My hon. Friend is absolutely right. That is the heart of the problem. Let me quote what MHP itself has said:
“do we work for a ‘non-lobbying business’? In our case, MHP Communications is a full service communications consultancy. We operate a single bottom line approach, and so do not break out the work of our public affairs division. Employees are employees; there is no ‘MHP Public Affairs Ltd’. And the work of MHP is certainly not mainly concerned with lobbying. Even if we were to limit ourselves to our public affairs team, the definition talks about actively lobbying, in the sense of seeking to persuade…members of the Government as well as officials—and this is not ‘mainly’ what we do all day.”
That is the problem with the clause and the Government’s attempt to fix it. It all gets circular—even if we accept that MHP is a lobbying entity, lobbying is defined purely as communicating with a Minister of the Crown and a permanent secretary.
Let us take special advisers, who are not covered at all; we all know that they often have more influence than the Under-Secretary of State. Under the Government’s plan, the lobbyist will be perfectly entitled to have lengthy and detailed influential discussions with a special adviser, and that would not be covered by the Bill. However, the lobbyist could meet the Under-Secretary of State and that meeting would be. Which meeting would be the real problem? One needs look only at the debacle of News International and Fred Michel to see the kind of scandal that can happen.