Lobbying

Angus Brendan MacNeil Excerpts

Tuesday 25th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[John Thurso]

I am going to disagree with the hon. Gentleman in a moment for a simple reason. In relation to visiting a Minister, the key is not in the Bill or in any legislation that we might pass. The key is the ministerial code; the key is the fact that the visits by that company or any other company will be published. I agree with hon. Members who said that there should be more information; wider detail should be published about meetings. At the moment, the quarterly register often just says “general discussion”, and that is not good enough. I urge those who are responsible for the ministerial code to look at toughening it up in some way and perhaps publishing the code a little more often than quarterly. Such things could be done tomorrow; they do not require legislation.

The second point is the difference between in-house and third-party lobbyists. I think we are all going in the same direction, but it seems to me that one has to start somewhere. To me, the third-party lobbyists are a good place to start. As the hon. Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen) said, it is better to make a start than to go for perfection. If Oxfam turns up to see the Secretary of State for International Development, it is pretty obvious what is going to be talked about. It is far more important that when Messrs Grabit and Nickit turn up to lobby on behalf of an unknown firm, we have a registration of who they are and what they do. That is far more important than making every single company that has someone in house working for them register that fact.

In my party’s 2001 conference motion on regulation of professional parliamentary lobbying, which I am sure was on everyone’s lips at the time, we said:

“No parliamentarian … at Westminster should be a director of, an employee of, receive any reward from or hold a stake in any of the duly registered professional parliamentary lobbying companies. … A statutory register of such professional lobbying firms should be set up and supervised by the Commissioner on Parliamentary Standards.”

In 2006, my colleague David Howarth, the then Member for Cambridge, sought to insert an amendment into the Companies Bill to cap the amount spent on lobbying. The then Government declined to accept it. So my party has a long history of seeking to do something about lobbying. The important thing now is to be clear who is doing the lobbying. That is why registering the professional lobbyists is so important.

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

Is not one of the problems of the recent scandal not so much the lobbying but the payment of politicians, who may be part of the operation of that lobbying. It is not the lobbying per se; it is the payment, the money, the feeling of corruption.

[John Thurso]

I am delighted to welcome the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) to his place. That is something I touched on at the beginning of my remarks. He makes an important point. In the recent scandals involving a Member of this House and three Members of the other place, nothing in this Bill or any other Bill on lobbying would have changed anything. What they did is already against the rules. My advice to any Member of this House is that the day someone comes to them and says, “Would you like £24,000?”, they are being offered a sting. None of us is worth that amount.

I was once almost the victim of a sting. A gentleman came to see me and asked me if I would chair his company. I said, “Yes, but first I need to do due diligence and see a set of accounts. Secondly, you have to look at my CV and see whether I have the skills you want. Thirdly, if it is ever anything to do with Parliament, I can have nothing whatever to do with it.” Needless to say, I never heard from him again.

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[Helen Jones (Warrington North) (Lab)]

We have heard several interesting speeches, especially from my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North (Mr Allen), the Chair of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee, that have tried to grapple with how we define and register lobbyists. The fundamental point, as everyone in the House knows, is that one of the biggest political problems of our time is the loss of faith in politics and politicians, and we have only to walk the streets of our constituencies to see that. People feel that they are not listened to and that they have no way of influencing events. They might have some regard for their own Member of Parliament—indeed, polls show that people often do—but they feel that the big decisions are taken elsewhere, in a place where their views are not heard—[Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Na h-Eileanan an Iar (Mr MacNeil) wants to make an intervention, I shall allow him to do so.

[Mr MacNeil]

I just wanted to suggest that the case the hon. Lady makes is exactly why we want independence —thank you very much.

[Helen Jones]

The hon. Gentleman will find that the polling in Scotland is no different from that elsewhere. There is a loss of faith in politics and politicians in many developed countries, and it ill behoves him to make cheap political points about that serious issue, with which we all must deal. People think that there is a distinct political class of people who move in and out of lobbyists, think-tanks and Parliament. I know that that is not true and that there are many hon. Members from diverse backgrounds—obviously not those in the Cabinet—but we have to bear responsibility for allowing that perception to exist. That is why dealing with lobbying is important, so that is one of the vital things—not the only one—that we must do to open up Parliament. If we continue to allow people to have the impression that some individuals have privileged access and may buy the right to influence legislation, we are digging our own graves. It is not lobbying itself that is wrong, as many hon. Members have said, but lobbying behind the scenes when people do not know about it.

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[Helen Jones]

My hon. Friend makes a valid point about who should be included on the register and the importance of getting the definitions right. Many people have referred to lobbying by constituents, and any constituent has an absolute right of access to their Member of Parliament. My constituents are not slow about making their views heard, as I suspect is true of those of other hon. Members, but that is different from commercial lobbying, so the legislation must make that clear.

We have to deal with those who are directly employed lobbyists, but they would be allowed to carry on as before under the Government’s plans. What would happen to big firms such as Capita, Grant Thornton and PricewaterhouseCoopers that operate across government in many ways, but include lobbying among their functions? Legislation cannot work unless a code of conduct is attached to it. Parts of the industry already have a voluntary code, but without a code of conduct, there is no real point of having a register, because one then cannot deal with breaches of ethics, including by removing people from the register. Without full publication of details and meetings, lobbying will still be shrouded in secrecy because people will not know what is going on.

[Mr MacNeil]

rose—

[Helen Jones]

I have given way to the hon. Gentleman once, so I hope that he will forgive me if I continue.

The fairly shabby little proposal before us is a reaction to a particular story, rather than an attempt to get things right. It is important that we have proposals that command cross-party support in the House and that, if possible, they are subjected to pre-legislative scrutiny. In my time in the House, a lot of bad legislation has been passed in a hurry, but a lot of legislation has been made better as a result of pre-legislative scrutiny, so I do not understand why the Government are shying away from that process. We need to get the proposals right for not just this Parliament, but future Parliaments, and we need a clear definition of “professional lobbying”, a clear code of conduct and strong sanctions for breaches of that code. Why on earth are the Government so reluctant to go down that road?

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[Harriett Baldwin]

What I accept is that the Government are the ones taking the steps to publish meetings with organisations that represent themselves with their public affairs professionals. The Government are doing much more in the way of transparency than the Opposition were able to do in 13 years of power. I would love to see members of the shadow Cabinet publish details of their meetings, and I strongly hope that as a result of my persuasive remarks this afternoon, those are steps that the Opposition will soon take.

[Mr MacNeil]

The hon. Lady says that the Government have taken great steps on transparency, so will she encourage them to publish the pre-1997 papers relating to devolution legislation, which should be open and transparent for the people of Scotland? I look forward to her support.

[Harriett Baldwin]

As the hon. Gentleman knows, I am a fervent supporter of us all being better off together, so I will support whatever is in the interest of our doing that.

The point I am trying to make is that there is an awful lot that Members of Parliament can do as individuals to help advance the cause of transparency. We should not all sit and wait until legislation is passed. We can take some responsibility in being open and transparent. I look forward to the day when that includes the meetings of the shadow Cabinet.