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

Baroness Pitkeathley Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Pitkeathley (Lab)]

My Lords, I begin by congratulating the noble Lord, Lord Horam, on his maiden speech, and by drawing your Lordships’ attention to my interests in the register, especially to my roles as vice-president of Carers UK and as chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Civil Society and Volunteering. I hope that I might be permitted to record my disappointment that neither of the Ministers on the Bill is currently in the Chamber.

I will concentrate on Part 2 of the Bill, and I will speak personally. As far as I am aware, none of us knows how we become a Member of your Lordships’ House—the reasons we are chosen and so on. However, I have a pretty good idea why the honour was conferred on me. It was because I was a campaigner and lobbyist—rather a successful one, I would suggest. I was chief executive of a charity whose raison d’être was lobbying and campaigning in pursuit of policy changes for carers.

Let me take noble Lords back to the mid-1980s. The word “carer” was unknown; it was frequently misspelt as “career”. Nothing of what we now take for granted about the issue was known. We had no numbers. Estimates were not believed. We had no idea about the range of activities that carers undertake, or the distress that caring can cause. There were few organisations that dealt with caring, no helplines and no legislation. No attention was paid to carers at all. It is hard to believe now, when the word “carer” is added to practically every document coming out of every government department—and sometimes, I think, every sentence of every document coming out of every government department. Think of the Care Bill and the focus on carers’ rights. Think of what we now know about carers for o1der people, young carers, parent carers, carers in the benefits system, carers in employment and so on. It is hard to imagine what it was like 20 or 30 years ago.

All that we have achieved for carers has been achieved by lobbying and campaigning by a registered charity, or by several charities working together. No Minister or department suddenly woke up and said, “Oh, sorry. This is a group of people whom we have been ignoring for years. We had better do something about it”. Of course they did not. They took notice because we drew attention relentlessly to what the situation was by focused campaigns, getting the media on side and getting carers to be willing to speak out rather than being a silent and hidden army. Figures on how many carers there are and how much money their contribution is worth did not come out of the blue. In fact, I remember successive Secretaries of State denying that the numbers of carers that I was suggesting even existed. We got the numbers because we ran a concerted campaign to have a question about carers included in the census, and then we used the figures, which surprised everybody—6 million, since you ask—at every opportunity.

Our campaigns for policy change were never more concerted and active than during election periods. I first attended party conferences in the late 1980s—all the party conferences, of course—and at the 1992, 1997, 2001 and all elections since, a carers manifesto has been produced and all political parties have been lobbied to make concessions for carers. A very important aspect of this work was the alliance that was formed to give the lobby the strongest possible voice. Originally, more than 20 carer, disability, older people and patient organisations came together to produce a manifesto. This made the call and the demands of the manifesto so much more powerful. Many of us have recently been in contact with the Care and Support Alliance, which played such an important role in both last year’s Health and Social Care Bill and the Care Bill currently being considered by this House. If each of those many organisations had had its costs counted, including its overall admin costs, I doubt whether they would have come together in such an effective way. Indeed, I am sure that they would not. The effectiveness of such coalitions has already been mentioned by several noble Lords.

What would have been the situation of carers if all these campaigns had not taken place? Eventually, what was a private trouble might have become a public policy issue—the one that we know so well today—but not as quickly or effectively, I would contend. Three Private Members’ Bills, a national carers strategy, the Standing Commission on Carers, and the Law Commission report that led to the Care Bill all came about as a direct result of regular lobbying and campaigning, much of it focused in election periods. I might add that the tradition in the United Kingdom of campaigning charities effectively lobbying for changes in policy is the envy of the world—and I do not exaggerate that, as I know it from my contact with emerging carers movements in many other countries throughout the world.

Of course, we have to emphasise that this is politically neutral campaigning, which requires a degree of political sophistication to bring about. Is it that political sophistication and political nous that frightens the Government and makes them put in place this sledgehammer of a Bill to crack what is, at worst, a very small political nut as regards charities. The Bill surrounds charities with an unwarranted amount of bureaucracy, as noble Lords have pointed out, while at the same time not being nearly strong enough with the real culprits, who should be addressed in Part 1 of the Bill.

I use the issue of carers as an example of what will be lost if the Bill goes through in its current form, because it is the one I know best. But there are dozens of others, as is apparent from the huge amount of correspondence that your Lordships have received on the Bill—from climate change to child abuse, through every variety of charity. That would not have come to public attention if it had not been for the efforts of charities, acting singly or in alliances. I am baffled as to how any Government who have sung the praises of the big society and repeatedly placed emphasis on the importance of the charitable sector can put before us a Bill so ill thought-out and with so much potential to stifle the voices of the disadvantaged, and ignore groups and issues that are the very essence of democracy.

If you really want to engage with charities and the voluntary sector, as this Government constantly assure us that they do, you cannot simply put them into the role of service providers, effectively gagging them because they are too dependent on contracts to utter a breath of criticism. What has happened to the Minister’s call, made so trenchantly before the election, that the charities should,

“keep our feet to the fire”?

I quote him directly. Is that to be interpreted as keeping their feet to the fire except in an election year—and only if you keep the costs down to the level that they have set?

Will the Minister take this opportunity to answer the many questions that are being asked? For example, what exactly constitutes campaigning? Does it include taking part in policy discussions or doing research on issues such as poverty, and publishing the results? How are partnerships and alliances to be defined, and their expenditure costed, without huge administrative burdens on already cash-strapped organisations? What is the Government’s reaction to the legal opinion that says that the Bill will restrict organisations’ ability to engage in campaigns or policy debates and will insulate the Executive from criticism? Above all, why the rush? There are so many problems with the Bill, and so many possibilities of unintended consequences—I give the Minister the benefit of the doubt and do not accuse him or the Government of sinister motives, though many might—that surely the right thing to do is to start again, or at least to pause and put the Bill through the sort of scrutiny that a pre-legislative process would have provided. Starting again would be a sign not of weakness but of a Government who have the courage to seek and take notice of the opinions of the society that they represent.