Lobbying (Transparency) Bill [HL]

Lord Bew Excerpts

Friday 9th September 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe, for his initiative in bringing the Lobbying (Transparency) Bill. I say immediately that I speak as chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, which was established 21 years ago by John Major, with the objective of strengthening integrity and honourable behaviour in our public life. In 2013 we published a document on precisely this topic, Strengthening Transparency Around Lobbying. Indeed, next week we will publish a cognate document on ethics for regulators. As the noble Lord, Lord Brooke, said, there will be an explosion of activity in this area as a consequence of Brexit. I am grateful to him for creating a context for discussion about this important issue.

This is an extraordinarily complex issue. There are few, if any, easy answers. The committee has spent hours and hours of discussion trying to find viable ways forward. In the 2013 document I mentioned, at paragraph 2.7, the committee acknowledged the importance of lobbying to our public life. It says:

“Lobbying plays a vital role in the political process as it enhances informed debate”,

and provides “exact information” that,

“can be fed into the policy development process”.

Having said that, I remind the House that this week we have had excellent debates on the disabled and on charities. Everyone accepts that lobbyists are central to providing information in this field and to those debates. There is no challenge to that lobbying, even though one could say that these cases, like all cases, are in a sense self-interested. The truth is that the issues that are more sensitively felt are around what one might call crony capitalism, but it is worth saying that no serious democracy in this complex age can operate without a lively lobbying culture. We accept this in many areas of our life.

Our 2013 document suggested a series of practical steps that would strengthen transparency around the lobbied, so that officials, Ministers or Peers would be able to demonstrate probity to the outside world. The Bill before us in some way enhances that, in that it attempts to bring about greater clarity on who is or is not a lobbyist.

We recommended timely, detailed disclosure of all significant meetings and hospitality involving external attempts to influence policy discussions. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, referred to this and to the work the Government have done in this area. We should acknowledge some positive improvements. He may concede that on timeliness of disclosure the Government’s record was not wonderful. There has been a lively correspondence between my office and the Cabinet Office on this point over the last two years. If we are to have this disclosure, which is helpful and has been a positive development, it needs to have as its counterpart no dumping of information on dead days, which has happened. That is counterproductive because we have a journalistic class that will not be deceived by such manoeuvres and will none the less go through documents, even if they are dumped on the eve of a public holiday at 4.30 pm, as has happened. We also argued, and the point has been made today, that:

“Disclosure arrangements should be widened to cover special advisers and senior civil servants as well as Ministers, Permanent Secretaries and Departmental Boards”.

We made other suggestions. I will pick out only one, because people will remember the public furore which, unfortunately, developed in this context. This is the suggestion—the obvious point—that Select Committees have become more and more important in recent years and the role of the chairmen of Select Committees more and more sensitive. We asked for consideration to be given to the idea that chairs of Select Committees should have,

“additional restrictions in relation to conflicts of interests and providing explicitly that Members should not accept all but the most insignificant or incidental gift, benefit or hospitality or payments from professional lobbyists”.

In the case of Select Committee chair positions, since we issued our advice there have been unfortunate public furores on exactly this point. My own view is that if there had been a more serious engagement or a debate on that issue, we might have avoided some incidents that have probably contributed to the problem that many noble Lords are aware of—the apparent decline in trust in politics.

I will also say something about this House. The House of Lords responded more firmly in certain respects than the Commons to some of our recommendations. I pay particular tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Hill, the then Leader of the House, for that. For example, this House lowered the threshold for registering gifts and hospitality from £500 to £140, and introduced a new code of conduct for members of staff, with requirements to register interests in parliamentary lobbying and to abstain from lobbying or using access to Parliament to further outside interests in return for either payment or reward. The way in which the Lords responded—and that is only part of the Lords response—was helpful because at least in those areas we have not had big problems in the past two or three years. So it is possible to take certain types of surgical action to deal with some of these issues.

It has to be accepted that transparency is not the cure-all that I suspect 20 years ago my committee believed it would be. We have vastly increased transparency in our public life. My own view is that it is absurd to claim that we have lower standards in our public life than in the past, if only because that vastly increased transparency would make it almost impossible for those lower standards to exist—leaving aside the fact that I do not believe that human nature has deteriorated. None the less, we have a problem that there is massive evidence of public malaise with politics and the way in which it works, and a feeling among the public that it is all an insiders’ game.

Therefore, what I have to say in defence of transparency is limited. I will argue for greater transparency in this area. It will not take all the tricks. It is necessary simply as a deterrent to bad behaviour. That is its principal role and a more limited assurance to the public. The public, to be honest, will not be as impressed as we would like them to be. The obvious example of this is how the great clarity that now exists around MPs’ expenses has not had the benign effect on public opinion that many people quite reasonably hoped for.

I will conclude with a point that many Members have referred to: the tone of the new Government on this issue. The Government have raised hopes that there will be a more critical tone with respect to the operations of crony capitalism. There are really very complex questions here. We have heard enough already today to show how some of the detail in this Bill, and in the original Bill, works and how some of it does not and may not work. Already we can see how difficult it is to get the balance right. But this question cannot be left exactly where it is. There is no doubt in my mind that expectations have now been raised by the new Prime Minister—the tone of her speech in particular—which will require some public response and some movement by the Government in this area during this Parliament.