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

Lord Rooker Excerpts

Tuesday 22nd October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rooker (Lab Ind)]

My Lords, the note handed out by the Minister on 10 October stated:

“The Bill takes forward the Coalition Government’s agreement to enhance transparency around the interaction of certain ‘third parties’ with our political system”.

I did a search of the coalition agreement and no such thing is in there. The best I could find was in Chapter 16, “Government Transparency”, which states:

“We will regulate lobbying through introducing a statutory register of lobbyists and ensuring greater transparency”.

Elsewhere in the coalition agreement, I found lots about social action and,

“the creation and expansion of mutuals, co-operatives, charities and social enterprises”,

and about encouraging involvement in social action. The coalition agreement also boldly claimed that,

“our political system is broken”.

In fixing the broken system, the coalition now seeks to fix the system in a way that Putin in Russia would be proud of, by fixing the date of the general election and then snuffing out civil society in the year before it. That is the reality. It is quite clever: make the law imprecise so that civil society has no certainty, and give the policing of the law to a commission, which said of the Bill when it was first published in the Commons:

“We do not think it is appropriate for us to have the sort of wide discretion over the meaning and scope of the regulatory regime that the Bill as drafted appears to provide”.

The replacement wording now needs very rigorous testing in your Lordships’ House because new activities are covered for the first time.

As part of the government “fix” of civil society, the Bill introduces a major change in the Electoral Commission’s regulatory remit. This was not forewarned to the commission. No consultation took place with the board or the accounting officer and no rationale has been given. The House will need to test this when we debate Clause 35.

I say to the House that the same group of Ministers in charge of this Bill in the other place changed part of the remit of another regulator, the Food Standards Agency, in 2010—overnight and without warning—as regards food adulteration. Since then, we have had the horsemeat adulteration scandal, and in recent weeks the 2010 changes have been condemned by both the National Audit Office and the Defra Select Committee. We have been warned.

Of course, this worried Government believe that the Bill will not curtail freedom of expression by campaign organisations. That was in the note from the Minister, but those affected by the Bill must have another version of it. The Bill was not just rammed through the supine House of Commons by the coalition Government; it was printed and published the day before the Summer Recess. There was no consultation prior to publication and it was slipped into Commons Committee in the black hole of the two-week September sitting. The Government exercised bad faith by promising government amendments a week before Report but delivering them only two days beforehand.

The bodies affected by Part 2 of the Bill, which is all I am speaking about, will in the main be registered charities. This means, as has been said, that they are already regulated regarding all activities that they undertake, including during the election period. They claim that the Bill will place extremely tight restraints on their work 12 months before the election. It is also a direct threat to some of the most valued democratic principles, such as freedom of expression, and it undermines democratic participation by restricting civil society involvement in debates. Even now, we do not know whether charity or community volunteers’ time will be costed and included in the new time limits. There is still doubt about that. Assurances given by Ministers in the Commons regarding the ability to support specific policies have not been met.

The Bill rigs the financial limits by effectively counting twice the money spent if organisations are in coalition. This is a massive deterrent to, say, a charity for the homeless working in conjunction with an environmental charity to seek a new housing development—or it might stop two or more charities working together and joining their back-office functions to save money. Furthermore, the Government broke the national compact regarding consultation on matters affecting the third sector, and they cannot deny it. As has been said, the Bill creates a chilling effect on campaigning activity.

The Commons was treated with contempt, says the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee. At paragraph 3 of its report, it says:

“This is an object lesson in how not to produce legislation”.

It is the case that any and every organisation that seeks to influence public opinion, whether through campaigning or advocacy, in the 12 months before a general election, either directly or as a consequence of its actions, is now going to be covered. What a gift to those who conduct sham democracies around the world. Christian Aid cannot run its Make Poverty History campaign again in a general election year; the Royal British Legion’s Time To Do Your Bit campaign in 2010 cannot be repeated; and the Countryside Alliance will likely not be able to function at all in the 12 months before a general election. We are informed by NAVCA, the National Association for Voluntary and Community Action, whose members support 160,000 local charities and community groups, that the campaign it ran, Real Powers for Communities, could also not be run. That campaign, believe it or not, was designed to highlight the support that the coalition Government’s Localism Act could give to charities and groups. Is this all a mistake? Actually, I do not think so.

The Bill makes virtually no change regarding commercial lobbyists but punishes charities and other civil society groups. As has been said, we need to be mindful that those belonging to charities and civil society groups far outnumber those belonging to political parties. I wonder why that is.

For all the rhetoric, many members of the coalition have little or no regard or respect for civil society. The big society is okay when it is running a park or volunteering for the Olympics but not when it wants to speak up. That is the reality. If our political system is broken, this is not the way to mend it.

I suspect, and certainly hope, that this unelected House has more concern about freedom, plurality, good governance and, indeed, the rule of law than the Commons at the present time. Given the lack of pre-legislative scrutiny, the inadequate scrutiny that the Commons gave and the concerns of the regulator, if this House does not now do a decent job, we might as well ask Clegg to come back and abolish us, as he was planning to do in the first place.

It appears that the new constituency controls may be completely unenforceable, as we have heard, because of the combination of the lower registration threshold and spending limits, new constituency limits and the wider scope of regulated activity. Far more allegations of breaches of the rules will come forward in the heat of an election, as has happened in the past, yet the Government have still to explain how they think the Electoral Commission will enforce these new constituency controls. That was not even debated in the Commons.

I realise, of course—and I am not trying to win friends and influence people in the coalition at the moment—that the coalition has rigged this place to create a government majority for the first time, but it is not too late to make this a better Bill. We have not yet been given a list of issues from the previous general election, where there was concern regarding civil society, to justify this draconian measure. In fact, 33 non-campaign groups registered at the previous election. In total, they spent £3 million in the year before the election. The three main political parties spent £31 million in that year. Where is the problem? I repeat: £3 million was spent in the year before by those non-campaigning groups that registered. Indeed, the only issue that caused me concern at the previous general election was when I obtained a copy of the Conservative manifesto and saw on page 14 a full-page portrait of a named charity chief executive, who extolled the policies set out on the following pages.

In fact, at the last election I was, as is known, working for the Government as chair of a non-ministerial department, the Food Standards Agency. I was not on the Labour Whip and, as such, I did not undertake canvassing or any public speaking. So when I saw the Tory manifesto at that time, I was actually shocked. It was certainly a major lapse in the acceptable standards of conduct that one would expect from a registered charity. The person who signed off that manifesto also fell below the required standards. Frankly, I am not prepared to take any lectures about the moral high ground of non-party campaigning from this governing coalition when it pulled a stunt like that at the previous election.

Part 2 will have to come out or be substantially modified. From my three years’ experience of the coalition and of the way that we have been treated over some Bills, I am not going to trust any offer until I see it on the Order Paper.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

I take the point that the noble Baroness makes. She has said to me off the Floor of the House that this ought to be reinforced by making sure that in the notes of the meeting there is a reference to the subject of the meeting so that those in the press and outside who want to understand what happened are informed which of the clients the meeting was about. This is therefore a step towards transparency. It does not claim to provide complete transparency on all contacts between outside proponents of particular policies and Ministers or officials. If we were to do that, we would find ourselves with a huge amount of information of the sort that the NSA loves to collect for the United States, but might not be beneficial to British politics. If we were to include all lobbyists, as some of the answers to the consultation wished, and included all charity lobbyists, I think that the answer from the charities sector would also be very negative. However, charities do have lobbyists. For example, Oxfam has people who actively lobby the public and the Government. Therefore, we have to be a little careful over how universal one needs to be. That is the importance of starting—perhaps others will want to go further—with a register of consultant lobbyists and of their major contact with the Government.

The noble Lord, Lord Norton, suggested that we should start at the other end by asking all officials and Ministers to register whom they have met. I see no reason why, in a sense, as transparency develops, the two should not come together. I have just filled in my quarterly return of whom I have met, including a number of people who could be described as lobbyists. Indeed, Saferworld was one of those that I reported on for obvious reasons: as I represent the Foreign Office, I talk to Saferworld and other such charities. That is part of what we already do.

The question of how far down the list one should go and whether it should include special advisers has also been raised. That clearly is a question to which we will return in Committee, and I look forward to that debate. However, I am conscious that the major concerns are on Part 2, to which I now turn.

I assure the noble Lord, Lord Phillips, that a Keeling schedule will be available well before Committee for everyone who wishes to look at it. I say with due confidence that, since he first asked me that question, I have discovered what a Keeling schedule is.

[Lord Rooker]

With respect, that is a worry, because that is the kind of thing that the Minister should have been advised about before the Bill was introduced. For the Minister to say now—and I am not being personal about this—that he did not know what a Keeling schedule was when we have a major constitutional Bill, and it is the norm to do it this way and has been for a long time, shows a failure of those who have been advising Ministers.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

It shows my ignorance more than anything. The Bill team has a Keeling schedule, and it will be distributed. Of course, the Bill team has a Keeling schedule—it is part of what Bill teams have to do in preparing the Bill. Since this is a rather complicated amendment of PPERA, that is what we are into.

I stress, as has been stressed by a number of noble Lords, that this is an amendment to PPERA. It is about election law, not about charities law; charities are not the main target and not those mainly affected by it. The most recent Electoral Commission report on this said:

“The Commission believes that, where significant non-party campaigning takes place, this should be transparent and properly regulated ... We think these controls on campaigning that is not explicitly ‘party political’ are a necessary part of the regime. Without them, it would be easy to evade the rules by framing political campaigning in terms of policies. For similar reasons, we do not think the rules should exclude particular types of organisations, such as charities or voluntary bodies, as this would create opportunities for political campaigners to evade the rules and would reduce transparency. However, the necessarily wide scope of the definition of controlled spending makes it particularly important to consider the overall impact on campaigners of Part 2 of the Bill, including the registration thresholds and spending limits”.

That is what we will focus on in Committee—but it is correct that we should include this in the scope of the Bill.

I was quite surprised—