I thank my hon. Friend. My views on MPs’ second jobs are well known. They were debated in the House not too long ago.
The Leader of the House accepted that consultant lobbyists are a tiny minority. The Government have constructed a straw man argument in order to give the appearance that they are taking action on lobbying transparency, whereas in reality they are doing no such thing. Why is a register of consultant lobbyists proposed in the Bill? In my view it is because the Government merely want to be seen to be doing something while in fact doing very little.
We, the lobbying industry and the lobbying transparency campaigners, as well as the Select Committee, all want to act to achieve greater lobbying transparency for the good and the health of our democracy. We want to suggest something different to the Government. We want lobbying transparency because in a 21st century democracy it is only right that people can see how their Government are being influenced and by whom—which commercial forces lie behind particular decisions. That requires a register of all professional lobbyists. All lobbyists would then have to meet the same high standards, not only to create a level playing field within the industry, but to make sure that big money can no longer buy more influence than the rest of the population by using underhand techniques.
Instead of ensuring high standards in the lobbying industry, however, the Government would make the situation much worse. That is not simply my view. Mr George Kidd, acting chair of the UK Public Affairs Council, the body that runs the largest voluntary register of lobbyists, said that
“there is a risk that in doing something we do harm rather than good. We may end up with a less transparent system than we currently have if the definition is unchanged and”—
listen to this—
“we have a statutory register with very few names, if any, on it. People will be able to construct their business never to be on it.”
He suggests that we may have a register with no names on it—no lobbyists at all—and a register that is so full of loopholes that it is possible for anybody, with the smallest amount of ingenuity, to find a way to avoid getting on to the register. It would appear that the word “transparency” in the Bill’s title is a total misnomer.
If all that were not bad enough, Government amendment 76, in the name of the Leader of the House, rather remarkably succeeds in achieving what many think is impossible: making a bad Bill even worse. Despite comprehensive and uniquely united criticism and a consensus against the Bill, the Government have decided in their wisdom further to amend it, not in order to strengthen it, as lobbyists and experts have recommended, but rather further to weaken it. Rather than including companies and organisations that employ lobbyists on the register, as happens currently with the voluntary register, the Government have chosen to seek to limit the scope of the Bill further with this amendment by removing the need for a lobbyist’s employer to register. This is an important point, so I hope that the Committee is following the argument. For a register to bring meaningful
transparency to the lobbying industry and to allow public scrutiny of lobbying, it must surely include, at the very least, all of those who are doing lobbying. That surely must include the individual lobbyist’s employer. Yet that is precisely what the amendment seeks to avoid. Without the information as to who is employing a particular lobbyist, it will be impossible to know which organisations or companies are lobbying at all, let alone what they are lobbying about or how often they are lobbying. The amendment is a retrograde step.
I have highlighted before how the Bill is weaker than the existing voluntary code, and the amendment is a case in point. The public or an organisation seeking the services of a lobbyist can currently search the voluntary registers in a way that discloses an organisation or employer’s client list, but the Government’s new proposals will remove that ability. The amendment removes the necessity for the lobbyists’ employers to be registered. We would know who the lobbyists were if they were consultant lobbyists, not if they were professional lobbyists, but we would not know who they were working for. We would not know who their colleagues were. Nor would we know which clients were being served by their colleagues. Nor would we know which other clients were employing the same company. We would not know the identity of the directors of the company. I would argue that knowing the names and identities of the directors of the company is quite important. Arguably, a company director may not themselves be a lobbyist, but it would be of interest to know who the directors of the company were which employed the lobbyists who were then on the register, and the amendment would exclude such a possibility.
Finally, we would not know who the shareholders of the company were, which leaves a massive opportunity for opacity. We would not know who the directors are or who owns the company, the name of the company or its registered address; we will be able to know simply that a lobbyist, Mr M. Smith, or whatever his name may be, is working out of Wimbledon. We will have no idea who his colleagues are, what company he works for, what its registered address is or who its shareholders and directors are. It really is a very bad and dangerous amendment. Rather than opening up the lobbying industry, the Government’s proposal would allow companies and organisations to hide behind the legislation.