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

Chris Bryant Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Lansley]

Let us return to the question of the statutory register of lobbyists. To ensure the independence of the system—

[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

rose—

[Mr Lansley]

Sit down. I am not giving way at the moment.

To ensure the independence of the system, the register will be administered and enforced by an independent registrar of consultant lobbyists who will provide guidance on compliance and publish an online register on a quarterly basis. The registrar will have the power to issue information notices to investigate where he or she believes that consultant lobbying is taking place without registration. Where this is found, the registrar will also have the power to impose civil penalties. Criminal sanctions will be available for those guilty of deliberate non-compliance.

The register will be funded by the lobbying industry via a subscription charge, but to reduce the burden on the smallest businesses, organisations that are not VAT-registered will not be required to pay the charge. There will therefore be no impact on the public purse as a result of these measures.

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[Mr Lansley]

I promised to give way to—

[Chris Bryant]

Please will the Leader of the House give way?

[Mr Lansley]

Oh, the hon. Gentleman said “please”! Okay, but I will give way to the Chairman of the Standards Committee.

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[Mr Lansley]

I will give way to the hon. Member for Rhondda, but colleagues behind me on the Government Benches have also been patient.

[Chris Bryant]

I am deeply grateful to the Leader of the House for giving way. He says this is all about transparency, but if I have got it right every single member of the public affairs team in-house at BSkyB will be able to visit as many Ministers as they want and every single lawyer employed by BSkyB to advance its case will be able to do so without any need to register. The only person who would have to register would be an independent consultant in a company that solely lobbies. How does that possibly afford greater transparency?

[Mr Lansley]

It promotes transparency because if a representative of Sky visits a Minister in order to discuss that business, it is transparent that they are doing so in order to represent the interests of Sky. However, if somebody from “XYZ Corporation”, a consultant lobbying firm, visits a Minister in order to discuss somebody else’s business but it is not transparent through the ministerial diary publication who they are representing, that is not transparent. We propose to remedy that by making it transparent.

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[Ms Eagle]

My hon. Friend takes every opportunity, with great eloquence, to further his views on how we should change the House’s procedures for the better.

[Chris Bryant]

Is not the importance of pre-legislative scrutiny that all too often it means we can iron out some of the unintended consequences? A classic one that I think we are likely to come across, in relation to part 1, is that when the Government or Parliament face a big issue many small charities decide to form a joint committee and employ someone specifically to act on their behalf and represent them. They would be caught by this Bill, whereas the bodies that they would probably be fighting against, the big commercial interests, would not. That is the unfairness.

[Ms Eagle]

My hon. Friend is of course right. Parts 2 and 3 of the Bill came as a complete surprise to all those in civil society who will be affected, be they charities, campaigners or trade unions. The Government designed the changes in secret and sprung them on everyone in a baleful attempt to bounce them quickly on to the statute book. They have not even bothered to consult those affected. Discussions I have had during meetings with stakeholders on all three parts of the Bill suggest that time after time e-mails, letters and calls requesting conversations with Ministers were left unanswered. The Government did not even tell the Electoral Commission until the end of June that they were going to alter the rules that it is required by law to police, so they have kept their own regulator in the dark. The Electoral Commission has said:

“We share the concerns that the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee expressed… about the timing of the Bill and the absence of pre-legislative scrutiny.”

I cannot believe that the Leader of the House is content with this shameful and shambolic process. He has provided an abject lesson in how not to develop and propose legislation. This is a Bill that he should be embarrassed to be associated with.

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[Angie Bray]

I cannot imagine that anybody would waste their money if they did not think that there was a desirable outcome.

If we are to limit election expenditure, then limit it we should without fear or favour to any political party or special interest group. I find it hard to believe that many members of the public who happily chuck a couple of quid into a bucket rattled for a charity in a supermarket on a Saturday morning fervently wish their money to go into political campaigning rather than to the cause that has appealed to their generosity in the first place. That is why I do not believe that the Bill will affect charitable activity; I do not believe that charities, on the whole, tend to do politics.

[Chris Bryant]

Will the hon. Lady give way?

[Angie Bray]

No. I have given way twice and other Members are keen to speak.

Let us be clear: the Bill will not curtail policy campaigning but only campaigns during elections that are targeted directly at political parties or their candidates, who are themselves limited in what they spend.

I fear that the Bill will not succeed in one of its primary aims, and I speak as a candid friend when I urge the Minister to revisit the proposals for the register of lobbyists. The Government are right to seek to extend transparency further in the lobbying of Parliament, but sadly I do not think we have grabbed the opportunity with both hands, as we should. Although I hesitate to say that we need less of a rush, given how long it has taken to get to this point, we need far greater detailed consideration and—dare I say it—a better understanding of how the lobbying industry works.

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[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

We are so fortunate to have a Prince of Wales who is able to train properly for the job he will have as our sovereign in due course, and to have access to Ministers. Of course, that should be confidential. Compared to some princes of Wales we have had in the past, how fortunate—how blessed—is this nation to have one who does his duty so diligently? I am glad that he does, and I think we can admire His Royal Highness for that—almost as much as we admire the Lord Privy Seal.

[Chris Bryant]

I am slightly worried that the hon. Gentleman’s respect for the Lord Privy Seal is based on a fundamental misconception. I do not think he has read the Bill, because it does not say anything about regulating lobbying Parliament, only about lobbying Government. That is one of the Bill’s flaws.

[Jacob Rees-Mogg]

Oh dear, the hon. Gentleman gets so over-excited on these occasions that he intervenes far too early. What I was going to come on to say is that the matter of what happens in Parliament is, rightly, not covered in the Bill. It is the duty of Parliament and the House of Commons itself to regulate its own affairs. If the Bill interfered in the procedures of this House I would oppose it. We have an absolute right, under the Bill of Rights, to freedom of speech in this House, and members of the public have the right of access to Members of Parliament. That absolute right must be defended. Members of the public must be free, whether individually or collectively, to express their views to Members of Parliament. If MPs fall foul of the high standards that are expected of them, then that is a matter for the Privileges Committee to deal with. We have powers not only to expel Members if necessary, but to imprison them, and they have no right of appeal to any court in the land.

That is how we should proceed in terms of Parliament. Government is another matter and that is why it is right that part 1 deals with the lobbying of Ministers of the Crown and of civil servants. That is a matter rightly confined to legislation.

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[Chris Bryant (Rhondda) (Lab)]

It is a great shame that the hon. Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) is no longer in the Chamber, because I think that not only did he let his voters and the House down, but—worst of all—he let himself down. He is the arch- patriot, but lobbying is one of the things that Britain gave the world. The only reason it is called lobbying is because of the lobby outside St Stephen’s chapel, where the House of Commons used to sit. That is why when Paris lost the bid to host the 2012 Olympic games, Bertrand Delanoë complained passionately in French that the British had engaged outrageously in lobbying—“doing the lobby,” as he put it.

A fundamental part of our history, and of the way we have grown up as a democracy, has been the right to turn up at the door of Parliament, or a little further away since this ghastly building was built in the 1850s, and ensure that one’s voice is heard. The age of consent in this country is now 16, but it had been 13 until the late 19th century, because the only thing Josephine Butler could do was come and stand at the door of the House of Commons to lobby, grabbing hold of MPs as they came in to try to persuade them of her point of view, and eventually she won the argument.

It has been that way for centuries. In 1432 the Brewers’ Company wanted a new licence and a new company charter, so they tried to persuade Parliament. They failed, but then they paid the Lord Chancellor £40 and miraculously got their piece of legislation. In 1455 John Whittocksmead was paid a noble to be a friend for another honourable company in parliament. In 1485 the longstanding battle between the canons and the Poor Knights of Windsor was resolved when the Clerk of the House was given a very sumptuous breakfast to persuade him to get a Bill through. The Doorkeeper was given tuppence, the Serjeant at Arms was given a noble, the Speaker was given six pounds, six shillings and eightpence, and the King was given £100.

Quite rightly, as the Chair of the Standards and Privileges Committee said earlier, we have outlawed receiving money in return for putting forward a case in this House, but that is not the case in the other House. I suggest that many of the problems relating to lobbying and to corruption in our parliamentary system stem from the other end of the Corridor, because many people pursue their commercial interests through how they vote in that Chamber, which I think is inappropriate.

My personal experience is twofold. First, I was the BBC’s lobbyist in Brussels. That must make me the Daily Mail’s arch-hateperson—the BBC, Brussels and lobbying all in one—but I was proud of the fact that, by persuading MEPs and Commission members, we managed to see off Rupert Murdoch’s attempt, ironically enough, to make Brussels determine that the BBC’s licence fee was unfair state aid. Murdoch using Brussels to try to make that case was slightly odd. I am delighted that we won that battle by convincing people through legitimate lobbying.

[Paul Farrelly]

Does my hon. Friend agree that the Bill would tilt even further an already unlevel playing field? At the next election the vast majority of the press, including the Daily Mail, will support the Conservative party, yet the Bill will seek to restrain, for example, the National Union of Students and the education unions from reminding the Government of their record on university tuition fees.

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[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend is absolutely right. If there is already a rake in the political system when it comes to money, the Bill will simply increase it and make it more difficult for ordinary members of the public to have a say in the political life of this country.

Secondly, when the Mental Health Act 2007 was going through Parliament I was a Back-Bench Member on the Government side. I did not just want to be voting fodder in Committee; I wanted to understand the issues as we went through them. They were very complex and I am not a mental health or medical specialist. The fact that all the mental health charities got together and paid someone to organise them, creating an alliance and then coming to members of the Bill Committee to argue their case, informed us and made sure that we could be far more creatively involved in the Committee than would have been the case.

My worry is that the Bill will mean that those organisations, which created an alliance because none of them had a large lobbying department of its own, would not be on a level playing field with the big pharmaceutical companies that also came to lobby us—it was legitimate that they did so. The small charities will have to declare that they have effectively set themselves up as a lobbying consultant, but the pharmaceutical companies, which have vast arrays of lawyers and in-house operatives, will not have to declare, and that is fundamentally unfair. I hope that is an unintended consequence of the way that the Bill is drafted, but I am not so sure.

An essential part of our democracy in general elections is the business when we get all those irritating e-mails and letters asking, “What is your position on the following issues?” Homosexuality was mentioned earlier by an Irish Member, but there are many others—animal welfare, abortion, euthanasia, or whatever issue people want to take up. They will then say to the public, “Look, this is how people are saying they are intending to vote on these individual issues; we would prefer it if you voted for the following people who have a three-star record on those issues as we see them.” My worry is that, yet again, this Government Bill will prevent that important part of the democratic process in this country, which will mean that we have a poorer political process.

The Bill fails on many counts. It excludes the in-house teams and the lawyers. As far as I can see, schedule 1 excludes nearly everybody apart from the poor organisations that decide to create an alliance and the charities. It will dismantle the voluntary system that we already have because there will be no incentive to keep it going. It will catch the charitable coalitions. It will scare off charities from engaging with political debate. It does nothing about the abuse of parliamentary passes down at the other end of the building. Much of the language is highly nebulous. On the anniversary of Cromwell’s death, it is perhaps ironic that the Government have united the Royal British Legion, every single think-tank in the land, Help the Aged and Guido Fawkes in opposition to the Bill. I agree with them.