Parliamentary Lobbying

Kwasi Kwarteng Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd November 2011 Westminster Hall

[Paul Flynn]

Is this “Mastermind”? I really cannot account for the tens of thousands of votes I have taken part in on clauses of Bills. I shall disregard the hon. Gentleman’s intervention as worthless.

In November last year, the Deputy Prime Minister promised legislation in the current parliamentary Session, which ends next spring, but that has now been delayed and we are likely to have no change until 2013. Let us look at what has been happening since then. Has there been reform? Has there been a new atmosphere in the House? Do we treat lobbyists differently? I wrote to an hon. Member to say that I would mention him this morning. I shall not mention his name or constituency, but I spoke to him at length this morning. What he is doing might be entirely honourable—he takes an income of £30,000 from lobbyists—but it is not acceptable or wise in the present post-scandal Parliament. I believe that suspicions will be aroused and people will say, “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.” There may well be no fire. I am sure the man is behaving in the right way.

[Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)]

Surely in that case it is the job of constituents to vote the offending Member out. The issue is transparency. That is clear and on the books, and everyone can make his or her own judgment.

[Paul Flynn]

Yes, but the problem is that the public will, with some justification, believe the worst of us after the expenses scandal. They had all those assurances before. The excuses will not work, and we need clarity and simplicity in the way we behave. It is entirely wrong for a Member of Parliament to be employed by a company—£30,000 is a substantial amount, many times the minimum wage—and, having taken that money, to raise subjects on which the company concerned is campaigning, and then say, “Of course, this is about the interests of my constituency; it approached me on the issue.” That is what the hon. Gentleman in question says. I believe that the public are right to be suspicious of us, and I refer to the words of the Prime Minister in that regard.

--- Later in debate ---

[Paul Flynn]

I certainly supported all animal welfare groups for many years in my political capacity, which is what my constituents want.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

They were lobbyists.

[Paul Flynn]

Indeed—

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

And they gave you money.

[Paul Flynn]

No, they certainly did not give me money. I hope that the hon. Gentleman is not suggesting that.

--- Later in debate ---

[John Mann (Bassetlaw) (Lab)]

I listened with some amazement to the hon. Member for Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire (Simon Hart) saying that we should be careful, because people will be put off lobbying. I assure him that the people of Bassetlaw do not require paid advisers to lobby their MP eloquently and effectively. We have a word for it—democracy. My problem and my constituents’ problem is that access to MPs, and therefore access for my constituents, is squeezed and blocked by the number of paid lobbyists representing interests, gaining access preferentially and using their contacts, which stops the rest of us getting the access to the Government that we should be getting.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) has used the term “incestuous”. I think that a better term to use is “interchangeable”, because we are becoming a Parliament of paid, professional lobbyists. The reason is that the political class, the advisers and the researchers are entirely interchangeable with the lobby industry—they are literally interchangeable. People spend a couple of years as an adviser, then a couple of years as a lobbyist, then they go back to being an adviser, then they go back to being a lobbyist and then they go into Parliament as an MP. That is the way into this place, although I will not embarrass the dozens and dozens and dozens of colleagues who have entered the House in that way.

[Kwasi Kwarteng]

What does the hon. Gentleman propose as a measure to stop that career development, because it is clear that many of our colleagues have followed the path that he has just described? Is he going to introduce legislation to stop that?

[John Mann]

The hon. Gentleman will want to listen to my speech. He may have a “career” in this House, but I have a vocation here, attempting to represent the interests of my constituents. That seems to me what being a Member of Parliament should be about.

Let me give an illustration of this interchangeability, or “incestuous relationship”, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West has described it. We will go to the top and start with the Prime Minister, because of course the founder of Shandwick lobbyists was Lord Chadlington. Lord Chadlington was the Prime Minister’s patron to get his parliamentary seat in Witney and, as was reported in The Sunday Times in 2007, he offered the Prime Minister his little farm and pool, in which the Prime Minister’s family were invited to swim. Actually, he did a lot more than that, because the little farm is the same building that he gave the Prime Minister and that the Prime Minister used for the first six months that he was a Member of Parliament. And Lord Chadlington is a man who formed a lobbying company, which was eventually sold on to Huntsman—sorry, Huntsworth lobbyists. People can see that Huntsworth does not lobby me that often. [Laughter.]

Huntsworth has its tentacles across the world. One of its subsidiaries is called Quiller. The Minister will be smiling, because Quiller employs lots of people from lots of different political parties, including advisers. I have never heard of it myself, but apparently two of them were advisers to the Labour party; they were a Mr Smith and a Mr Slinger. I never came across them myself. There were also a Mr Alistair Murray, who advised the Liberal Democrat party, and a Mr Parkinson, a Ms Roycroft and a Mr Malcolm Morton, who were all aides to Conservative MPs. Indeed, the Minister will know Mr Malcolm Morton, because he was an adviser to the Minister. Saying that is not to criticise either the Minister or Mr Morton, but it demonstrates the interchangeability between the political world and the lobbying world. That preferential access is gained by personal contacts, which is what is fundamentally wrong with the current situation.

Superannuation Bill

Kwasi Kwarteng Excerpts

Tuesday 7th September 2010 Commons Chamber

[John McDonnell]

Would it not have been useful, though, if we actually had the number so that we could have a properly informed debate, rather than allegation, counter-allegation and, almost, smear?

Ministers were also asked how much public expenditure the imposed scheme would save—my right hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Tessa Jowell) on the Front Bench raised the issue again today—but that information has not been forthcoming. The Secretary of State has said that the amount is impossible to calculate. I have been there; I have advised decision makers—and in the private sector it is exactly the same—and when one is entering a redundancy situation, one does a rough, or even a back-of-an-envelope, calculation of the numbers one is looking to lose, the amounts, the average rates of pay, the distribution of the rates of pay across the service, and therefore roughly what the cost would be. That is not too much to ask before we make a momentous decision on this legislation. In fact, the Public Accounts Committee raised the issue again in July, and the Minister refused to respond.

I deal now with the myth of the highly paid civil service. Some people have already mentioned the subject today, but it is important that we get the point on the record. Even though this has been denied today, it has been part of the Government’s strategy to promulgate the myth of a highly paid civil service.

[Kwasi Kwarteng (Spelthorne) (Con)]

I am unclear about the hon. Gentleman’s position on the status quo. Does he believe that the system is sustainable at current levels, given the economic climate?

[John McDonnell]

I believe that people who are made redundant should be properly compensated and, yes, I believe that the system put forward by the last Government was certainly affordable. I actually believe that the mechanism previous to that is still affordable. However, I accept that there was a need for reform. That is what the unions were negotiating on. It was not the PCS’s fault that the last scheme fell apart; the Government ruled that the process by which it was introduced was unlawful—it is as simple as that.

Let me return to the myth of a highly paid civil service that is promulgated, if not today, certainly elsewhere, including by the media. Yes, there are some highly paid civil servants, and we have dealt with that today. The unions themselves are at the forefront of highlighting the need to tackle high pay and bonuses. However, as had been said, the average civil service pay on which redundancy payments are based is £22,850 a year, compared with £24,970 in the private sector. There are 35,000 civil servants who earn less than £15,000 a year. Some 210,000 people—40% of the civil service—are paid £20,000; 350,000, less than £25,000. The bulk of our civil servants are on low or relatively modest pay.

The other tactic that is used—and it has been paraded again today by Ministers and Members in the debate—is a justification of the attack on the compensation scheme by divide and rule, playing public sector workers off against private sector workers. The Government have argued that many people in the private sector receive only statutory minimum redundancy payments or low-level additional scheme payments, but the reality is that most private sector workers are covered by some form of additional scheme, and are usually protected by its being written into their contract of employment. The fact that the level of many of those compensation payments is disgracefully low in some parts of the private sector is no justification whatsoever for undermining standards in the public sector. It is an argument for raising levels and standards in the private sector, even in these economic times.

The argument that when civil servants take on their job they weigh up the merits of going into the public or private sector has been made today. Wages in the public sector are lower, but the benefits are better, and usually more secure—that is the calculation that is made. If we compare civil service grades with jobs in the private sector, we can see that admin officers in the civil service earn 21% less than people in comparable jobs in the private sector.