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

Debate between Lord Norton of Louth and Lord Stevenson of Balmacara

Tuesday 5th November 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stevenson of Balmacara (Lab)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 65 I shall also speak to Amendments 67, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77 and 113, which are in the names of my noble friends Lady Royall and Lady Hayter. This is an extensive group of amendments but the main focus is to expand greatly the amount of information that the register holds. For example, one of the key amendments in the middle of this group concentrates on the detail of spending by lobbyists. This is important as, without these details, it is possible only to build up a very limited picture of the lobbying activity taking place because, as Unlock Democracy says in its briefing to noble Lords:

“A good faith estimate of what it being spent on lobbying would also show scale, disparities and trends in lobbying”.

Compare the current, limited proposals in the Bill with the level of transparency in place in the United States, where it is relatively easy to find out how much is being spent, and by which companies and sectors, using publicly available information. For example, the Senate record of spending shows that Boeing spent $15,440,000 on lobbying in the US in 2012. General Electric spent $21,200,000. These are very significant sums and they are spent by in-house lobbyists. As we know, this can have a marked effect on policy and the discussions around it. For example, an IMF working paper from 2009 draws a direct link between the amounts of money spent in lobbying by financial services firms and high-risk lending practices before the financial crisis. Ameriquest Mortgage and Countrywide Financial, both of which were at the heart of the crash, spent $20.5 million and $8.7 million respectively in political donations, campaign contributions and lobbying activities from 2002 to 2006. The IMF paper concludes that,

“the prevention of future crises might require weakening political influence of the financial industry or closer monitoring of lobbying activities to understand better the incentives”.

This is still pertinent here. As recently as 2 July, the head of the Prudential Regulation Authority was reported in the FT as saying that he was going to draw up rules to prevent the banks lobbying parliamentary officials against new requirements for leverage. Under the proposals in the Bill, we will not get any of the same transparency when it comes, for example, to lobbying by the big six energy companies. It has been reported that Ministers from the Department of Energy and Climate Change have met representatives from the energy giants on 128 occasions since 2010, yet have held talks with the main groups representing energy consumers only 26 times during the same period. We need much more information about what is going on here.

Amendment 65 would exclude the option of an individual residence being listed as the address of a lobbyist. Our concern is that this seems to represent a potential loophole, which we urge the Government to reconsider. The effect of the Bill, if passed in its current form, is that the level of transparency for the register is limited to the individual name and address of a main place of business or, if there is no such place, the individual’s residence. This is surely a loophole that would bar us from knowing who the individual works for. That concern fits into the wider point raised by our Amendment 67: that an increase in transparency should allow us to see who is lobbying on behalf of a company and which members of staff are engaged in that lobbying.

There are also a number of amendments in this group in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie. We should be very grateful for the way in which he has gone through the Bill with such forensic attention to detail. His amendments have similar intentions to ours and we support them. I beg to move.

[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.