Lobbying of Government Committee

John Penrose Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Brendan O’Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

Mr Speaker,

“I believe that secret corporate lobbying…goes to the heart of why people are so fed up with politics. It arouses people’s worst fears and suspicions about how our political system works, with money buying power, power fishing for money and a cosy club at the top making decisions in their own interest. It’s an issue that...has tainted our politics for too long, an issue that exposes the far-too-cosy relationship between politics, government, business and money.”

Wise words indeed, and I wish they were mine, but they are not. They were said by David Cameron in February 2010, just a few short months before he became Prime Minister. He became Prime Minister with a promise that:

“If we win the election, we will take a lead on this issue by making sure that ex-ministers are not allowed to use their contacts and knowledge—gained while being paid by the public to serve the public—for their own private gain.”

Today, David Cameron, that self-styled great reformer, is up to his neck in the same cronyism, corruption and sleaze that he promised to call out, expose and eradicate while in opposition.

The hypocrisy is breathtaking, and not simply because nothing has changed. We now know that far from taking on the corrosive culture of the nod and a wink and the old boys’ club favouritism, he actually took it into government. We now know that while David Cameron was Prime Minister, Lex Greensill himself became so embedded in Downing Street that by 2012, he even had an official No. 10 business card, describing himself as a “Senior Advisor”.

Almost 10 years to the day after delivering those stirring words and making those great promises, we discover that David Cameron directly lobbied the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care and senior Government officials, thereby securing 10 meetings in three months in an attempt to influence the UK Government’s covid corporate financing facility. He did it to benefit Greensill Capital, where he was then working as an adviser and lobbyist for the same Lex Greensill and where he reportedly held share options worth millions of pounds.

I invite Members to compare and contrast that level of access to the Chancellor and the powers that be at the centre of Government with that given to the millions of people and businesses left without any UK Government support during the pandemic, and in particular the group of the excluded—those 3 million self-employed people who have been left without a penny of Government support. What they would have given for just one of the opportunities that were afforded Mr Cameron, let alone the 10 that he got.

I wonder whether Mr Cameron recalled at any point while brokering those meetings his own hollow words of February 2010. He said:

“We all know how it works. The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way.”

Of course, now it transpires that the Greensill influence in Downing Street during the Cameron years went even further and deeper than we could ever have imagined, with the astonishing revelation that in 2015, one of Britain’s most senior civil servants was given permission to work part-time as an adviser to the board of Greensill while still serving as the UK Government’s head of procurement.

How is it possible that the Cabinet Office gave the green light for the former Government chief commercial officer at the Cabinet Office to become part of Greensill Capital in September 2015 while still working as a supposedly impartial civil servant? Who authorised such a move? Who approved this appointment? Who thought that that was okay? What questions did the people at the Cabinet Office operating the internal conflict of interest policy actually ask to reach the conclusion that it was perfectly all right for one of the UK’s most senior civil servants to twin-track and work for a private finance company whose owner at that point was swanning about Downing Street, dishing out business cards describing himself as a special adviser to the Prime Minister? It beggars belief.

This is crony capitalism at its worst. It stinks. The closer we get to it, the more it reeks, and that is why we will be supporting a full independent and transparent investigation and why we will support this motion when the House divides this afternoon.

On its own, the Greensill scandal would be bad enough. Unfortunately it is far from being an isolated event. It is just the most recent example of the rampant cronyism that is at the heart and centre of this Government, who seem to be stumbling from one scandal to another as the details emerge of a network of those who have become fabulously wealthy during this pandemic not because of their skill or business acumen but because of their political connections. In November last year, the National Audit Office revealed that companies with political connections who wanted to supply the UK with personal protective equipment were directed to a high priority channel, where their bids were 10 times more likely to be successful that those from companies that did not have links to politicians and senior Government officials.

In and of itself, the existence of this high priority channel is quite remarkable, but it becomes far more sinister when we consider that the NAO also reported that there were no written rules for how this high priority channel should operate, meaning that the companies gaining political support had access to hundreds of millions of pounds of public funds, were not subject to the usual procurement rules and could bypass the essential paperwork that in normal times would be a prerequisite for safeguarding against the misuse of public funds.

No matter how we look at this, it is not a good look. I absolutely agree with Professor Liz David-Barrett of the University of Sussex when she said:

“It’s not clear to me why MPs or peers should have any special expertise on whether a company is qualified to provide PPE.”

She is absolutely right. She went on to make the entirely reasonable point that those who can be described as being linked to politically exposed persons are usually treated as being higher risk and therefore deserving of more scrutiny rather than less.

[John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con)]

I asked a parliamentary question about the standards being applied to people and companies on this supposed fast-track list versus others, to check that the same due diligence standards were being applied to both sides and that there was a level playing field. The answer that I got was that they were and that in this respect the playing field was level, so would the hon. Gentleman care to reconsider his point that the same processes do not apply?

[Brendan O’Hara]

What I would love to happen is for the Committee, when it meets, to examine that in detail to find out exactly whether it is true. What is inescapable is that a company is 10 times more likely to receive a Government contract through a political contact. That deserves careful scrutiny and has to be smoked out to the nth degree.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Penrose (Weston-super-Mare) (Con)]

There is widespread consensus across the House that this is a very difficult moment that is causing great concern, but widespread disagreement about how to take things forward. I was greatly struck by a point made by the Chair of the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Hazel Grove (Mr Wragg): what is being proposed is something his Committee already has the powers to do, and he stands ready to fill in any gaps that his Committee feels might be left as a result of the announcement of an inquiry which has just been made.

In the light of those two things, I see no reason to support the motion. However, because there is such an important underlying issue and there are such important and central questions about the future of our democracy, and the probity and legitimacy of our system, there are some important points that need to be made. I hope the Minister will address them.

Today, I have put on my website my submission to the inquiry of the Committee on Standards in Public Life; the committee will make it public in due course, so I am not pre-empting anything. My submission contains a series of proposals for how we should improve things around lobbying and much else. The Minister for the Constitution and Devolution said earlier that post-legislative scrutiny work, which I have contributed to, is already going on around the lobbying Act, but I will briefly share some things that I believe could usefully be done to improve that Act. It has many strengths and does an enormous number of important things tremendously well, but it is now seven years old and it is time to review it and move it on. There are three or four things we could usefully do, and should do in any case, quite apart from the current concerns over Greensill.

First, as we have heard from several Members, disclosure of whom Ministers meet and when is tremendously important as the foundation stone of transparency. Such disclosures do not happen fast enough, they are not complete enough, and they are not mutually comprehensible, machine-readable and searchable enough. As a result, it is much, much too difficult to link up who Ministers have met, whom the lobbyists are working for and who is donating money to which political party. Those three things should be immediately understandable, immediately searchable and immediately identifiable in order for the system to work well—that is not the case at the moment. This is a sensible change and one we should introduce immediately.

The second thing we should do is capture more people in those disclosures. At the moment, they apply to Ministers, rightly, and to senior civil servants—permanent secretaries and the like. However, there are other people whose opinions matter and who will seek to be influenced by lobbyists no matter who is doing the lobbying. Such people include not only political advisers—Spads—but a slew of other civil servants below the rank of permanent secretary. Their meetings, and the topics, should all be disclosed in the same way.

People will have seen that it is proposed that everybody who is lobbying should be included on the register of consultant lobbyists, but that seems to be overkill, because if someone from Rolls-Royce comes to speak to a Minister, we all know on whose behalf they are lobbying—they are lobbying on behalf of Rolls-Royce. Simply putting them on the register of consultant lobbyists will not improve things, whereas disclosing what they talked about, why they talked about it and any conclusions that were reached would make a huge difference.

Equally, there should be disclosure in respect of foreign agents—people working on behalf of foreign powers who are not part of the diplomatic corps of that country.

My final point relates to the about-to-be-reappointed prime ministerial adviser on special interests. If they had the power to launch independent investigations as well, we would not need debates such as today’s because they would have already opined.