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Lobbying (Whitehall)

I am actually quite ambivalent about that. I say that as a great man for openness, freedom of information and so on. However, if I was Prince Charles—there is a thought—and the heir to the throne and I thought that I had a role of advising, encouraging and warning, which is part of what a monarchy does, then I would probably want to exercise that role, certainly not in areas that were party contentious but over a wide terrain. I would write vigorously to Ministers about all the things that I was concerned with and I would probably write less vigorously if I thought that those letters were going to be published. That is the reason for my ambivalence. The easy answer would be to say, "Yes, of course, they should be published". However, the older I get, the more old-fashioned I get, and I quite like the idea of monarchs writing to Prime Ministers, Prime Ministers writing to monarchs and all that kind of thing, but no doubt that is just a sign of ageing. Anyway, lobbying is intrinsically a good and necessary thing. So why should we be concerned with it? Why on earth should we investigate it and inquire into it? Of course, it is because lobbying carries with it, as well as intrinsic goods, some intrinsic dangers too. Those dangers are pretty obvious; if some people have privileged access to power, policy and Government, that creates disadvantages for other people. So, as far as possible, we need to know who is lobbying whom about what. If we do not know that, of course people will draw all kinds of conclusions about the policy process. When Governments take decisions, unless we know something about the process by which those decisions have been taken openly, it can simply be asserted that they have been taken because certain interests have had their way with a Government in a manner that is not open and that has not been challenged. So, on that basis, we set out a number of principles that we thought should inform lobbying. We said in our original report that we needed measures that would do three things:""to promote ethical behaviour by lobbyists, with the prospect of sanctions if rules are broken…to ensure that the process of lobbying takes place in as public a way as possible, subject to the maximum reasonable degree of transparency…and to make it harder for politicians and public servants to use the information and contacts they have built up in office as an inducement to other potential employers."" That third and last principle relates to the issue of the so-called "revolving door". In pursuing those principles, which I think would receive wide assent, we wanted to take an approach that would be effective in ensuring that the principles were actually safeguarded in some serious way. However, we also wanted to approach this subject in a way that was proportionate. We did not want to set up a bureaucratic structure that would be completely out of kilter with the nature of the problem. Those were the two aims that we brought to our approach. We wanted to consider those who lobby and those who are lobbied. To take up a point that I mentioned at the beginning, we decided that we were concerned not just with the industry, and certainly not just with multi-client firms, but with all those who lobby regularly. Most lobbying is done by in-house lobbyists, not firms. I am always interested, by the way, by people who do not want to describe themselves as what they are. Lobbyists usually like to describe themselves not as lobbyists but as something else, usually people concerned with public affairs or Government relations. We know that they are lobbyists. If they think that lobbying is a good thing, they should say that they are lobbyists. They should set up lobbying companies and advertise themselves as lobbyists. They should not be coy about it. We wanted to consider the whole activity of lobbying, wherever it came from, and not single out certain bits of the industry. In relation to those who lobby, although this was not our primary concern, we began to consider the industry. There are other issues that I will not touch on about whether it is worth spending large amounts of money on lobbyists to do a variety of jobs. Some people who spoke to us certainly did not think so, but that is not our concern. We were struck by the fact that there was no single and effective system of regulation for the lobbying industry. There are three major industry associations or bodies that, although they all claim to have principles in common, are run in different ways. We know that industry is important to Government, but it does not have a single regulator to maintain ethical standards, so when issues blow up, the ability to deal with them depends on whether someone belongs to a particular association and whether it has standards that bite and can be enforced. We took the view that we needed an umbrella regulator for the industry to approach the issue from the side of ethical regulation. The Government agreed with us in their reply, saying that they want a "single and credible" system of regulation—self-regulation, if possible—for the industry. We will discuss whether the industry is making progress towards a single, effective regulator. What I have said so far relates to those who lobby, but our prime concern was those who are lobbied within the policy process and within Government and what we should be doing about them. We discussed the need for records of meetings between those who lobby and those who are lobbied, and we considered the provisions for declaring outside gifts and hospitality in relation to Ministers and civil servants. Our central proposal involved a register of lobbying activity. In our report—I will not repeat it now, but it is worth reading for those who are interested—we have set down what principles we think should inform such a register and described what we think its content should be. We seek to show that it can be done both effectively and proportionately, and we give examples of different jurisdictions, showing what registers are like in the United States, Australia, Canada and parts of Europe. By the way, that indicates that the need to move towards a registration system is becoming common in many parts of the world. It is becoming common in Commonwealth and European systems and at the European level, and the United States has detailed provisions. One of the first acts of the new Administration in the United States was to introduce more effective lobbying regulation. However, we did not want simply to copy those systems. We thought it important to devise a scheme appropriate for our political system. For example, when we went to the United States, we talked to lobbyists and those who were lobbied, and most of us returned with a feeling that the scale, volume and detail of what was legislated for there was not appropriate for our system. We went to a lobbying firm and met the lawyer whom it employed, whose job was to circumvent all the provisions to regulate who people can have a cup of coffee with and what contacts they can make. Due to the role of campaign finance in the United States, it is more pressing to regulate any contact between politicians and money people and outside lobbyists. Our system here is rather different. That is the point about combining effectiveness with proportionality.