I rise to speak to Amendment 2 in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, my noble friend Lady Hayter and myself, which extends the parameters of who needs to be lobbied to prompt registration to include special advisers, civil servants and PPSs.
I, too, welcome the enhanced transparency in relation to reporting that was mentioned by the Minister in
response to the earlier debate. However, I believe that will not be enough if the subjects who are principally lobbied are not asked to report. There has been progress, but it is simply not enough.
Both today and in Committee, a powerful and clear case has been made by former Ministers, former senior civil servants—which includes those in the Diplomatic Service, pursuant to the discussion we had in Committee—and former special advisers as to why the remit of the Bill must be extended if it is to have proper impact. As the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, said in Committee, the target is normally the Minister and you therefore have to focus on the channels for reaching the Minister. The Permanent Secretary, as we have heard, is not a significant channel for this purpose. Indeed, the lobbying industry itself has said on numerous occasions that,
“we do not make personal representations to Ministers or Permanent Secretaries”.
So there we have it from the horse’s mouth. Yet the Government did not provide any convincing reason for why only meetings with Ministers and Permanent Secretaries should be subject to the provisions in Part 1. I hope that this short debate will persuade the Minister that there need to be some changes to this Bill in order to make it properly creditable.
Civil servants here and in Brussels should be included, not because there is any suggestion that they are conducting themselves in any inappropriate manner but to fulfil the purported aim of the Bill—that is, transparency. Last week it was revealed that there had been 130 meetings between representatives of the alcohol industry and the Government since 2010. The BMJ investigation showed that they had an extraordinary level of access to the Department of Health, which later decided to U-turn on the question of minimum unit pricing. It was a comment from the Minister for Public Health on the “Today” programme on Wednesday that caught my attention. Of those 130 meetings, she said, “But most of those were with officials”. Precisely. If the Bill is to increase transparency, the public should have access to this information.
I turn to special advisers. Naturally, I support Amendment 3 in the name of the noble Lords, Lord Tyler and Lord Greaves. Special advisers should certainly be subject to the same level of transparency, given how closely they work with their Ministers and the influence that they can and do have on policy. The case has already been well made but I make no apology for returning to the News International lobbyist Fred Michel, whose case proves quite how large the loopholes in the Bill are. He was summoned to the Leveson trial after DCMS released 164 pages of e-mails between him and Adam Smith, the then Secretary of State’s special adviser. This came to light only in what I am sure everyone would agree were quite extreme circumstances. Again, if the Bill is to increase transparency, the public should be able to access these details.
Given the stance taken in Committee, I imagine that the Minister may well object by saying that the provisions in our amendment are disproportionate; indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Turnbull, has just made that case. Of course that argument cannot apply to extending the Bill to cover special advisers—that should
be a given now—but, if proportionality is the Minister’s only concern, I hope that he will commit to bringing an amendment back at Third Reading that at least includes special advisers, civil servants and Parliamentary Secretaries. There is time for the Government to work on an amendment that could ensure that these people are included in the least bureaucratic way.
The Minister may also point to the fact that the limits that the Government have put in the Bill mean that there is no obvious place to publish such information. In Committee I asked the Government to look at the least bureaucratic way of extending the scope of those lobbied, but they do not seem to have taken the opportunity to find a solution. We can provide the Minister with two solutions. No doubt the Minister will be aware that on the website data.gov.uk, the meetings between special advisers and newspapers editors, proprietors and executives are already published, so there is no convincing argument why that cannot be extended. The other solution may have been provided by the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, and it is elegantly simple: the Minister, when publishing details of his own meetings, publishes information about the meetings of civil servants and special advisers in his department.
This House has explained—very graphically, in many ways—the problems relating to the Bill and its extent, but we have also pointed the Government towards solutions. I very much hope that they will accept these amendments. If not, I trust that they will go away and come back with an amendment at Third Reading that takes these crucial issues into account.