Lobbying

Debate between Caroline Lucas and Jon Trickett

Tuesday 25th June 2013 Commons Chamber

[Jon Trickett]

I will not take any more interventions, because I want to make some progress and other people want to speak.

It is not difficult to define what the House should do to regulate the industry—I agree that the point is to regulate as well as to register, as my hon. Friend the Member for Foyle (Mark Durkan) said—and it need not be burdensome for professional lobbyists. In fact, it takes about 20 minutes to provide the necessary information on the relevant form—I have tried it myself. The Bill should do four things. It should create a clear definition of professional lobbying; a statutory register of all those who lobby professionally; a clear code of conduct that forbids inappropriate financial relations between lobbyists and parliamentarians; and a strong system of sanctions when the code is breached.

All that is detail, however. We are simply asking for a commitment from the Government to agree to cross-party talks—in fact, that is really all our motion asks for—not as an excuse for failing to act, but as a prelude to rapid action to bring this matter into proper order. I hope that the Government’s amendment to the motion is not a signal that they intend to conflate a series of irrelevant issues in order to obfuscate further and therefore once more evade the central question before us this afternoon, which is: how are we going to reform and then regulate the lobbying industry? The noble Lord Wallace, who speaks for the Cabinet Office in another place, said that the Government did not intend to conflate these matters. I hope he is correct, but I fear he is not.

[Caroline Lucas (Brighton, Pavilion) (Green)]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, but does he agree that if we are genuinely to restore public trust in politics, the statutory register of lobbyists has to be the very minimum, and that we must do far more to tackle the excessive influence of corporate money and vested interests and to address things such as the invisible secondments of people from industry right into the centre of policy making here in Whitehall?

[Jon Trickett]

I will be speaking on other matters, as will other Labour spokespeople in due course, but the hon. Lady is right that we have to take big money out of politics across the board. We have proposals to do that, and have made some difficult recommendations on trade unions, if anyone is interested. It is the Government who are stalling the negotiations on party funding.

We need a lobbying Bill that will begin the process of cleaning up our politics and create a level playing field for all the professional lobbyists who behave ethically but are constantly undermined by a few who do not play by the rules. Nothing less will do. The Leader of the House must say whether he will continue to speak for the closed circle, the tiny elite, that seems to run our country and on whose behalf many professional lobbyists often work, or whether he will speak on behalf of the many by placing the professional lobbying industry on a proper footing.