Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Lord Lang of Monkton Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lang of Monkton (Con)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Derby. As we are debating a lobbying Bill, I suppose that I should declare my interests. I had the honour to chair the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which is much concerned with lobbying, and to be a member of the Select Committee on the Constitution. Both, in a sense, are marginal to the central debate surrounding this Bill, but the Select Committee criticised, with good cause, the unnecessary speed and lack of advance consultation with which the Bill was introduced in another place. I believe that undue haste is bad government. The matter was three years in gestation with no draft Bill, no White Paper and no consultation, and unsurprisingly therefore the content has been widely criticised. This, I believe, should be, as the committee said in its report, a matter of significant concern. Indeed, it baffles me that Governments should behave in this unnecessary but highly provocative way.

I know that, because of that, Part 2 of the Bill has aroused great concern—we have heard much of that already in this debate—especially among charities. Of course, Part 3 was always bound to attract a certain amount of interest from the party opposite, but in the time available I propose to confine my remarks to Part 1.

While the Bill aims at professional consultant lobbyists, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments focuses on individuals. We are concerned with Ministers leaving government and senior civil servants leaving or retiring from the Civil Service, and that embraces ambassadors and senior military personnel. One of our tasks in considering their applications to us is to prevent them, when taking up subsequent appointments, whether with industry, commerce or even charities and consultancies, lobbying their former colleagues or government in general for up to two years. We are concerned with a different part of the lobbying spectrum. It is a broad and divisive spectrum, and therefore we have a different definition of lobbying.

The Bill has another definition because it has a different focus: on corporate lobbying consultancies, rather than on individuals. I believe that definition is all in these matters, and a single, comprehensive definition of lobbying is elusive—indeed, perhaps impossible. As the Government’s briefing note says, and as the Minister said today, its aim is to,

“shine the light of transparency on consultant lobbying”,

not to act as a complete regulator of the industry. That creates anomalies, which I shall come to, but it is probably wise to concentrate on that category in the Bill rather than to seek a comprehensive solution, because lobbying comes in all shapes and sizes and from many different sources. They are not all malign or dangerous to parliamentary democracy. Indeed, the taint that has begun to fall on some aspects should not be allowed to be got out of proportion.

Lobbying in one form or another has been around for centuries. Plantagenet kings held their Parliaments in all parts of England, and they summoned those Parliaments not just to raise taxation for their foreign wars and crusades but to hear the pleas, complaints and concerns of their citizens, to entrench their kingship and, indeed, to enact Acts of Parliament and thus to give form to the rule of law over a period of time.

Ever since then, lobbying has been, and is, part of the life-blood of our parliamentary democracy. We cannot and should not seek to choke it off. Therefore, the Bill is surely right not to try to do that but to focus on the main areas of concern. However, shining the light of transparency, in the best Nolan tradition, on one aspect underlines the lack of transparency in others. It may be that the parameters are too tightly drawn, and that needs to be explained because a spotlight on one sector casts a shadow around about it. For example, the Bill does not include in-house public affairs departments or multiclient firms, such as lawyers pursuing the legal interests of their clients. What of consultant lobbyists who do not themselves lobby government, but who train their clients and advise them on whom to lobby and how to go about lobbying?

On the persons who are lobbied, the focus is put on Ministers and Permanent Secretaries or the equivalent, but does not cover special advisers, who are often well placed to influence government policy. What about those civil servants who are below Permanent Secretary level, but are highly expert and influential in particular sectors of, for example, industry, defence or health and may work closely with major companies in those fields? Ministers and Permanent Secretaries are already required to disclose on a quarterly basis the names of those outside government whom they meet. Has the Minister considered whether an easier, and perhaps more effective, approach to the lobbying issue might be to require anyone in government, whether parliamentarian or civil servant, who is lobbied by discernible commercial interest to declare that in a lobbying register?

I welcome the provisions approved in another place and the clarification in Schedule 1 of the position of parliamentarians. In this House in particular, there are many noble Lords with distinguished careers from which they have derived immense expertise and wisdom who could feel inhibited from speaking on their specialist subjects in this House for fear of being thought, quite wrongly, to be lobbying in some way. I hope that the Bill may help to lift that particular shadow.

In courtesy to the many remaining speakers in this debate I have been relatively brief. I conclude by saying that the Bill as it stands, with its register, registrar and enforcement powers, has a net, but one that will probably catch few fish. It may be enough to draw the sting and the taint from the lobbying issue. I hope so; but if not, it will be something to build on.