Baroness Chakrabarti
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(2 years ago)
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Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
I thank the noble Lord for his point. We need to distinguish between inappropriate lobbying, which we have sought to regulate since 2014, and other contributions to thought. In other countries, think tanks are very common; they exist to contribute to democratic debate. Indeed, in the US, they are very much better financed. I come back to my previous point: work is going on through the review by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee and through the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists, who, for example, made some changes earlier this year to tighten up the definition of incidental exception. We need to be careful where noble Lords are taking us on the matter.
Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)
My Lords, I declare an interest as the former director of Liberty—the National Council for Civil Liberties—and its charitable sister, the Civil Liberties Trust. I would have thought it an intrusion into individual Members’ privacy, if each and every one had to declare that they were members of Liberty. However, in exchange for the privilege of being a charity or a not-for-profit company, is it not right that an element of transparency over donations above a certain and significant threshold should be required?
Baroness Neville-Rolfe (Con)
If you declare all donations and list all the people who donate to charities—such as Liberty, to which noble Lords may want to contribute—you will find that other people will go through and seek to influence those who are donating to such charities, to contribute to them. These things are very complex, and it is not right that we should introduce those sorts of detailed rules on small sums of money, which is largely what we are talking about. Those small sums of money are helping the whole process of having independent thought, which is needed, both for those of us who serve in government and for those who serve in other parties and sit on other Benches.