Commercial Lobbyists (Registration and Code of Conduct) Bill

John Stevenson Excerpts

Friday 1st February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Thomas Docherty]

Some of the comments are a matter of public record. On some I have kept my council until an appropriate opportunity. Of course, it is always a privilege to speak in the House.

Mr Cummings specialises in planning applications. Anyone who reads Private Eye—which I know many members of the Government are caught reading furtively on the tube on their iPads—will be familiar with the section “Rotten Boroughs”. I was talking to an hon. Friend of mine about the Bill a couple of weeks ago. He recounted that when he was a councillor, he once had a meeting with a developer about a planning application and at the end of the meeting the developer said, “Oh, by the way, here’s something for you to read,” and left an envelope on the desk. Some Members can see where this is going. When the developer had left the room, the councillor turned to his officials, packed the meeting up and opened the envelope to find a number of sheets of paper, each with a common theme of £20.

That would probably be covered by the Bribery Act, although the Minister may wish to clarify that when she responds. That was an isolated case involving a developer, but the problem is still too widespread. I know that many hon. Members have served in local authorities and know that a small number of developers and practitioners of lobbying think such behaviour is acceptable. I want to talk about one such type of behaviour.

Mr Cummings specialises largely but not exclusively in planning and has worked for a number of companies. It is interesting that on his website, invictapa, he does not list who his clients are. This goes back to the lively debate we had earlier on registration. It is important that people are able to see who public affairs lobbyists are working for, and I will come to that in more detail later.

There is a good debate to be had about what happens if someone phones and purports to represent, say, Taylor Wimpey, and you agree to meet them because you are, for example—because he happened to catch my eye—the hon. Member for Carlisle (John Stevenson). If someone phones and says, “My boss works for Taylor Wimpey. He would like to have a meeting with your boss regarding a possible development on the outskirts of Carlisle,” and the researcher says to the hon. Member for Carlisle, “I think it would be interesting to meet this person,” we would all expect that when the hon. Gentleman meets that individual, he is clear whether the person works for Taylor Wimpey directly and therefore can answer questions about Taylor Wimpey more widely, or whether the person is employed as a third-party lobbyist specifically on that project. That is not unreasonable.

[John Stevenson (Carlisle) (Con)]

rose—

[Thomas Docherty]

Of course I give way to the hon. Gentleman, having mentioned him.

[John Stevenson]

What, then, does one do with people who are, say, planning specialists? That is their profession and they are employed by a business to act on its behalf in connection with planning matters.

[Thomas Docherty]

The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point. Let me segue slightly into that. For the benefit of hon. Members, “segway” is a type of transport that is currently fashionable with many younger people who work outside the House. More and more planning companies are setting up public affairs arms to lobby on planning applications. That is particularly true in Scotland under the new Scottish planning policy, where for a development over a certain size—say, 50 houses—a public consultation must be undertaken.

The hon. Gentleman is right to say that if a planning consultancy is directly undertaking the lobbying to influence and shape the policy of the councillors, it should be covered, but if a planner attends a meeting to provide technical answers, that is factual, in the same way as architects and transport consultants would provide technical answers. To return to my example of retailers, if Sainsbury’s brings its head of sourcing along to answer technical questions, nobody outside the House believes that they should be captured by the legislation. I hope that answers the hon. Gentleman’s question.

Let me return to the example of Mr Cummings. There is an assumption that a person who is going to meet someone should be transparent about their status and the purpose of the meeting. So the hon. Member for Carlisle has agreed to meet someone because they purport to be an employee of a company that he would trust. Trust is an important factor. I know that many hon. Members have a principled view that they will not meet third-party lobbyists. I respect that viewpoint; they are entitled to it. It is vital that both in-house and third-party lobbyists are registered, so that others can go on to the company’s website, type in such-and-such a name and see if they work for Taylor Wimpey, in this example, or if they work for a third party. The hon. Gentleman may not have agreed to the meeting if the person was a third-party lobbyist.

Once the hon. Gentleman has agreed to a meeting about a particular planning application—he might serve on a Select Committee and be approached in that role, or he might be a Front Bencher with a particular policy responsibility and a company might approach him and say, “That is within our bivouac. I am keen to meet to make our points to you,”—it is crucial that the hon. Gentleman is comfortable that he knows who that individual actually works for. What should not happen is for the first 45 minutes of the meeting to be spent on the subject matter on which he has agreed to meet, but then he is ambushed for the last 15 minutes because the person says, “By the way, I also happen to represent another completely different company—“Landmines R Us” in my made-up example—and while I’ve got you here, I just want to say a few words about it.”

That is inappropriate behaviour. Under the APPC code, which to an extent is motherhood and apple pie, but none the less is a step in the right direction, that is not allowed. When a meeting is requested, it must be clear whether a consultant works for the company that they purport to represent or is employed as a third party on its behalf, and the meeting should be on the agreed subject matter only. If an hon. Member wishes to raise a further matter, that is for them, but Members should not be ambushed.

When Mr. Cummings is pitching to clients or has a client, he will often play off his contacts. To use a legal analogy, we would expect that in advocating a case the success of those who are fortunate enough to be lawyers—I use my brief loosely—would be based on the strength of the argument, not on whether they know the judge. If a lawyer told a constituent that he should hire him because he knows the judge and has another case in front of the same judge and so can have a bit of a word with him, I think the Minister would probably agree that that would not be acceptable. It is unethical and immoral to both clients falsely to purport to have a level of influence or access to a Member of Parliament or councillor on one case and to use it for another case. Having spoken to colleagues on both sides of the House, it is probably fair to say that if they were aware that people such as Mr Cummings were using their access to raise other issues, they would be horrified.

Some colleagues will recall that the Cabinet Office introduced a Bill earlier in this Session to reform the House of Lords. For a reason that I never fully understood the Government dropped that, regrettably. I spoke in the debate and said that I thought that the Lords Temporal should be removed in a reformed House of Lords.

--- Later in debate ---

[James Duddridge]

I totally agree with my hon. Friend and I cannot evidence in the Bill any thought or consideration of different sizes of businesses. There is a massive difference between Asda or the might of a FTSE 100 company that might be involved in lobbying, and one or two individual businesses. There is no consideration of whether the fee should be fixed for all businesses, fixed per person, or be a threshold to allow businesses to move into the sector without signing up. There is no consideration of corporate structures. Gone are the days where we have one simple limited company or one simple plc. Many companies have subsidiaries, are wholly owned, separately floated or floated in different jurisdictions. There is a whole level of complexity that will make some details of the Bill difficult to iron out.

There are also difficulties in relation to an organisation that is trying to get round some of the proposed rules. People are not always well meaning and will look for holes in the legislation and see whether they can register offshore, have consultants or separate out the lobbying into a subsidiary area. They will see whether they can disguise what they are doing and define their lobbying activity by way of a consultation or public relations, rather than public affairs.

The consultation said that a number of questions had been raised, such as the definition of lobbying and lobbyists. I am concerned about that and about who will be included and excluded in the register. It strikes me, for example, that trade unions should form part of the provisions. One clear role of a trade union is to lobby organisations and the Government for better working conditions, pay and arrangements, and that is quite proper and a healthy part of democracy. Clearly, trade unions are lobbyists, but they are certainly not commercial and nor, on the other end of the scale, are they charities. They do not belong to those two categories and are neither one thing nor the other. We need to define that, and I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for North East Somerset (Jacob Rees-Mogg) that we have not done that.

[John Stevenson]

Does my hon. Friend agree that one fundamental flaw with the Bill is that it contains no specific definition of lobbyist?

[James Duddridge]

Absolutely, and I would not want to see the Bill go into Committee without such a definition. I would want the Government to define what a lobbyist is—perhaps the way forward is to define a lobbyist by what it is not, rather than by what it is, so that we have absolute certainty that certain organisations will be exempt from the provisions. I am sure that we will have a debate; I am sure Labour Members will want trade unions to be exempt from the register, although I would quite like them to remain on it. We might wish to give preference to and exempt some trade organisations, but we will want others to be very much part of such a register so that we have the transparency sought by the Bill.

I was glad that the consultation received more than 260 responses. Lord Wallace of Saltaire from the other place has eloquently summarised the feedback. At one point, the Government summary of replies to the consultation document states

“in effect, a lot of those consulted regard themselves as a legitimate part of the political process but regard everybody else as lobbyists”.

That is spot on, and quite often people who come to us talk in similar language. Lord Wallace said that although there is need for reform,

“there is a quite remarkable dissensus among respondents”

I was unfamiliar with the word “dissensus”, but I can work out what he means and I broadly agree with his conclusion.

I look forward to seeing the Government response to the consultation. I believe that some of the inputs to the consultation have been published, but I could not find that, so I assume the Government have not yet responded, given that the consultation was in January 2012—[Interruption.] The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, my hon. Friend the Member for Norwich North (Miss Smith) is kindly passing me a document, but I am unclear whether it is a summary of responses or the Government position. Flipping through, it seems to be the summary of responses, rather than the Government response to those responses.