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

Helen Goodman Excerpts

Monday 9th September 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Main]

The hon. Gentleman is right. I am not decrying lobbyists. What I am saying is that I need to know who they are, what they are doing, when they are doing it, who they have spoken to and what happened as a result of those conversations, however informal or formal. The register will not capture that. I am sorry if I have offended any gentle lobbyist anywhere, but there are quite a few lobbyists whom I would not give the time of day to. Indeed, I have named them. I think that Mr Hoare knows my views on his lobbying activities in my constituency.

I am sure that the scenario that I described last week is not unique; I was just fortunate enough to find out about aspects of it. Once there is a chink in the dam, there is a chance that the lobbyist will effect the result that they want, but that does not happen in a transparent fashion. Subtle messages and arguments over a private lunch or a catch-up with old chums get results, so why will we not see more of that practice if it is not captured by the Bill?

If lobbying is the next big disaster to hit Parliament, the public have the right to expect us to deliver. I believe that we have the opportunity to deliver a way of recognising where these lobbyists are, for good or bad, and what they are doing. We need to amend the Bill today. Whichever amendments get picked up, I think that we should run with them to show that this House is bigger than party politics.

Dwight Eisenhower, who many people consider to have been a great man who gave great quotes, said:

“You have broader considerations that might follow what you would call the ‘falling domino’ principle. You have a row of dominoes set up. You knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly. So you could have the beginning of a disintegration that would have the most profound influences.”

That crumbling effect is exactly what a lobbyist seeks to effect behind the scenes. They pick their domino. One never knows who that domino is. It might be somebody who works in a Department, a Minister or anyone else who has influence in the chain of argument. When that domino falls, the chain reaction can have the most profound influences. In my case, a refusal was turned into a permission. I believe that, but I cannot prove it. When the domino effect happens, it is amazing how other people pick things up and run with them. Most people are never lobbied directly—it all goes back through the chain reaction to the original lobbying.

[Helen Goodman (Bishop Auckland) (Lab)]

I am very interested in what the hon. Lady is saying. I am not clear whether her new clause covers the wide penumbra of public and quasi-governmental organisations that spend a lot of public money and that can be influenced in the way they spend that money. I think, for example, of health authorities and local enterprise partnerships. Do we not need to address the influence on those local authorities, with respect not only to policy, but to how they spend public money?

[Mrs Main]

The hon. Lady raises a large number of points. As I have said, I am not wedded to new clause 5. It would perhaps be somewhat cumbersome to remove the existing clause and insert my new clause. However, it does seek to cover anyone acting on behalf of a client or an employer and anyone acting as a volunteer on behalf of a charitable organisation or on their own behalf.

--- Later in debate ---

[Helen Goodman]

Let me illustrate that point. I have just looked at my diary for this week. It contains six meetings with people from corporate bodies or trade associations, and six with people from what we might loosely call the voluntary sector. None of the first six would be caught by the provisions in the Bill, but all the second six would. Does my hon. Friend not agree that that is absolutely ridiculous?

[Mark Durkan]

I do. At risk of receiving a caution from the Chair, I must agree that my hon. Friend is contrasting the inadequate provisions in part 1 of the Bill with the egregious and excessive provisions in part 2. Many of us suspect that those charities, voluntary organisations and public advocacy campaign groups that will find themselves in line of danger under part 2 are being used as a human shield to protect those that should have been targeted in part 1 but have deliberately been given free licence and allowed to escape. This part of the Bill, particularly in the light of some of the Government amendments, will say to those who might be sitting on the next big scandal, “Carry on regardless. Carry on happily. We don’t want to touch you, and we have deliberately framed this legislation so that it will not touch you.”

--- Later in debate ---

[Tracey Crouch]

I do not wish to be rude, but I think that that shows a real lack of understanding of the lobbying industry. A significant proportion of what lobbyists do does not relate to Ministers or permanent secretaries. In the entire 10 years for which I worked in the industry, I do not think that I once either arranged or attended a meeting with a permanent secretary. With great respect to current and former Ministers, that was very much the end process of whatever we were seeking to do. We would quite often meet civil servants to discuss incredibly technical issues that, by the time they reached the Minister’s desk, were probably already signed and agreed through the interactive relationships developed with those particular civil servants.

[Helen Goodman]

The hon. Lady is absolutely right. It is not the job of a permanent secretary to do particular pieces of policy work; that person’s job is to run the Department.

[Tracey Crouch]

I quite agree, so it is not surprising that I did not meet a permanent secretary in any capacity during my lobbying days. It was not my job to advise them on how they ran their Department; it was my job to try to influence opinions and the legislative process with civil servants at a lower level, particularly on the very technical issues that typically arose in the insurance industry. It is quite clear that this aspect of the Bill is not fit for purpose and it would benefit from being broadened in definition to include all consultants, including both in-house consultants and those that are part of multi-agency firms.

--- Later in debate ---

[Chris Bryant]

I have been campaigning for a very long time to get rid of the entirely mendacious private Member’s Bill process and to replace it with a system that works better, but I do think this Bill would be better advanced on a cross-party basis without Government-Opposition divide and on the basis of practical experience of how the industry actually works. There is a danger that we will introduce bad legislation here, and we may well—irony of ironies—have to resort to the House of Lords to try to improve it because the Government nearly always have a majority on any legislation in this House.

[Helen Goodman]

My hon. Friend is making his case rumbustiously, but I just wonder whether I could bring him back to the problems of definition and the limitations of this Bill by giving a couple of examples. I spent 16 years as a Treasury civil servant, and we were subject to highly formalised lobbying every year before the Budget from the Scotch Whisky Association, the tobacco people, the cider people, the motor manufacturers and so forth, and in the case of the UK offshore operators, we had a whole joint committee between the industry and the civil service in order to work out the north sea fiscal regime—

[The Temporary Chair (Mr Martin Caton)]

Order. That was a very long intervention.

[Chris Bryant]

Yes, but it was a very good one, because it does make the point. I do not think my hon. Friend was the permanent secretary or the Minister—although she was a Minister later on. At that time, however, she was just a humble—

[Helen Goodman]

Lowly.

[Chris Bryant]

My hon. Friend was a lowly—although perhaps not a very humble—Treasury official, and the point is well made.