Parliamentary Lobbying

I will start by declaring an interest: I am a former lobbyist and an unpaid board member of a group which spends part of its time lobbying this place and other places. I congratulate the hon. Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) on securing this debate. I hope that I encourage him when I say that I sympathise with much—but not all—of what he has said. The Government's progress in their first 18 months of office is rather more promising than that which their predecessors achieved in 13 years. The coalition agreement strikes the right balance between encouraging lobbying and ensuring transparency. People should know what we are up to over and above what they can obtain from the register and under the Freedom of Information Act. None the less, we must be cautious about some of the unintended consequences. I do not want to over-simplify things because, as I have said, I am on the same page as the hon. Gentleman in so many ways. The solution is not only the register but the codes of practice and the professional standards that underpin the register. As a former lobbyist, I attach the greatest importance to those matters. As a Government and a party, we promote and champion self-regulation over statutory regulation. Having dealt with a number of regulators in my previous life, I have some experience of such matters. My experience of the Advertising Standards Authority as a regulator was pretty good. The organisation had teeth, it did things and it applied standards with which the lobby industry was entirely comfortable. My experience with other organisations, such as the Market Research Society, was less than satisfactory. When trying to table a complaint against an individual member of the MRS, we found that the president of the MRS was the very same person against whom we were lodging the complaint. I am talking about not just blurred lines, but real confusion, and I had a similar view of the Press Complaints Commission. I am probably one of the few Members in this Chamber who took Piers Morgan to the PCC when he was editor of The Daily Mirror. I was astonished by the complete contempt that he showed for that body—it was as if it was not there. He did not give a damn. At that particular moment, it was, as far as he was concerned, a toothless organisation.