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

Andrew Gwynne Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2014 Commons Chamber

[Mr Allen]

Indeed. All parties are now, for the first time in a fixed-term Parliament, entering a prolonged discussion of policy and undertaking a manifesto process that will no longer take just 28 days and be decided only by party leaders. We will all have a chance to influence the process. If hon. Members care about Parliament, whatever their party, and want to make it relevant to the electorate, who hold us in contempt, I urge them to propose ways in which the House can make a contribution to our democratic process. We would all be stronger for that and start to win back some of the reputation that we have lost in recent years.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

I, too, commend my hon. Friend and his Committee for all the work that they have done to ensure proper scrutiny of the Bill, but he might be being a little too unfair on the Government. It is not my usual practice to defend Ministers, but one of the successes that the Bill has had in its progress through both Houses is that it has unified the transparency campaigners and the lobbying industry, both of which agree that the Bill is chronically bad and will make things worse not better.

[Mr Allen]

I thank my hon. Friend for his kind remarks about my Committee, which has members from all parts of the House. I thought that he was going to steal one of my best lines—that it is quite an achievement for the Government to get the League Against Cruel Sports and the Countryside Alliance on the same side and working in unison. He makes a serious point: there are people out there who can help us to make a contribution, and they appeared before us as witnesses, but that process has been completely ignored. At least we were able to do some serious work on the lobbying aspect of the Bill. We were able to conjure a consensus between people who came from different ends of the spectrum, and that could have been the first step in making the lobbying aspect of the Bill effective, but it has been cast aside.

The sad thing is that what has happened throws back in people’s faces—including even the Prime Minister—the contention that lobbying is the next big scandal waiting to happen. As a parliamentarian, I want to help the Prime Minister sort that issue out. It was in the coalition agreement, and both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats pledged to do this, as we all did. So why are we not using the processes of the House to reach a result that will stick for a long, long time?

--- Later in debate ---

[Tom Brake]

The hon. Gentleman must be familiar with the Chilcot inquiry website, so he can access that. I am sure that Mr Speaker will not allow me to take this debate on to the subject of Chilcot when it is very much a focused debate on the amendments under consideration.

The list I have just read out is impressive in terms of opening up transparency. In addition, we have published the names, job titles and pay bands of all civil servants earning more than £80,000, and the job titles and pay bands of all other roles. Such initiatives are shining the light of transparency on to the actions of decision makers and are empowering citizens to hold politicians and public bodies to account. Despite being recognised leaders in open government, we are not complacent. We heard from colleagues in both Houses that there is more we can do to extend further transparency in Government and the public sector. We listened carefully to those concerns and, in response to my colleague, Lord Wallace of Tankerness, we made a commitment to improving the accessibility of Government transparency information. Specifically, the Government committed to ensuring better co-ordination of the publication of datasets so that all returns within a quarter can be found on one page.

We will improve the access to and the presentation of that data, including by improving the consistency of presentation and titling. We will also seek to ensure greater consistency in the content of departmental reporting and to include the subject of meetings. Finally we will ensure that the Government.UK transparency pages contain a link to the statutory register of lobbyists so that the data can be easily cross-referenced.

[Andrew Gwynne]

Surely the Minister recognises that the first port of call for many lobbyists is not the Minister or the permanent secretary but the political adviser in that Department or other civil servants. Is that not the gaping hole in this lobbying Bill? It does nothing to tackle the real lobbying that is taking place.

[Tom Brake]

The Government are focusing on Ministers and permanent secretaries because of their key decision-making roles. Ultimately, they make the decisions in Government. We will of course come to the issue of special advisers.

The measures will further improve the transparency of decision makers. It is equally important that the actions of those who seek to influence decision makers are also transparent. We have been clear that lobbying plays a vital role in policy making, ensuring that Ministers hear a full range of views from those who will be affected by Government decisions, particularly in the more participative and open policy-making environment that we are promoting. It is crucial that the fluency of this dialogue is protected.

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Twigg]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker, and let me move on to address some of the specific Lords amendments. First, may I welcome changes that have been made which respond to concerns that have been raised by civil society, but I urge the Government today, notwithstanding what the Leader of the House has just said, to go further and accept the Lords amendments on staffing costs and on constituency limits? Raising registration thresholds is a sensible move that will stop many small and local campaigners becoming entangled in complicated and burdensome regulations. Allowing large campaigners to provide a single expenditure report on behalf of a coalition of smaller campaigners will incentivise and help collaborative working by organisations of different sizes. Simplifying the reporting regime is also a sensible reform.

[Andrew Gwynne (Denton and Reddish) (Lab)]

My hon. Friend makes an important point about the burden on third-party organisations. Does he agree with the point made by Lord Harries that it would be almost impossible for the Electoral Commission to police third-party expenditure?

--- Later in debate ---

[Stephen Twigg]

So this is what it is all about. Unison, on behalf of its members, spent 4%. The Conservative party spent 25 times as much as the biggest third-party spender, which suggests that this is a solution in search of a problem.

[Andrew Gwynne]

The real issue is that at the 2010 general election spending by all the political parties totalled £31 million. In that same election period, third-party organisations spent just £3 million.

[Stephen Twigg]

My hon. Friend makes the point better than I did, and I thank him for doing so.

Given that both the Commission on Civil Society and Democratic Engagement and the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee supported the restoration of the third-party limit to the levels in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, we believe that that is the right approach. The Lords have advocated a clear, simplifying amendment, which would ensure that there are new reporting requirements for third parties in relation to telephone calls, literature to households and physical distribution in a defined area. The Government’s wider scope of activity, which would have to be reported, has been described by the Electoral Commission as unworkable and unenforceable. It said that

“it will be challenging to obtain robust evidence to determine and sanction breaches in specific geographical areas, for example, regarding the effects of a leafleting campaign or mobile advertising in different constituencies…it is likely to be difficult to demonstrate that a breach meets the necessarily high test for using a stop notice to intervene to halt campaigning activity.”

Surely there is nothing worse than our passing a new law that is unenforceable and unworkable.

The Electoral Commission states that the Lords amendments would reduce its worries about enforceability, although it still has concerns about this part of the Bill. The Government’s plans risk increasing the administrative burden on charities and campaigning groups. Often, as the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) said, those groups are not organised regionally or locally, let alone by constituency, and they would have to modify their accounting structures and the way in which they monitored their expenditure.

Let us consider the kind of cross-party campaigns that we are talking about: people campaigning on the badger cull; on HS2; on a hospital closure that might affect a region or sub-region; local food banks; and road extensions. There are many such examples, and I do not believe that the Leader of the House, in his response to the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion, gave sufficient reassurance that the Government have addressed that issue. The Opposition support the Lords amendment, and we hope that the Government will have a change of heart.

In the debate in the other place, Lord Cormack said that he welcomed amendments that were trying

“to make a bad Bill better”—[Official Report, House of Lords, 15 January 2014; Vol. 751, c. 281.]

He urged the Government to improve the Bill by supporting the Lords amendment. The chief executive of the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action said that the Government have

“turned an awful Bill into what might at best be described as a deeply flawed Bill.”

They have another opportunity to try to mitigate the disaster of the original Bill. Even at this late stage, I urge the Government to accept the amendments that the Lords have proposed after careful and pragmatic consideration. For a party that used to talk a lot about the big society, it seems to me that without the Lords amendments, this is a cruel attempt at making society that bit smaller. The Lords amendments are sensible and modest on staffing costs and constituency limits, and they would help charities and other voluntary and campaigning organisations. If we keep the Lords amendments, they would improve the Bill considerably. I urge the House to accept them.