My hon. Friend makes an important point. One way to have transparency and clarity and to minimise the burden of regulation for the industry would be to ensure one clear code of conduct and therefore one clear set of principles that everybody has to sign up to in order to do business.
Another provision in the APPC code—one that seems eminently sensible, at least on the face of it—says that
“practitioners”—
that is, lobbyists—
“must not make misleading, exaggerated or extravagant claims to clients about”
what they can do for them. That is hardly an unreasonable or burdensome principle to have in a code of conduct either, so I ask again: why do Ministers not want such a basic principle covered in a clear code of conduct? The APPC code contains other suggestions that we might take forward, including the proposal that
“Political practitioners must not…Make any award or payment in money or in kind (including equity in a member firm)…to any member of…the National Assembly of Wales or the Northern Ireland Assembly or the Greater London Authority”.
As I understand the drafting of the Bill, Ministers have not gone so far as to cover those bodies. Perhaps the Minister can use her response to this debate as an opportunity to explain why a code of conduct should not cover those organisations as well.
Including such requirements or versions of them—I do not want to be prescriptive; there should be proper consultation with all stakeholders about what should be in a code of conduct—would help to raise the standards of the whole profession and, as a result, give the registrar the means to begin to challenge any poor behaviour in the industry that he or she might come across.
New clause 2 would help to ensure proper oversight and better public scrutiny of any potential conflicts of interest when senior roles are taken up in Government by people who were—or, indeed, perhaps still are—lobbyists. It would require the Government to disclose the names of any professional lobbyists who work for them, including those employed directly by the Government and those employed by the political parties that form the Government. The new clause would help to prevent a situation in which the country did not know definitively whether a lobbyist working at the heart of government for a political party, with access to the inner sanctums of
No. 10 and No. 11, was at the same time lobbying on behalf of commercial interests such as big tobacco or the alcohol industry.
It is surely worth drawing the Committee’s attention to the scandal surrounding Lynton Crosby. The reason that that will not go away as an issue for the Conservatives is that the country does not know whether he is lobbying Ministers on behalf of any big commercial business groups here in the UK. New clause 2—coupled with other amendments to widen the definition of lobbying and to require an estimate of expenditure on lobbying activity—would help to tease out whether Mr Crosby was able to use his position working for the Conservative party to raise the concerns of other clients that he or his business might have.
The issues relating to Lynton Crosby raise the question of whether other lobbyists are employed, perhaps part time, to work for the Government while separately working for their clients to lobby Ministers, permanent secretaries, other senior civil servants or special advisers. New clause 2 is a sensible proposal that would help to make transparent the role of lobbyists who pass from an area of commercial life to become more actively engaged in public life as well.
Big tobacco appears to have successfully exerted considerable influence on Ministers recently. Similarly, minimum alcohol pricing seems to have been dropped as a major Government priority. The presence in the Conservative party of a lobbyist who has access to No. 10, who is notorious in other countries for his other interests and who will not, at first glance, be covered by the legislation does not help to ease people’s fears that Ministers are not being quite so straightforward in their professed commitment to transparency as they might be.