Commercial Lobbyists (Registration and Code of Conduct) Bill

Lindsay Hoyle Excerpts

Friday 1st February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Philip Davies]

I appreciate the shadow Minister’s view, but I simply do not agree with it. I do not see where the lack of transparency is. I have no problem telling anyone who asks me about which organisations I have met. If my constituents want to know who I have met—what lobbying firms and organisations—I would have no problem telling them, and I would like to think that that would be the attitude of most of my colleagues on both sides of the House. I do not see where the secretiveness is. If anybody is in an organisation relating to culture, media and sport, whichever side of the argument they are on, I am happy, time allowing, to meet them. As far as I can see, that is perfectly transparent. So I do not see the problem the Bill seeks to solve.

Like my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North, I oppose the Bill in principle. It will be a dog’s dinner, to be honest, and will not deal with any of the perceived problems we have heard about. In fact, the Bill is probably the worst of all dog’s dinners.

Let me turn to clause 1, which deals with the registration of lobbyists, and to the fact that there would be a register and the fees that would be charged. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North had an interesting exchange with the promoter of the Bill, the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife, about fees. The promoter not only intended to be helpful but actually was helpful in setting out the fees that he thought would be charged. However, I share my hon. Friend’s cynicism about fees, in the sense that we all know where they start off but there is no telling where they will end up, particularly when a bureaucracy has an audience that has no choice over whether to join. People will have to join because it will be the law of the land for them to join, so the bureaucracy can end up charging what it likes.

Let me therefore say to the promoter of the Bill—I hope the Minister will hear this too, because if she and the Government are so misguided as to go down this path, we may as well try to make it as good as we can—that it would be helpful to have a cap in the Bill on the fees that could be charged. Just to make a suggestion, perhaps the fees would be no more than the £200 to £300 that the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife seemed to think would be suitable. That would at least remove the issue of people thinking that the fees would go up and up, in a never-ending spiral, to try to satisfy a never-ending bureaucracy that would grow up as a result of this Bill.

We all see how these things work. My hon. Friend the Member for Bury North talked about how such bodies start off being self-funded but end up having to be funded by the state. I think he is probably right. It is not an exact comparison, but we are seeing the start of something similar with the Press Complaints Commission. It is a self-funded body, but it is seen as being too close to the industry it is supposed to be looking after, so people are asking whether that is good enough and whether we need to do something else or get the state more involved. We can see how these things develop, and there is no reason why the same would not happen under this Bill.

I am sure that people will correct me, but it seems to me that clause 2 would introduce the offence of non-registration of one’s organisation. Then there is another criminal offence under clause 3 for breaching the code of conduct—the Labour party created lots of new criminal offences when it was in government and it appears to be continuing the same theme in this Bill. The promoter of the Bill said that we should not worry because everything would be subject to parliamentary scrutiny and approval, and that that was fine—let me say in passing that he has more confidence in parliamentary scrutiny than I do—but as far as I can see the Bill makes no great provision for parliamentary scrutiny. Parliamentary scrutiny is what we are doing now, by discussing the merits of the Bill. It is the council set up under this Bill that would prepare the code of conduct with which, under clause 3,

“those included on the register shall comply”.

It will not be Parliament that draws up the code of conduct, so there will be no parliamentary control there. Once we had passed this Bill, the council would be free to establish the code of conduct as it saw fit and that would be that.

Clause 3 then says, in subsection (2):

“The Secretary of State shall give statutory effect to the code and any revised code by order.”

There is no great parliamentary scrutiny there either. We are basically giving the Secretary of State huge powers to act on his or her own terms and whatever he or she happens to think is the right thing to do. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Bury North, I have a great deal of time for the Minister, but she will know, as we all do, that she will not be the Minister for ever, and we might not get as good a Minister in future. Indeed, we might be left with one who is not as talented and sensible. We might—if we want to be very depressing—end up with the Labour party in government. Who knows what we might end up with at that point? [Interruption.]

[Mr Deputy Speaker (Mr Lindsay Hoyle)]

Order. What I do know is that we are going to get straight back to the Bill and not get into speculation about the next election.

[Philip Davies]

As ever, Mr Deputy Speaker, you are quite right. I was getting carried away with myself—the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife did not help when he invited me to consider the prospect of a Lib Dem Government, which does not even bear thinking about. I will move on, for the sake of my own sanity more than anything else.

The idea that there will be a great deal of parliamentary scrutiny of the terms of the register and the code of conduct is not one that I recognise from my reading of the Bill. Also, I asked earlier who would enforce the criminal offences that the Bill creates. There will no doubt be all sorts of vexatious complaints from people who do not like a particular industry, from people who have been lobbying someone about something, and counter-organisations that do not like a particular industry will put in vexatious complaints here and there. People will be contacting their local police and crime commissioner, their local chief superintendent and their chief constable, and putting pressure on them to investigate this or that case. The police’s resources are stretched enough as it is. I have been opposed to the reductions to the police budget that have taken place over the past few years. Surely at a time when the police budget is going down, the last thing they need is more of these kinds of offences to investigate, when there is much more bread-and-butter crime to be dealt with.

Then we have to consider the Crown Prosecution Service. What will be the chances of getting a conviction for such offences? We all know what the CPS is like. It is very reluctant to take a case to court unless there is a cast-iron guaranteed certainty of a conviction. There will be all sorts of complaints relating to whether the code of conduct has been breached, for example, and it is hard to imagine the CPS taking anyone to court, no matter how much time the police have spent investigating a case.

The whole thing is a complete dog’s breakfast, and that is before we even come to the definition of lobbying in clause 4. Clauses 1 to 3 were bad enough, but clause 4 is the worst clause of all. We have had an interesting debate on the definition of lobbying. There is so much to say on that, and so little time in which to say it. I do not intend to speak at length. As you will know better than anyone, Mr Deputy Speaker, I am always anxious to proceed at a pace on a Friday so that we can get on to the next piece of legislation, and I do not intend to do anything different today. I will make a few remarks about the definition of lobbying, but I just want to say to the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife that I hope his second Bill, which I trust we will get on to in the not-too-distant future, is better than his first one. The first one has not been a good start.

Clause 4 gives the definition of lobbying as

“any activity carried out in the course of a business or employment which are undertaken for financial gain and are designed to influence the Government of the United Kingdom, Parliament, any local authority in England or any member or employee of any of those bodies in formulating its official policy.”

We could spend hours talking about clause 4, because it contains all sorts of loopholes, flaws and omissions. The whole point of anybody approaching a Member of Parliament, on any basis, is to lobby them. It might be to lobby them because the person believes strongly in something, perhaps in their local community, or to lobby them for financial gain. It tends to be one or the other. Someone might come to see me because they want to reduce the amount that they owe to the Child Support Agency, for example. That is a perfectly legitimate thing to come and see an MP about. I cannot always sort such things out, but I will always do my best for my constituents. They are lobbying me for financial gain, of course they are—it is a perfectly legitimate, respectable thing to do.

The hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife seems to be trying to distinguish between different types of financial gain. From his definition in the Bill, he seems to be saying that some kinds of lobbying for financial gain are fine, while other kinds are not so fine and need to have something done about them.