Lobbying (Transparency) Bill [HL] — House of Lords, 2016-09-09
Topic: Government Operations
Clive Brooke (Labour, Centre-left): Not as an alternative, then, but as a way of addressing the failings of the Bill. Post-legislative scrutiny need not be undertaken until we finish with the present legislation The noble Lord, Lord Bew, was very helpful, and I am grateful for such an authoritative contribution. He spoke in support of the general direction we are travelling in. Again, he made the point that definitions are not easy, but this one, as the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, said indirectly, is too narrow to create the right balance. The definitions must be much wider than they are at the moment The noble Lord, Lord Bew, made an interesting point about Select Committee chairs. There is a public malaise towards Parliament and we have to find all the ways we can to address and change that. Transparency will not solve all but it will help to a good degree. However, when we pretend to be transparent but are not, we lead to a further lessening in the trustworthiness of our public bodies. I have only good wishes for the noble Lord and his committee as they continue to tackle the difficulties before them The noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, made a powerful contribution for which I am very grateful. He gave a reply to the noble Lord, Lord Beith, for which I am grateful, and asked some fundamental questions about the register. What is its purpose? Is it transparent? Is it producing what it was intended to produce? Should we keep it, scrap it or amend it? I hope he will support my Bill and that it will replace it. If he has further changes to my Bill, I invite him to table amendments to it If we end up with only this debate and no change, I would share the noble Lord’s view that the 2014 Act should be scrapped. I cannot believe how pointless it is, how little it tells and how much it costs to do so little. I have come to the view that it is a complete waste of time and that Part 1 should be scrapped. That will not be the case, but we will go on and try to get a sensible outcome I am grateful, too, for the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy. I recall the Power committee in 2006 and the many recommendations it made to improve our democratic procedures. It is a great pity that many of those recommendations never came into being. Like her, I believe that big business has become overweening and is a much greater influence in the fabric of our lives than was the case 10 or 15 years ago. I am grateful to her for raising our sights beyond the UK and to what is happening all around the world Companies are adept and clever at finding new ways of lobbying all the time. An issue that has not been addressed anywhere as yet is the way in which they are persuading the public, through the way they ask questions, to come to a particular view. That is then presented as evidence to the Government of what people believe without the other side of the argument having been presented fully to the public. That is happening in the States and will come here. It is a worrying development Many companies are now establishing their own charities. In the area of alcohol, where I work, Drinkaware is funded 87% by the drinks industry. That is not an independent charity. It will claim that it is, but when I examine the policies it is pursuing, invariably the balance falls in favour of those who are paying the money—the drinks industry. So, yes, companies are moving into other areas and we should be aware of it The noble Baroness also referred to the diaries and her support for them. I shall get to the diaries, how they are failing so badly and how this Bill will address the issue I thank my noble friend Lady Hayter, who did a scathing demolition of the present register. Without any doubt she underlined my view that it is a complete waste of time and should be scrapped. It is a bad and expensive failure. She worked her way through a range of areas where noble Lords had raised questions during the debate and gave them answers, and I shall not repeat all those. I am particularly pleased that she has given the Front-Bench support of the Labour Party for the Bill. I do not often bring a Private Member’s Bill in line with Labour Party policy, but I am grateful for all that she has done and for what she has said today In referring to the contribution of the noble Baroness, Lady Chisholm, I come back to the diaries, on which so much weight is put. The disclosure in the diaries is extraordinarily limited. Indeed, some of it is quite jocular, as my noble friend pointed out, where people have put down what they have been doing. "Policy discussions", "round-table discussions", "company sites"—these are all parts of the activities of Ministers when they engage with people but they do not mean a thing. There is limited disclosure on the diaries at the moment and many of us who have cross-referenced the quality of the data find that it does not add up Others have mentioned the inaccessibility of the data, which is different for each department. There is no common theme running through it and it needs to be put together, which can be done. We have tried to do that. We have tried to set up software to bring it together so that we can read what is happening. When you do that, you find that Ministers have had meetings which do not match up with what is coming from the private sector and vice versa—the private sector have meetings and Ministers have not been linking them as discussions that have actually been taking place The formatting needs to be looked at. Of course there has been a problem of the timeliness of the data, which has only latterly started to improve. But there are still very significant differences between the performance of different departments. The Cabinet Office is very good, but look at the Ministry of Defence and see what is coming out of there I regret that the diary issue is not going to answer the problem. The answer rests in the Bill now before your Lordships. I freely concede that it is not perfect and I am happy to talk to anyone who has ideas about how we can make helpful amendments to it. I am not going to change the substance or the heart of the Bill. It proposes an entirely different register from the one in place now. It would be a truly transparent register, and many other countries have similar ones. There is now one in Europe and there is no reason why we should not have one in this country, other than the obstinacy of the Government for reasons known only to themselves. Regretfully, the Minister has not convinced me to take a different line from that which I have set out.