Lobbying Transparency (In-house Lobbyists) Bill [HL]

Lord Lansley Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 3rd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lansley (Con)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Viscount, Lord Stansgate. I was much entertained by his speech. He, along with the Bill’s proposer, rightly said that this is not about trying to restrict lobbying activity; rather, it is about trying to introduce transparency in lobbying activity. We want to see lobbying take place.

I am reminded that Benjamin Franklin’s major contribution to the Declaration of Independence during the American Revolutionary War was, of course, as a lobbyist in London and Paris. So, lobbying can play an essential part in creating democracy as well as in sustaining it.

I declare an interest: I am a director of a company that is on the register of consultant lobbyists, in recent times principally only because it acts as a secretariat to development forums and contacts housing and planning Ministers in that context. I am also an adviser to a company in Brussels that is on the EU transparency register. I will come back to the comparison between those two registers. I also declare an interest in that I was the Minister responsible for the 2014 legislation under the coalition Government, and had the benefit of being supported in that task in the other place by the then deputy leader of that House, Tom Brake, who is now the distinguished director of Unlock Democracy and is, I suspect, a supporter of this Bill.

It may surprise the Bill’s proposer that I support in principle what she is attempting to do. I will, I am afraid, irritate her by saying that, while I agree in principle, I disagree with almost every practicality of how she is doing it. The reason why—here, I come back to the comparison between the Westminster register and the EU transparency register—is that it is virtually impossible in the Westminster register to reconcile the quarterly information reports that Ministers make about their meetings with the consultant lobbyists who are on the register to try to see how they directly relate to one another as regards meetings and, especially, content. There is nothing about the content.

I should remind the House that in 2013-14, when the Bill was going through—unusually, this is not reflected accurately in the Library briefing—it was not extended to companies that were not consultant lobbyists because, in 2010, we in the coalition Government had introduced the ministerial reporting requirement. At that time, as far as we were concerned, the ministerial return would make it perfectly transparent if any company met a Minister on its own behalf, because that would appear in the return. The point was that a meeting between a public affairs or consultant firm and a Minister might appear in the Minister’s return, but you did not know on whose behalf they were speaking. That was why the register of consultant lobbying was established and why it had the parameters it did. The intention was not to restrict transparency but to add a transparent register where the quarterly information returned would not provide the information.

Why do I think we need to go further? There is capacity within the Act to go further, which Administrations since 2014 have not used. That capacity is twofold. First, as was mentioned previously, special advisers could be included along with Ministers and Permanent Secretaries, because consultant lobbyists know perfectly well that special advisers are an extremely effective way of avoiding the transparency the register is meant to provide. That is available, through secondary legislation, under Chapter 2 of the Act. Secondly, Chapter 23 gives Ministers the regulatory power to change what information is required to be provided to the register.

There is a very big difference. I will not bore the House by enumerating the differences between the Westminster register return and the EU return, but the latter is far more substantial in terms of what you know about an organisation that is seeking to influence the policy of the European Union. You know on whose behalf it is working, what clients it has, what funding it receives, which band of financial activity it is devoting to this task, and so on.

Why do I think the EU register is now a better way of doing things? Because you can reconcile the content of the lobbying with the organisation that is doing it, on whose behalf it is doing it and what resources it is devoting to it. If we are going to be transparent, we might as well go to the EU register, but it is substantively different from the one in the 2014 Act. The 2014 Act is constructed around regulating the person who lobbies, whereas the EU register is about regulating the nature of the activity itself. It is possible to move the 2014 Act in that direction, and I suggest that we should, but this Bill does not do that sufficiently.

I will give just one example. In paragraph 1(1) of Schedule 1, an exception from the requirement to register is provided if the person conducting the communication with Ministers or Permanent Secretaries does so for a business whose main activity is not lobbying. Most organisations will say, “We’re covered by the exemption. Lobbying is incidental to what we do, so we don’t need to register”. When they do register, they will get very confused about who they register. Should it be the chief executive? Should it be everybody? The EU register does not have that problem—the organisation is registered, not the individuals within it.

I suggest that at this stage, given that it is Second Reading, we say yes to the principle of trying to do something about this, but in Committee we may have to look in some detail at how we do it. It is not about simply putting “in-house lobbyist” alongside “consultant lobbyist”; it is about shifting from consultant lobbying and in-house lobbying to creating a register of organisations that are seeking to influence government legislation and policy. They should be on the register, in the same way as is true of the Brussels register.