel able to withdraw his amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

The point is that my noble friend’s amendment would require that they could not do both—they could do only one. The Minister is saying that they can do both as long as they register it. He is not answering the point in my noble friend’s amendment. The answer is, “No, we are not prepared to legislate, we are prepared to carry on allowing journalists to act as lobbyists as well, as long as they register it”. That is not my answer but it is the Minister’s answer and he should be blunt at the Dispatch Box and spell it out in that form.

[Lord Gardiner of Kimble]

The prudent thing to do is to reflect on what both noble Lords have said. I will come back to them.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

That sounds good to me.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I do not want to delay the House. I think I heard the Minister say that he was going to consider our amendments. In that light, I beg leave to withdraw.

Amendment 72 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

88: Clause 6, page 4 , line 27, at end insert—
“( ) If the Registrar has reasonable grounds for believing that a registered person is not (or is no longer) fit to act as a consultant lobbyist, the Registrar may decide that the registered persons shall be removed from the register.”

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 88, I will also speak to Amendment 90. The Bill as it stands sets out a series of offences under Clause 12. The offences include “inaccurate or incomplete” registration and failing,

“to submit an information return under section 5”.

The Bill then goes on to propose penalties in the form of fines. What the Bill does not do at this stage is set out the arrangements for removal from the register, which is what my amendment is intended to deal with. Under the heading “Guidance”, Clause 21 states:

“The Registrar may give guidance about how the Registrar proposes to exercise the functions under this Part”.

Under Clause 21(2)(c), it is proposed that the guidance may indicate,

“the circumstances in which the Registrar would … remove a person’s entry from the register”.

My amendment flags up what I believe these circumstances should be.

The first circumstance is bringing Parliament into disrepute. I recognise that the professional associations have their own codes of conduct, but their codes are not written by Parliament—they are written by their legal advisers and approved, I presume, by their members. Parliament, in conditions of a statutory register, although not included in the Bill, needs to seek protection against being itself brought into disrepute through the actions of lobbyists who are not subject to a code. We will all be aware of the well documented and publicised scandals of recent years and that a small minority of lobbyists can abuse their relationships with Members of Parliament. The same applies with civil servants: if a lobbying operation is found to have compromised the integrity or independence of a civil servant, it is not just the civil servant who is necessarily at fault; a heavy burden of blame inevitably falls on the lobbyist. We need to be sure that the lobbyist concerned loses his or her official seal of approval, which is effectively what registration provides.

As to the wider issue of offences under Clause 12, there can be no circumstances in which a lobbyist who commits an offence under this clause should be allowed to remain on the register. We need more than guidance at this stage. We need to place firmly and clearly in the Bill our view as Parliament on what the circumstances for deregistration are. I beg to move.

[Lord Hardie]

My Lords, Amendments 89, 103, 109 and 110 stand in my name. Amendment 89 is concerned with Clause 6. Your Lordships will note that Clause 6 empowers the registrar to do a number of things, including, under Clause 6(6)(b), to decide whether a person’s entry should be removed from the register:

“If the Registrar has reasonable grounds for believing that a registered person is not (or is no longer) a consultant lobbyist”.

It is important to bear in mind that under Clause 1, a person cannot be in business as a consultant lobbyist unless he or she is registered. The decision of the registrar to remove someone from the register effectively stops that individual from operating in business. As far as I can see, there is no right of appeal against the decision of the registrar, which seems fundamentally unjust. Anyone who is aggrieved by a decision to remove him or her from the register ought to have a right of appeal to the tribunal, and that is what this amendment seeks to do.

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

I did not want to tie the Order Paper down with a very long amendment but if I had done more homework I would have introduced an element of appeal. I was simply floating the principle and I am sure that, were the Government to accept it, an appeal procedure would be introduced into the Bill.

[Lord Hardie]

I take the noble Lord’s point. I am not criticising his amendment; I am criticising the Bill. The Bill does not contain any right of appeal. My Amendment 89 introduces such a right for someone who is aggrieved by the registrar’s decision.

Not only does the Bill deprive someone of the right to a livelihood, perhaps, but Clause 12 creates an offence: it is a criminal offence to lobby if you are not on the register. Not only do you deprive someone of their livelihood but you subject them to the possibility of criminal proceedings and a fine. Clearly there ought to be a right of appeal. There is a tribunal in existence so there is no difficulty about that.

I have already referred to Amendment 103, which creates similar offences in relation to the register of lobbying activities, so I will say no more about that.

Amendment 109 relates to Clause 16, which concerns the ability of the registrar to impose civil penalties. The level of the penalty is fixed at £7,500. I have suggested that that should be reduced to £5,000. The civil penalty is an alternative to prosecution and, if you are prosecuted, the maximum summary fine in Scotland is £5,000 so I do not understand why the civil penalty is half as much again. There may be a reason for that; if there is, I would like the Minister to tell me; if there is not, there should be equivalence of penalties.

My final amendment is Amendment 110. It relates to Clause 18, which states:

“The Registrar may not impose a civil penalty on a person in respect of any conduct … at any time after criminal proceedings … have been instituted … and before they have been concluded, or … after the person has been convicted of an offence under this Part”.

My amendment introduces, after the word “convicted” in subsection (1)(b), the words “or acquitted”. Once we get to that stage, the individual has gone through a criminal trial and a court has decided that he or she is not guilty. Unless we include the words “or acquitted”, a court may have acquitted someone but the registrar could still impose a civil penalty of £5,000. Again, that is unjust. That is the reason for that amendment.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Campbell-Savours]

My Lords, I do not want to detain the House. We have now been talking about amendments for some five and half hours but the Government have conceded nothing. However, the Minister has repeatedly said that he intends to take some of these amendments back to his department for further consideration. Let us hope that when we further consider them on Report, we have far more flexibility from the Minister. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 88 withdrawn.