I do not want to incur the wrath of the Deputy Speaker, so I had better not say anything on clause 4(2)(g) as my amendment relates to clause 5. I do
not intend to press my amendment to a Division, however. What I wish to do is engage the Leader of the House on an issue on which there is both concern and a lot of constructive activity. If he chooses to tap into it, there is a lot of constructive endeavour out there seeking to get this right for all the people who are concerned about lobbying. On that basis I am putting a number of items on the record in the hope that, either here or in the other place, we examine the following very difficult question: if we are going to register lobbying, do we register the subject too, and if so, how do we best do that for the sake both of convenience and of the transparency and accountability on which this whole Bill rests? I am sure that it is not beyond the wit of my Select Committee, and that it is absolutely not beyond the wit of Government, to come up with something, put it on the Order Paper in the second Chamber and find a way forward that allows everybody to make progress.
We are not talking about a detailed note and a minute and so forth—I do not imagine the hon. Lady is talking about that either. Alexandra Runswick, the director of Unlock Democracy, is one of the people who gave evidence to us. She said:
“I think that misrepresents the nature of the information we are looking for in the register. We are not expecting a transcript of the meeting, but what policy area it is that is being lobbied on. There are already individual MPs who publish their diaries and say, for example, ‘I met Unlock Democracy about the Lobbying Bill.’ That is the level of information that we are looking at—the policy that is being lobbied about, not the exact information that was shared with the person whom you are lobbying.”
That strikes me as eminently reasonable, but if it is not in those exact words something that the Government feel they can adopt, perhaps it is something they feel they can work with, so what we produce from these Houses is not a laughing stock to people out there who say, “There they go again; the old boys in the club have stitched it up again. Look at what they’ve done. This isn’t going to tackle lobbying. We’ve seen that it’s not tackling some of the key lobbying issues that got this subject into the public domain, and now look at it! They’re not even going to tell us what they want to talk about in two words.”
That does not do a service to the House or to this Bill. Lobbyists and those being lobbied are also very clear that that does not help them in what most of them do, which is a fair day’s honest work trying to do their job effectively. They understand that this looks as though there is something to hide, when in fact, as in most walks of life, 99.9% of them are just doing a fair day’s work.