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

Paul Flynn Excerpts

Tuesday 8th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Jenkin]

I hear what my right hon. Friend says, but it is not generally asserted that, for example, correspondence between him representing his constituents and a Minister is privileged, because it would be difficult to prove that that constituted proceedings in Parliament. I do not think, therefore, that we can seek to extend parliamentary privilege in the Bill. What we do as our job to represent our constituents is clearly not intended to be included in the regulation of lobbying. It would be intolerable if Members of Parliament had to register as lobbyists in order to represent their constituents, or indeed represent any other interests. I will return to that point later, if my right hon. Friend will forgive me.

[Paul Flynn (Newport West) (Lab)]

The hon. Gentleman will recall that in the previous Parliament there was concern about the way that certain Members were behaving, and two were summoned to the Committee. One was receiving £75,000 to represent a company; the other was receiving £105,000. They received those sums entirely to lobby on behalf of a commercial organisation. One of their excuses was, “The organisation has employees in my constituency.” But surely it is the core job of an MP to lobby for his constituents, and if MPs are offered money to do it, that should be seen for what it is, which is a bung, an inducement or a bribe.

[Mr Jenkin]

I recognise the sentiment the hon. Gentleman expresses, and I share his outrage at any abuse that he suggests took place, but we have our own rules in this House. We adjudicate on these matters, and in fact we apply very harsh terms to people we believe to be guilty of paid advocacy. For many decades, since 1945 or even earlier, paid advocacy has been utterly abhorrent to this House. No longer do we have MPs sitting in the railway interest, as they did during the 19th century. The important distinction here is that we regulate that from within this House, as proceedings of this House. We do not need or require the courts to interfere in those matters. I do not think we are providing any leniency to Members that the courts would not also afford. Indeed, it might be far harder to obtain a prosecution in court for a matter such as that than to create in this House the right atmosphere of discipline and self-discipline that we expect from all hon. Members.

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[Mr Thomas]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman, and I want to explain how those two paragraphs arrived in the Bill.

[Paul Flynn]

May I raise with my hon. Friend a question that he himself has raised? There is a difference between this House and the other House. There was a recent investigation into the conduct of a Member of the House of Lords who was behaving in a way that would be condemned in this place as reprehensible, but the Lords have not come to a final conclusion. It relates to a Lord who was campaigning and lobbying on behalf of the Cayman Islands. The excuse given was that there is a difference between the two Houses because Members of the House of Lords are not paid and so are entitled to go around making money by hiring themselves out to the highest bidder. Surely that is a matter of public scandal that must be addressed.

[Mr Thomas]

If my hon. Friend, who is an expert on these questions, will bear with me, I will come later to some of the issues relating to the House of Lords and the extent to which the Bill affects the performance of its Members.

I accept that it was probably not the intention of the Leader of the House that Members of Parliament should be affected in the way that I and other Members who have intervened have described and that that was a result of the Bill being so badly rushed. Had Members on both sides of the House not raised concerns, these sensible amendments would not have been put forward by the Government.

As I indicated, I want to ask a couple of questions about the impact of the Government’s amendments and whether any lessons have been learnt from the process by which the offending paragraphs ended up in the Bill. As several Members made clear on Second Reading, and as the standards committee spelled out, there was a series of concerns about the inclusion of paragraphs 1 and 2 to schedule 1 and their impact on parliamentary privilege. The Committee’s helpful report noted the evidence that had been received by the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege in March this year. The evidence from Lord Judge underlined the risk of including specific exemptions for MPs in this, or indeed any, Bill. It also underlined the concern that future legislation relating to Members without such an exemption might inadvertently affect parliamentary privilege.

Did the Leader of the House consider that report from the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege, and if not, why not? Did he take any advice on the inclusion of those paragraphs before signing them off and presenting the Bill to Parliament? Does he now accept that pre-legislative scrutiny, and perhaps a further period of public consultation with the industry and its stakeholders, might have prevented such a considerable error?

A further concern the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Privilege highlighted relates to the inclusion of a definition of who is resident in an MP’s constituency using the 1983 Act’s description of who can and cannot vote.

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[Mr Speaker]

Has the right hon. Gentleman finished? He has. I thank him and call Mr Paul Flynn.

[Paul Flynn]

It is a rare occasion when one feels that the right hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes) has been disappointingly brief. [Laughter.] I cannot remember any similar occasion.

I rise with a sense of excitement about the Bill because anyone who speaks to it will go down in parliamentary history as partaking in one of the worst Bills that has ever appeared before the House. Students of the future will study this with amazement—to think that a Bill of this kind could ever be introduced. Speaking to the amendments is rather like trying to chromium-plate a pile of horse dung, imagining that we could improve it in any way.

I feel sympathetic, as was said from the Front Bench, towards the hon. Member for Norwich North (Miss Smith), who as the responsible Minister was given the gloomy task of introducing this Bill to our Select Committee in July, on the last day before we went off for the summer recess. She had a torrid time, trying to defend the indefensible. I said that I was sympathetic to her, given that she was sitting there, garlanded with an albatross of nonsense. I am delighted to know that she has given up and gone to spend more time with the truth, having escaped from the Front Bench. I wish her well in her future career; it could not have got worse. I am sure that when she was assailed by this blizzard of e-mails—not from just 10 or 20 charities, but from hundreds—she realised how damaging the Bill was. These amendments would go some way to improving it.

As was said earlier, we should see the wheeze. Of course no hon. Member behaves badly; nothing done in this House or the other place would be dishonourable. The whole purpose behind the Bill and why it was introduced was to address hints of a scandal. It was not yet established, but there was a fear that a scandal had taken place, involving the country of Fiji. The matter has still not been settled, but there was also an equally minor scandal involving a Member of the other place with respect to the Cayman Islands.

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[Paul Flynn]

I would not want to deny the hon. Gentleman—a possible future Deputy Speaker of the House—that privilege. I believe that he is one of the candidates. It is fascinating to get these invitations. One from an hon. Lady said, “Vote for me and you won’t have to put up with me on the Benches. I will be silenced.” Therefore, we are voting for the one we most want to silence as a Deputy Speaker and we think is most loathsome. It is a hard task, because we have a rich choice.

We were waiting for the Bill. We were promised it on 10 March 2010. This was going to be the great crusading Parliament against lobbying. This was going to be the new scandal. Nothing happened: comatose for nearly three years. Suddenly there was a scandal on the way and the Government decided to act. The Bill was conceived in haste. It was written in fear and in malice. The legislative process has been conducted with incompetence. These modest amendments will make some improvements but it will be one of the many Bills that will go through the House. We are very poor at legislating.

We should look at the history. During the 13 years of the Labour Government, 75 Bills went through all their stages and were never put into practice. A permanent secretary has that figure. We have this disease. If we see a problem, what do we do? Dogs bark, children cry, politicians legislate. This is a piece of utterly futile legislation. It does not deal with the problem. It misses 97% of the problem but it takes a spiteful side-swipe at bodies that are blameless such as charities and trade unions. The Government are trying to save corporate lobbyists, who are doing the greatest damage, from the bureaucracy, and they have hit out at people who are doing no damage whatever. They are reducing bureaucracy for one and increasing needlessly bureaucracy for the other. This is an awful Bill.

[Mr Lansley]

As has been demonstrated, the effect of new clause 7 and the other amendments proposed by the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) would be to bring into the register of lobbyists not just consultant lobbyists but all those who are in-house lobbyists. She knows that the approach we have taken is not to seek to create a register of everyone who engages in lobbying, which would be a very long list, but to ensure that the details of the meetings of the key decision makers—Ministers and permanent secretaries—are published and by extension we understand who is lobbying whom as far as the key decision makers are concerned. She rather shot her own fox by talking about the big six energy firms. The reason that earlier this week The Independent was able to run the story about the number of times that Ministers have met representatives of the big six energy firms is that we as a Government for the first time have published details of Ministers’ diaries. Putting the names of the big six energy firms in a register of lobbyists adds no information: we know who they are; we know on whose behalf they are lobbying; and we now know—as a result of this Government, not the previous Government—when they are meeting the key decision makers. That is clear. In this Bill we are extending transparency and addressing the key failing, and we are doing so not through having a large list of the kind the Opposition amendments would create.

New clause 7 proposes exceptions to the definition of those who are treated as consultant lobbyists. It may be of comfort to the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central (Chi Onwurah) and the Opposition that there are some sensible exclusions from their concept of lobbying, but all those sensible exclusions are already provided for in the Bill. Some of the proposed exclusions are less sensible, however. In their explanation for amendment 70, the Opposition say that they seek to remove the reasonable requirement that consultant lobbyists must be VAT-registered, which is aimed at protecting small businesses engaged in consultant lobbying, and to insert in its place a requirement that the lobbyist be a

“sole trader or company, or employee of such a person”.

The amendment therefore excludes charities, partnerships and any other type of body a lobbyist might be. The Opposition would therefore reduce the effectiveness of the register in relation to consultant lobbyists.

The Chair of the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee said that we took a long time in responding to its report. That was because it was arguing for this large-scale regulatory structure for lobbying. We looked carefully over a substantial period of time at whether satisfactory definitions could be achieved, and they cannot. We would end up with very large-scale registers that tell us very little that is new.

Opposition amendments 73 to 76 and 83 would alter the definition in clause 2 with the intention of extending the scope of the register to those who lobby each of the many categories of people, including special advisers, senior civil servants, Members of either House of Parliament, parliamentary staff and non-departmental public bodies.

Amendment 97, tabled by members of the Select Committee, offered a more limited expansion of the scope, aimed at including special advisers, the senior civil service and, in the case of amendment 98, parliamentarians. Amendment 116, in the name of my right hon. Friend the Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Simon Hughes), would extend the scope to special advisers.

The register is designed to complement the existing Government transparency regime whereby Ministers and permanent secretaries proactively publish details of their meetings with external organisations. It is intended to focus on communications with the key decisions makers in Government, not on the large-scale surrounds of people who are intermediaries. There is a question as to the value of increasing the scope of the ministerial transparency regime. Is there really value in collecting and publishing data on every meeting of every one of almost 5,000 senior civil servants?

Amendment 71 would add the term “electronic” to the concept of written communications. I can assure the House that such communications—including a fax, an e-mail, a text message, and even a personal tweet or BlackBerry Messenger conversation—are already currently captured by the definition of communications.

Turning to European legislation, amendment 72 would not be effective in the terms in which it is drafted. We do not make European legislation, but lobbying in relation to it or lobbying the policy of the Government in relation to it would be captured.

There is one Government amendment in this group: amendment 30. It provides that a person does not fall within the scope of the definition of consultant lobbyist if they carry out a mainly non-lobbying business and any consultant lobbying communication they make is incidental to those activities. Paragraph 3(2) of schedule 1 defines non-lobbying activities as any activities other than the making of communications about policy, legislation or contracts and tenders and so forth to any Executive, including the UK Government, the devolved Administrations, UK local government, any national Government, and any institution of the EU. This amendment will clarify that the reference to the lobbying of the Northern Ireland Executive in paragraph 3 includes the lobbying both of Ministers and their Departments. When the time comes, I shall wish to move that amendment on behalf of the Government, but I now give the hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne Central a moment to respond.