I am just trying to be helpful.
My hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West (Mr Thomas) has given us a tour de force on this group of amendments, leaving me mainly to sweep up on amendment 100, which I am happy to do.
Amendment 100 emerged from the considerations of the Select Committee on Political and Constitutional Reform when the Bill was put before us and we had a chance to take evidence from witnesses. I hope that the amendment is helpful in raising a number of issues that I would like the Government to consider.
We heard a few moments ago from my right hon. Friend the Member for Rother Valley (Mr Barron), the Chairman of the Standards and Privileges Committee, and I endorse his views in that the Government have listened on the particular item he mentioned, as a result of which we have a better Bill, although it is still far from perfect. That just shows that where there is interaction—this does not mean that the Government have to swallow every probing amendment that finds itself on to the amendment paper—there is a possibility of a little bit of give and take. From my perspective as a parliamentarian, I understand that some of the ethics
coming from the Front Bench have to be a little sharper and a bit more oppositional, but I sometimes have the luxury of posing a view on behalf of Parliament that might find favour, albeit not necessarily in its existing form. Let that debate continue.
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This is why, unprecedentedly in my own political career, I opposed the programme motion earlier today—because we did not have the chance in so many fields and areas to interact with the Government. Where we have had that chance, it has, by and large, been a productive relationship. I hope that, because this House has not had as much of that chance as we would like, colleagues in the other place will find an open door and be allowed more give and take so that the Bill evolves and gets better and better as it goes through the parliamentary process. [Interruption.] I do not know whether the Leader of the House was about to launch forth from the Dispatch Box or whether he was merely stretching, having sat in his place for 40 minutes. Clearly, he was just stretching.
As I say, my hon. Friend the Member for Harrow West has covered most of the issues, but on a more specific and narrow point, I would like to look at the issue of the information provided in the register. It was an issue that my Select Committee took very seriously, and we took a lot of evidence on it. Looking at the nitty-gritty of the Bill through the first consultation we undertook, we thought that we would have a Bill that dealt only with what we are discussing today—not with what we will be discussing tomorrow, as that was added at a later stage. Today, however, we are discussing lobbying, lobbyists and the process of lobbying. We thought that we had made quite a sensible and constructive contribution to that debate. Subsequently, we then rather hurriedly took additional witness evidence, including from the Leader of the House, but from people on all sides of the arguments about what lobbying is and what form regulation should take.
One point that was common to all those who spoke to us was that they felt that the big chance had been missed. They believed that the lobbying problem had been accurately identified by the Prime Minister and perceptively identified by the Deputy Prime Minister in the run-up to and during the last general election. People were surprised, however, that none of those issues that raised such public concern—and the concern of two party leaders who became partners in the coalition—were addressed in the Bill that was produced to deal with lobbying. Rather, lobbyists were narrowly defined and those to be lobbied were narrowly defined. We thus felt through that period that a big chance had been missed to do what we all thought the lobbying Bill was about. The detail of all that was taken seriously, as people from a wide range of views said, “Let us try to help; let us try to define the problem a little more accurately”—by reflecting, for example, on what sort of information should be provided. That is clearly at the heart of amendment 100.