Lobbying (Transparency) Bill [HL]

Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts

Friday 9th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, I, too, am delighted to welcome the Bill and do so on behalf of the Opposition. I pay tribute to my noble friend Lord Brooke for his careful work in the preparation as well as the presentation of the Bill. He and I have worked together to seek to reduce alcohol-related harm, and time and again, we have seen that big business with special interests has enormous influence, all of it out of sight of the public. Indeed, as my noble friend Lady Kennedy recounted, there is public scepticism about the power of corporates to influence government.

When the Government introduced the transparency of lobbying Bill, their stated aim—as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, confessed—was to produce transparency; it was in the title of the Bill. As the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said, as the Minister in the Commons said—he was then Andrew Lansley; he is now the noble Lord, Lord Lansley,

“the public should be able to see how third parties seek to influence the political system”.—[Official Report, Commons, 3/9/2013; col. 169.]

That objective, via the Act’s register of lobbyists, has failed lamentably. Not only did the register omit 80% of lobbying, as we warned it would at the time, because only consultants were included and because of its limited scope, but even on its own terms it is a sad and expensive failure that has achieved nothing. In total, it has had just 1,251 hits on its website—I think that my blogs from here get more than that—at a cost of some £600,000. Contrary to what the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, says, only half of that is paid for by those on the register; the rest is paid out of public funds. With those sorts of numbers, given how often rather sad anoraks such as me together with campaigners such as Unlock Democracy and Spinwatch as well as lobbyists themselves check up on it, of the 373 hits in the past six months cited by my noble friend Lord Brooke, which amounts to some 15 people a week, five of those people are probably in the Chamber today or watching us on their screens. It is absolutely not the public.

A list of consultant lobbyists is doing nothing for transparency, although its scope was always so tiny that it was never going to achieve very much. As others have said, the vast majority of lobbying is done not by a handful of consultant public affairs companies but direct from company to government via their professional in-house public affairs or parliamentary affairs teams. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said that we know who is lobbying—Heathrow is lobbying. We know that because it has put up big adverts between where you leave the Tube and come into this House. However, that is not how most of it is done. The public do not know what the trade associations are doing. One amendment we moved which was not accepted was to include trade associations, which do so much of this lobbying but completely unknown to the public.

Since the noble Lord, Lord Beith, raised the point, let us look at the defence industry, which directly hires former MoD civil servants or ex-Ministers. They do not need to go to some consultancy to have the ear of government; they pick up their phone and speak direct. We know that well from the quote that my noble friend Lord Howarth gave of David Cameron’s description of it—and I could not put it better myself.

What is more, contrary to what the Minister said in our debate yesterday, it is not the case that the Government’s own register shows on whose behalf a consultant firm is lobbying a Minister. It requires it only to list its clients; it does not show when a meeting takes place on behalf of which of those clients nor, importantly, on what subject that meeting is taking place. That is the statutory register. However, there is no possible reason why ministerial diaries could not show those details, and that would not even require the kind of legislation that the poor then Andrew Lansley had to spend a lot of time dealing with. If only the diaries were timely, searchable and comprehensive, that would reveal more than the current register does. At present, it is simply no good relying on ministerial diaries.

Despite what the Minister’s predecessor, the noble Lord, Lord Bridges of Headley, wrote to me on 27 May, that delays in publishing had now been overcome and that they are,

“in open, searchable CSV”—

whatever that means—

“formats,

the meetings logs are all published in different places. To assess meetings data, the public have to search department by department. It is time consuming and does seem to be a determined barrier to transparency. If they really believed in openness, why on earth have the Government not brought all the meetings data together into a single, searchable database on GOV.UK?

Furthermore, if a minister meets a company in a so-called private capacity, without civil servants, that does not even get listed. Even if a meeting is listed, it gives little away, as the noble Lord, Lord Beith, said. Of 79 meetings with lobbyists attended by MoD Ministers, 44 were described as, “discuss defence issues”, or “defence issues”, and 11 as “company site visits”. As the noble Lord alluded to, the Department for Transport similarly had dozens of meetings labelled “rail discussion” or “aviation discussion”. I would have been surprised if they had been discussing the latest Paralympic results. Over at the Department of Health, of 27 meetings with Jeremy Hunt, one-quarter were “catch-up discussions”. There was no disclosure of the policy area, along the lines suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Norton.

There are major shortfalls in the 2014 Act, all of which we pointed out during its passage through this House. It ignores in-house professional lobbyists. That is not someone from a garage, who is not paid to be a lobbyist, ringing up a department: let us put things like that to one side. It ignores lobbying of senior civil servants. An amendment we put down on that was rejected. It ignores lobbying of all politicians other than Ministers, including the chairs of select committees, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Bew. It ignores the lobbying of SPADs. Despite the amendment proposed in this House to include that power, it has not been introduced. I am, therefore, very grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and welcome his question on that. It ignores soft lobbying of Ministers, out of sight of their civil servants. This has to change, for the sake of our democracy. As has been stressed, this has never been more urgent than now, with the seismic Brexit decisions about to be taken, as mentioned by my noble friends Lord Brooke and Lord Howarth.

Today, the Government should heed the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Bew, that this question cannot be left where it is. As the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said, finding fault with this Bill and doing nothing else is not acceptable. The Bill will achieve real openness, for the public, for taxpayers and for all of us to see. We wish it well and hope that the Government will really listen to the comments that have been made: the present situation is just not good enough.