Lobbying of Government Committee

Rachel Reeves Excerpts

Wednesday 14th April 2021 Commons Chamber

[Rachel Reeves (Leeds West) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That the following Standing Order shall have effect until 31 December 2021:

Investigation into the Lobbying of Government Committee

(1) There shall be a select committee, called the Investigation into Lobbying of Government Committee, to consider:

(a) the effectiveness of existing legislation to prevent the inappropriate lobbying of Ministers and Government;

(b) the rules governing all public officials regarding conflicts of interest;

(c) the circumstances surrounding the appointment of Lex Greensill as an adviser in Government and the process by which Greensill Capital was approved for commercial arrangements with Government departments and other public sector bodies; and

(d) the role Government played in facilitating the commercial relationship between Greensill Capital and the Gupta Family Group Alliance.

(2) It shall be an instruction to the Committee that it:

(a) considers whether there are robust transparency and accountability procedures in place and whether existing rules are being adhered to;

(b) considers whether the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments’ regulatory framework and sanctioning powers are sufficient to enforce its advice;

(c) assesses the extent of undue influence that former politicians and advisers have on the policies and programmes of government departments and non-departmental public bodies; and

(d) that it makes a first Report to the House no later than 18th October 2021.

(3) The committee shall consist of 16 members of whom 15 shall nominated by the Committee of Selection in the same manner as those Select Committees appointed in accordance with Standing Order No. 121.

(4) The Chair of the committee shall be a backbench Member of a party represented in Her Majesty’s Government and shall be elected by the House under arrangements approved by Mr Speaker.

(5) Unless the House otherwise orders, each Member nominated to the committee shall continue to be a member of it until the expiration of this Order.

(6) The committee shall have power—

(a) to send for persons, papers and records, to sit notwithstanding any adjournment of the House, to adjourn from place to place, and to report from time to time; and

(b) to appoint specialist advisers to supply information which is not readily available or to elucidate matters of complexity within the committee’s order of reference.

(7) The committee shall have power to appoint a sub-committee, which shall have power to send for persons, papers and records, to sit notwithstanding any adjournment of the House, to adjourn from place to place, and to report to the committee from time to time.

(8) The committee shall have power to report from time to time the evidence taken before the sub-committee.

Mr Speaker,

“The lunches, the hospitality, the quiet word in your ear, the ex-ministers and ex-advisers for hire, helping big business find the right way to get its way.”

That is how former Prime Minister David Cameron described the next big scandal to hit British politics, back in 2010. We might think that what David Cameron lacks in transparency he makes up for in fortune telling, except that he had inside information because the person exploiting the loopholes would be the very same David Cameron.

We had a Conservative Prime Minister giving Lex Greensill access to all areas of Government. He was brought in and given privileged access to the heart of Government with the title and the business card of a senior adviser in the Prime Minister’s office. Then—what a stroke of luck—when he was no longer Prime Minister, and just past the required period, when he no longer needed the approval of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, David Cameron joined Greensill to lobby the Conservative Government full of his friends.

Having refused to respond to any questions at all for 40 days, David Cameron chose a period of national grief, hoping that there would be less political criticism and less scrutiny. It is cynical and it is shabby, and the statement itself was toe-curling. He is not sorry for his conduct, for the texts and the drinks, but he is sorry he got caught and he is sorry that his shares are now worthless. This is not just a question of why he did not go through the correct channels; it is question of why he was doing this at all.

Let us be really clear: David Cameron was not working in the national interest; he was working in his own personal interest, with the hope of making millions of pounds for himself through the exercise of his share options. But questions cannot just be asked of David Cameron, when it is current Conservative Ministers who have paved the way for this scandal. When it comes to lobbying, it takes two to tango. For every former Minister lobbying, there is someone in power being lobbied. That is why this scandal is not just about the conduct of David Cameron during his time as Prime Minister and in the years afterwards. This is about who he lobbied in the current Government and how they responded.

Lex Greensill was awarded a CBE and was made a Crown representative by a Conservative Government, yet his company’s spectacular collapse now means that over 50,000 jobs are at risk around the world, including thousands in the UK’s steel communities, from Hartlepool to Stocksbridge, from Rotherham to Scunthorpe and to Newport. The steel industry is crucial and the Government must make it clear that our steel industry will not pay the price for the failures at Greensill and beyond.

This Government have set up an inquiry, but just about supply chain finance and Greensill. Such a review is wholly inadequate, and deliberately so. They do not want to explore what needs to change in lobbying or who currently gets access to power, or the wider issue of how to lift standards, which have fallen so far in the 10 years of Conservative Governments. They do not want public hearings. They do not want the disinfectant of sunlight, as David Cameron once urged. They just want this to go away, which is why they have chosen Nigel Boardman to chair the inquiry.

It is a fact that Nigel Boardman is a good friend—a very good friend—of the Conservative Government. Some may suspect that the son of a former Conservative Cabinet Minister might be unlikely to make waves, but let us look at his record. Mr Boardman has been paid over £20,000 per year as a non-executive director at the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy—a Department with a real interest in the British Business Bank, which lent to Greensill, and the British steel industry, where so many jobs are now at risk. Mr Boardman has already whitewashed the Government’s handling of public procurement during the pandemic and I fear that he will do the same again with this inquiry.

You will remember, Mr Speaker, that I jointly chaired the inquiry into the collapse of Carillion. The fact that Mr Boardman’s law firm made £8 million advising Carillion, including £1 million on the day before the outsourcers collapsed, leaves a terrible taste in my mouth as it should in the mouths of Members on the Government Benches. To cap it all, Mr Boardman was appointed to a prestigious role at the British Museum by—oh, by David Cameron! What is being proposed by the Government is not remotely fit for purpose. It is not an inquiry. It is not independent. It is an insult to us all.



The scope of this inquiry has to be bigger than supply chain financing. It has to be about lobbying, too, and bigger than what rules were broken. If the existing lobbying rules were not breached, that is a big part of the problem, surely. Had the Conservatives backed Labour’s amendments to the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill back in 2014, there would have been much more transparency, but they did not. David Cameron and his Government voted them down, and boy are they exploiting them now! We need public service in the national interest, not people viewing the state like some get-rich-quick scheme, with taxpayers treated as collateral damage.

We now learn that the Conservatives are joined in all this by the SNP, whose Rural Economy Secretary in the Scottish Government dined with Lex Greensill in one of Glasgow’s finest restaurants with no officials, no notes, no emails, no texts and no phone records about the meeting. Here in Westminster, we have witnessed the degrading of the ministerial code.

[Brendan O'Hara (Argyll and Bute) (SNP)]

We have absolutely no quibble with what the shadow Minister has been saying, but is she trying to draw an equivalence between what David Cameron did and what Fergus Ewing did in a meeting that was recorded and has been publicly available for a long time on the Scottish Government’s website? There was nothing untoward in what Fergus Ewing did, and in trying to conflate the two, the hon. Lady does a great disservice to herself and her argument.

[Rachel Reeves]

Well, the Scottish people can be the judge of that. If the hon. Member thinks that a Scottish Minister dining with Lex Greensill is okay, his party should put that on its leaflets in the elections in May.

Sir Alex Allan resigned as independent adviser on ministerial interests following the Prime Minister’s failure to take action on the Home Secretary’s bullying behaviour. That was five months ago. The Government have not replaced him. They have not even advertised the job. What does that say about how seriously this Government take standards?

[Sir Bernard Jenkin (Harwich and North Essex) (Con)]

I just point out that, when Gordon Brown appointed his Prime Minister’s adviser on ministerial interests, that job was not advertised either because it is not advertised; it is a prime ministerial appointment. The motion proposes to set up a new Select Committee when there are many existing Select Committees. I am Chairman of the Liaison Committee. Why has the hon. Member not consulted any of us about this manoeuvre? I appreciate what Oppositions do, which is to try to embarrass the Government, but she is right that there are much wider issues to address. Should we not try to address those issues in a bipartisan manner?

[Rachel Reeves]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. The point about Sir Alex Allan is that it is five months later and nobody has been appointed to this role. Whether we advertise the role or not, it has been vacant for five months. [Interruption.] A Member says from a sedentary position that it will happen shortly, but five months is an awfully long time.

I will come on to the issue of the composition of the Select Committee, but like the hon. Gentleman, I had the privilege of chairing a Select Committee. When scandals happened, we looked into them, as we did with the collapse of Carillion, and I know that the hon. Gentleman did so too. The problem is that there is no overarching inquiry planned into not just what happened with Greensill but more widely around lobbying, cronyism and sleaze. I am very happy to work on a cross-party basis to take this forward, and I welcome the comments from the hon. Gentleman over the last couple of days.

As well as the lack of an adviser on ministerial interests, there has been an absence of ministerial interests being published. They are supposed to be published twice a year, but they were published only once last year, in July, and not at all since then. These things matter—they are the foundations on which the standards of government rest, and under this Government, those foundations are being consciously removed. That is why this motion does what the Government should have done but chose not to: it gives the power to this House, not the Government, with a 16-strong Select Committee with clout to investigate this whole sorry scandal. It would have powers to call witnesses and examine them in public, like an effective Select Committee would. The investigation that we propose would look at inappropriate lobbying of Government and what needs to be done to prevent it. It would have the powers needed to demand witnesses and communications. It would examine the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments and whether it has sufficient powers, resources and the right remit. Put simply, this special new Select Committee would aim to tackle the problem staring us in the face, not cover it up.

[Mr William Wragg (Hazel Grove) (Con)]

I note the motion and thank the hon. Member for it. I just wondered why she thought it was appropriate that the membership of that Committee be nominated by the Committee of Selection? Why should it be filled with a load of Whips’ stooges?

[Rachel Reeves]

I will not comment on how Select Committee Chairs are sometimes elected in this place. But as a former Select Committee Chair, I know how seriously colleagues around this House would take this responsibility, as the hon. Gentleman does. We are prepared to make a concession to Conservative Members. We will accept that this Committee can be chaired by a Back Bencher from the governing party as long as there is cross-party representation on the Committee, as with other Select Committees.

The Conservative party is at a fork in the road. If MPs vote for this motion, a proper investigation can take place, led by a team with the confidence of this House, not someone handpicked from the board of one of the Government Departments embroiled in this scandal. But if they vote against it, as the Prime Minister has told them all to do, I am sorry to say that they too will be part of the Government’s attempt to cover up Tory sleaze. All Members here today should reflect on who they are here to serve: their constituents and their country, or their narrow party interests?

The stakes are high for our democracy and our public life. It was a past Conservative Government—embroiled in sleaze in the 1990s—who eventually recognised the need for standards to rise and to create the Nolan principles. The Nolan principles of public life have to live and breathe through all those in public office serving our great country. Yesterday we learned that the Government’s former head of procurement was an adviser for Greensill while still a civil servant. Incredibly, that was approved. The defence is that it was “not uncommon”. What on earth was happening at the Cabinet Office and at the heart of Government to allow these conflicts of interest to fester? Sir John Major, who witnessed the cash for questions scandal and other Tory sleaze in the ’90s when he was Prime Minister also believes that the rules need to be changed again.

One of the Nolan principles—as you well know, Mr Speaker—is leadership. With that in mind, where is the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster today? Where was the Chancellor of the Exchequer yesterday? What have they got to hide? There is a wider pattern of behaviour with the Conservatives here, in the present as well as in the recent past: a Conservative Government who are more interested in private drinks with the owners of private jets than meeting the families bereaved by covid; a Government who gave a 40% pay rise to Dominic Cummings, but a pay cut to nurses; Tory politicians thinking that it is one rule for them and another for everybody else; personal attention lavished on friends of Cameron, while 3 million people are excluded from Government financial support and cannot even get a meeting with the Treasury.

[Craig Williams (Montgomeryshire) (Con)]

rose—

[Rachel Reeves]

If the hon. Member wants to defend all that—be my guest.

[Craig Williams]

On the subject of leadership, the hon. Lady has touched on the Scottish Government. But the Welsh Government have of course been in place for 22 years and there is still no lobbying register, and the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments has recently taken the former Labour First Minister to task over an appointment to GFG. On leadership, may I draw the hon. Lady on those points?

[Rachel Reeves]

As far as I am aware, the First Minister of Wales has not appointed a financier as his adviser, nor does he have £30 million-worth of share options that he might fancy exercising. The hon. Gentleman has today abstained in a vote to give nurses a pay rise—put that on your election leaflet at the next general election.

Some £2 billion of public contracts in the last year have gone to friends and donors of the Conservative party, which has been rolling out the red carpet with a VIP fast lane for contracts. Supposedly independent reports have been rewritten by Downing Street. There are undeclared details on who has paid what for a luxury refurbishment of the No. 10 Downing Street flat. Relationships are undisclosed, and there are increasingly frequent breaches and casual disregard of the ministerial code.

Some have asked this week, quite powerfully, “When did we stop caring about honesty and integrity?” That is what this motion is about. What happens in the vote will say so much about our great country, but also about our current Government. That is why I urge all hon. and right hon. Members to do the right thing and back this motion today. Vote for a proper investigation to close the loopholes, to rein in the lobbyists and to lift standards in this great democracy in which we all have the privilege to serve.