Lobbying Transparency (In-house Lobbyists) Bill [HL]

So lobbying is legitimate and beneficial to how we make our laws, and I support it. It is not always successful, of course. My campaign to increase duty on alcohol seems for ever doomed. You win some, you lose some.

In a democracy, good governance depends on decision-makers hearing from a wide range of voices, but businesses, interest groups, think tanks, trade associations and charities should not depend for their access on whom they happen to know or which conduit they can use to get a hearing. More than that, we should all know who has the ear of government. Legitimate representations should be open and above board, not hidden below the waves. This Bill is about transparency, which is crucial for public trust, as we discussed in our debate yesterday.

There are two sides to lobbying, of course: those doing the lobbying and those being lobbied. Neither’s regime is working properly, although the Ethics and Integrity Commission, which has been tasked by the Prime Minister to improve transparency around lobbying, will consider those being lobbied when it reports next week.

My Bill is about those doing the lobbying and seeing Ministers and Permanent Secretaries to put their valid points of view on legislation, policy or procurement. At the moment, the only organisations that have to register and report are consultant lobbyists, which probably covers around 5% of this country’s lobbying activity. The other 95% is done directly by companies, trade associations, professional bodies, think tanks and charities, using their own personnel rather than outside consultants.

Yet these approaches to government from in-house people are excluded from the need to register under the 2014 Act. They fly under the radar. Say a small pressure group, an SME or a consumer representative wants to talk to Ministers about the safety of a fertiliser, alcohol duty, the use of a weapon, online safety or a local planning issue. Should such a small organisation need outside help to make its case to a Minister, it would find its advisers and itself named on the register.

By contrast, any organisation—such as pharmaceutical companies, drinks trade associations, defence companies, big tech or developers—that uses its own people, whether its public affairs department or its chief executive or chair, to speak to government can see a Minister without any requirement to register or report, and with no obligation to sign up to any lobbying code of conduct. That is an inequality of openness between those making their case to government themselves and those using an outside agency to help.

The public—directly or via MPs, journalists or interested parties—have the right to know who is talking to Ministers about decisions that are about to be taken. Therefore, any organisation seeking to influence government policy or practice, legislation or procurement, should have to register and report. A bit of sunlight will do no one any harm.

We have two options. We can wait until we have another scandal and then rush through legislation or we can grasp the nettle now. This is what lobbyist representatives—the CIPR and the PRCA—want, bringing the hidden 95% of lobbying into the open. Passing this Bill would enable the existing register of consultant lobbyists to become a register of lobbying, no longer just catching the tiny minority operating as consultants.

The Bill would extend the existing register from covering only those lobbying firms to put any organisation that puts its view to a Minister, Permanent Secretary or spad on to the register. This goes no further than other comparative democracies do. It requires openness about normal legal behaviour undertaken by in-house executives. Our UK register lists just under 300 entries. Scotland, by contrast, has 1,500 and Canada has 8,000 because both cover in-house lobbyists—as do most other countries’ registers.

Let us do it now. Let us now wait for a scandal. Any organisation that lobbies should register. It is not difficult. It is the right thing to do. I beg to move.

If the Bill becomes law, almost all persons communicating with Ministers or Permanent Secretaries on behalf of their employer, engager or principal, or with the intent of furthering the interests of their employer, engager or principal, will have to register. Yes, many would like to see greater transparency of engagements between stakeholders and Ministers, but that broad and well-intentioned principle would represent a huge administrative burden on business. We are concerned that such a burden would disincentivise businesses, charities and other stakeholders from engaging freely with Ministers.

I hope that we can have a constructive debate today, in Committee and on Report. The principle of transparency is not contested. It is essential that Ministers and departments are transparent in their contact with lobbyists. The previous Government committed to develop a single database to collate and publish departments’ transparency returns. This appears to have been scrapped. Can the Minister tell us why this might be the case?

Our foremost concern is to avoid unintended and unexpected negative consequences for small businesses, charities and stakeholders. We are also interested in the risks to well-intentioned individuals who are simply unaware of the new, broader rules; the capacity for the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists to handle the rise in registrations; and the issue of the annual registration fee.

On burdens, the broader application of the lobbying register rules will see many more people subject to the burden of registering with the office of the registrar. In some ways, this is not a cumbersome step. The register is now well established and should not be difficult for individuals to use. However, no matter how easy it is to register, this is a new administrative burden. Furthermore, we must not forget that those registered with the UK Office for the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists pay annual fees of £1,000. Nothing in the noble Baroness’s Bill amends Section 22 of the 2014 Act. This means that the £1,000 annual fee will apply to in-house lobbyists just as it applies to consultant lobbyists. Contrast that with how the average UK small business has a profit margin of £70,000 and we see that two members of staff having to register at a total cost of £2,000 is not an insignificant burden for smaller organisations. As we proceed to Committee and Report, we will seek to establish protections for small and medium-sized businesses and other smaller stakeholders.

We want businesses, especially small ones, and other stakeholders to have open channels of regular communication with Ministers. Has the noble Baroness reflected on the interaction between the £1,000 per annum registration fees and the proposed wider rules on stakeholders’ willingness to make representations to Government?

Further to that, I would be grateful if the noble Baroness could confirm one point. Should a Minister, for example, meet a pub landlord on a visit, and that landlord goes on to tell him or her that the Government must cut alcohol duty, reform business rates or abandon Ed Miliband’s obsessive net-zero policy, would the landlord have to register and pay his £1,000 fee? If yes, does the noble Baroness accept that landlords will feel disinclined to give the Minister a piece of their mind? Is that not an obstruction to good government? I accept that this is an unlikely hypothetical scenario, since the Prime Minister and Chancellor, along with many Ministers and government MPs, are banned from their local pubs in protest against the Government’s appalling anti-business policies, but it illustrates my point.

On unintended harms to individuals, I would like to consider another example. Under the Bill, an in-house lobbyist who fails to register within the three-month registration period, whether by a mistake or not, faces a civil penalty of up to £7,500 or an unlimited fine on conviction. Is it reasonable and proportional for a small business owner who may be unaware of these rules to face that? What thought has the noble Baroness given to protections for well-intentioned, upstanding people who fall foul of the rules through ignorance, as they will if we broaden the scope of the law in this way?

On the possible backlogs in registration, what assessment has the noble Baroness made of the capacity of the four people currently in the office of the registrar to cope with the large increases in registrations? As she pointed out, there are just 240 people currently on the register; the EU has more than 17,500 organisations on its register and the Scottish Parliament has 1,642.

Finally, can the noble Baroness tell the House what her view is of the £1,000 annual registration fee? Does she feel that that is reasonable for a small business or charity, simply for allowing the Prime Minister or any other Minister to visit and discuss business?

I hope we can all have a constructive debate on the principles underpinning the Bill, but there are a number of unanswered questions to consider. I look forward to the response of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter of Kentish Town, and to our further debates at later stages.

My noble friend has argued that the rules, as they currently are under the 2014 Act, leave a large loophole and that the Bill provides the remedy, although it does involve some considerable administrative consequences. Previous Governments have argued—perhaps my noble friend the Minister will argue the same today—that there is already a regime in place whereby Government Ministers and Permanent Secretaries of government departments voluntarily disclose information about whom they meet on a quarterly basis, but is this enough? I do not think so.

The Committee on Standards in Public Life produced a report in 2021—not long after I arrived here—which specifically argued for the Cabinet Office to collate all departmental transparency information and publish it in an accessible and, above all, searchable database. It also advocated an expansion of the register to include contact between lobbying companies, spads and senior director-level civil servants. Perhaps my noble friend the Minister has something to say on this point. That committee stopped short of calling for the register to be expanded to include in-house lobbyists.

As the House knows, the post-legislative scrutiny of the Act by PACAC, the committee of the other place, also stopped short of recommending the extension to cover in-house lobbyists. However, it referred to “loopholes” that should be closed. The March 2026 Rycroft Review specifically drew attention to the current VAT exemption under the 2014 Act which, in effect, now allows lobbying firms of foreign-based subsidiaries of UK lobbying companies not to register. This is an error, and I hope my noble friend the Minister will address it.

As has been mentioned already, in March our outgoing Prime Minister commissioned the new Ethics and Integrity Commission to review, among other things,

“whether the current arrangements for transparency around lobbying are sufficient”.

If the report is being published next week, we look forward to reading what the answer will be. Maybe the Minister could also say something about that.

The Chartered Institute of Public Relations has already been referred to; its survey found that two-thirds wanted the lobbying register to include both consultants and in-house lobbyists.

If the House wants to know why I take a close interest in this Private Member’s Bill, it is this: my own experience. Before I was elected to serve in this House, I worked on behalf of and for the science community. As I knew a little about how Parliament works—indeed, in the family in which I grew up, it was impossible not to know a little—I was called upon to help represent the science community to both Parliament and government. I did so in various ways, such as organising events and arranging meetings. I suppose one could say that I did this work in-house. I organised on behalf of the science community—year after year, and decade after decade—the biggest science events ever held in the House. I hope the House will not mind if I give a couple of examples.

Parliamentary Links Day brought together the whole scientific community on a single day each summer. It comprised a huge meeting in the Commons, with standing room only, and another major event here in this House. You had to look only at the invitation cards to see what I mean: all the major sectoral science societies were represented—biology, maths, physics, chemistry, engineering—as well as many of our national academies, such as the Royal Society. The event was all about educating Members on science and technology issues and making the case for science and technology and the resources needed to fund them. We got speakers year after year from the Cabinet: the Foreign Secretary; the Environment Secretary; the Health Secretary; the International Development Secretary; the Science Minister, who was not always in the Cabinet but was crucial; and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Twenty-one years ago this year, the then Prime Minister himself addressed Parliamentary Links Day and I can well remember the frisson in the room. People were astonished to find a Prime Minister walking in to address them.

In 2001, I brought together a wide range of science organisations to produce the first ever Charter for Science and Engineering, to which the then Chancellor subsequently responded point by point, when he launched the 10-year investment strategy for science.

The Voice of the Future is another event that is still going. It brings young scientists and engineers to Parliament, who sit around the horseshoe questioning the Minister, the shadow Minister, the Chief Scientific Adviser, and members of both Houses’ Select Committees on Science and Technology, who sit at the witness table. It used to be launched by the Speaker himself.

I also organised parliamentary receptions—not just the Christmas reception at which we gave awards for outstanding contributions to the cause of science but others. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Anderson, who is in his seat, will remember the reception we organised to welcome back Helen Sharman, the first British person in space. That was quite a long time ago.

About 10 years ago, I arranged for Tim Peake—a name your Lordships may also remember—to give the first ever evidence from space to a Select Committee, in the Boothroyd Room. I remember meeting the parliamentary engineers, who worked in the basement at Millbank, and they were thrilled when the first signals conveying Tim Peake came through from NASA. The now noble Baroness, Lady Blackwood—sadly, not in her place at the moment—was the chair of the committee at the time so, if you do not believe me, ask her all about it. It was really quite an event.

Working in parallel to all this is the Parliamentary and Scientific Committee—of which, as it happens, I am now president—which organises the annual STEM for Britain event, in the other place. It brings early-career scientists and engineers here to meet their local Members of Parliament and exhibit their work. It is highly competitive. My purpose in giving these examples is to illustrate that lobbying activity of this kind goes on all the time. It is about seeking influence.

I have run out of time. Parliament is not a museum, it is a workshop, and this type of activity is to be encouraged. Expanding the 2014 Act register will do no harm and may well increase the sunlight we can shine on the whole area of lobbying. When it comes to this Bill, I will be voting for sunlight.

It may surprise the Bill’s proposer that I support in principle what she is attempting to do. I will, I am afraid, irritate her by saying that, while I agree in principle, I disagree with almost every practicality of how she is doing it. The reason why—here, I come back to the comparison between the Westminster register and the EU transparency register—is that it is virtually impossible in the Westminster register to reconcile the quarterly information reports that Ministers make about their meetings with the consultant lobbyists who are on the register to try to see how they directly relate to one another as regards meetings and, especially, content. There is nothing about the content.

I should remind the House that in 2013-14, when the Bill was going through—unusually, this is not reflected accurately in the Library briefing—it was not extended to companies that were not consultant lobbyists because, in 2010, we in the coalition Government had introduced the ministerial reporting requirement. At that time, as far as we were concerned, the ministerial return would make it perfectly transparent if any company met a Minister on its own behalf, because that would appear in the return. The point was that a meeting between a public affairs or consultant firm and a Minister might appear in the Minister’s return, but you did not know on whose behalf they were speaking. That was why the register of consultant lobbying was established and why it had the parameters it did. The intention was not to restrict transparency but to add a transparent register where the quarterly information returned would not provide the information.

Why do I think we need to go further? There is capacity within the Act to go further, which Administrations since 2014 have not used. That capacity is twofold. First, as was mentioned previously, special advisers could be included along with Ministers and Permanent Secretaries, because consultant lobbyists know perfectly well that special advisers are an extremely effective way of avoiding the transparency the register is meant to provide. That is available, through secondary legislation, under Chapter 2 of the Act. Secondly, Chapter 23 gives Ministers the regulatory power to change what information is required to be provided to the register.

There is a very big difference. I will not bore the House by enumerating the differences between the Westminster register return and the EU return, but the latter is far more substantial in terms of what you know about an organisation that is seeking to influence the policy of the European Union. You know on whose behalf it is working, what clients it has, what funding it receives, which band of financial activity it is devoting to this task, and so on.

Why do I think the EU register is now a better way of doing things? Because you can reconcile the content of the lobbying with the organisation that is doing it, on whose behalf it is doing it and what resources it is devoting to it. If we are going to be transparent, we might as well go to the EU register, but it is substantively different from the one in the 2014 Act. The 2014 Act is constructed around regulating the person who lobbies, whereas the EU register is about regulating the nature of the activity itself. It is possible to move the 2014 Act in that direction, and I suggest that we should, but this Bill does not do that sufficiently.

I will give just one example. In paragraph 1(1) of Schedule 1, an exception from the requirement to register is provided if the person conducting the communication with Ministers or Permanent Secretaries does so for a business whose main activity is not lobbying. Most organisations will say, “We’re covered by the exemption. Lobbying is incidental to what we do, so we don’t need to register”. When they do register, they will get very confused about who they register. Should it be the chief executive? Should it be everybody? The EU register does not have that problem—the organisation is registered, not the individuals within it.

I suggest that at this stage, given that it is Second Reading, we say yes to the principle of trying to do something about this, but in Committee we may have to look in some detail at how we do it. It is not about simply putting “in-house lobbyist” alongside “consultant lobbyist”; it is about shifting from consultant lobbying and in-house lobbying to creating a register of organisations that are seeking to influence government legislation and policy. They should be on the register, in the same way as is true of the Brussels register.

As things stand, two lobbyists could walk tomorrow into the same ministerial meeting and talk about the same issues. One might have to register, because they are an external consultant acting for a client. The other might represent a major corporation employing its own in-house public affairs team and would avoid the statutory register altogether. Try explaining that distinction to the average concerned member of the public. It makes little sense. The political influence on policy does not depend on whether the lobbyist receives a consultancy fee or a salary from the organisation they represent.

We have a system now that reflects organisational structure rather than the reality of influence. I had an example recently from a senior partner in a consultancy, who set out why the current system needs to change. Not long ago, one of their clients, a prominent financial institution, was sending experienced in-house government relations specialists into the Treasury to have material conversations about banking regulations. Those meetings did not have to be registered. But when a young employee of the consultancy wrote to a Minister simply requesting a meeting, that fell under the definition of “direct lobbying” under the Act and needed to be registered. I think that that is more than a harmless anomaly, because it contributes to public mistrust in government decision-making. So it is about time we had the straightforward change that this Bill would bring about by simply extending transparency to in-house lobbying. I hope that the Government will give it consideration.

As the noble Lord, Lord Lansley, mentioned, it is relevant in this discussion to talk about the Government’s transparency releases. As my noble friend Lord Stansgate said, as it stands, these releases are hard to find and hard to search. They are published in different places, in different formats, and with different names. They could be published in a single, accessible, searchable format. I hope the Government will give that consideration.

I also invite the Government to consider the remit of the Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists while they are at it. It has admirably performed the role Parliament assigned to it, but it is reasonable now to ask whether its scope is still relevant more than a decade after the original legislation because, since then, the practice of lobbying has evolved. More large organisations have invested in sophisticated in-house government relations teams and there is more digital campaigning. The boundary between public affairs, strategic communication and direct government engagement has become less distinct. It is therefore legitimate to ask whether the regulator’s remit should evolve as well.

In that context, Ministers might look at the experience elsewhere. The Scottish system, for example, operates under a broader framework. It focuses on recording lobbying activity itself, rather than relying so heavily on distinctions between different categories of lobbyists. The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, gave another example: that of the EU register. I am not suggesting simply copying another model, but there could be lessons worth learning about proportionality, coverage and public accessibility. A review of the registrar’s remit could consider questions such as whether the current definitions are still fit for purpose, whether the public can easily understand who needs to register and who does not and whether reporting requirements are proportionate.

The system we should be aiming for needs to be comprehensive enough to command public confidence, proportionate enough not to discourage legitimate engagement and, recognising the points that the noble Baroness, Lady Finn, made about businesses, proportionate enough not to place disproportionate burdens on business. The system should also be straightforward enough for organisations and the public to understand. I think that this Bill makes an important contribution towards that goal. It recognises that transparency should focus on influence, not merely organisational form; it begins to correct anomalies that have become increasingly difficult to justify; and it offers an opportunity to modernise a framework that has not kept pace with changes in the lobbying profession.

It is worth saying that it is up to the Government to decide who to meet, who to hear and who to listen to. Successive Governments have very much balanced access in favour of these big interests, not in favour of those lobbying for public interests. Also, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter said, the current way the register is arranged means a lack of transparency for big lobbying and creates extra work and barriers for those lobbying in the public interest. It might seem to be a deliberate weakness in the law, and I commend the noble Baroness for seeking to fill it.

It is worth noting that we rely very heavily on journalists to dig and burrow to find out links. They make an expensive investment in finding out what is going on in companies that are trying to get windfall profits while the public good is ignored. It is worth noting, as a number of noble Lords have said, that we are effectively relying on stronger laws in other jurisdictions—we have to note the much stronger laws in Scotland and the EU—to occasionally draw back the veil. I note the publication this week on the substack Democracy for Sale of an article by Adam Bychawski and Peter Geoghegan that is an interesting case study of that. I do not know whether this Bill would solve that problem, but it is concerning. Andy Burnham’s incoming chief of staff, James Purnell, was until very recently the chief executive of Flint Global. Flint has said that its British client list is confidential and has declared just two clients in the UK in five years. But, on the EU lobbying register, it emerges that Flint works for Uber, Amazon and Diageo. You might say that they are very clearly big interests.

That is one interesting case study but we have heard some horrific case studies, and reference has been made to those. We have to think of Greensill, Westferry and the Covid-19 VIP lane. I declare, in the interests of transparency, that the rest of what I am going to say has been informed by lobbying from Spotlight on Corruption, Unlock Democracy and Transparency International UK, and it is they who stress those examples of the transparency gap that the Bill could partially fill. I understand that the noble Baroness kept the Bill narrow and focused—in my upcoming Bill, I have gone very much in the other direction of having a very broad Private Member’s Bill—but it is important to raise some of the gaps, which I hope the Government will say they intend to act on, and other issues that this Bill does not cover that we need to see action on.

The VAT registration requirements represent a problematic loophole, and other similar registers of consultant lobbyists do not present these exemptions. There is a real problem with timeliness, and it has not got better. Knowing what has happened before a Government make a decision is important, but, too often, we find out only months after the fact. That is something the Government themselves should be promising to solve.

The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, and a number of other noble Lords, said that we get descriptions of meetings from Governments that do not really tell us anything meaningful about what was discussed or what the subject of the meeting was. We have registrations of lobbyists saying they are working for a particular company, but how do all these pieces match up? That has to be solved, so that the public can see who indeed has Ministers’ ears. We should know what the purpose of the meeting was. If it was a meeting to discuss “trade issues”, what does that mean precisely? Are you meeting to discuss Australian beef imports or sanitary and phytosanitary standards? Knowing those details is crucial to understanding what is going on.

I again commend the noble Baroness. This is an interesting and important discussion. I hope that the Government—whatever “the Government” means—are listening.

Imagine that the chief executive of an international bank is worried about what the Government might be doing around banking regulations or other aspects of banking, and he or she speaks to the Chancellor of the Exchequer and makes it clear that, if these changes in banking rules or regulations or taxation happen, the bank may have to consider relisting somewhere else. At that point, is the chief executive of the bank an in-house consultant?

I then look at the Bill before us today. New Section 5A(4) to be inserted by Clause 1(8) talks about regulations that would require the “topics of discussion” to be disclosed. Would that have an inhibiting effect on communication between business leaders and government? I do not think the noble Baroness would want to see the Bill having that sort of inhibiting effect on relations. It would be helpful, in her wind-up and perhaps when we come to the details of the Bill in Committee, for the noble Baroness to explain how we can avoid these unintended consequences.

I moved an amendment when the Bill was being considered in 2013 to provide for that, stipulating that representations made to the Government should be published when a policy was announced. That would have extended what my noble friend Lord Lansley was referring to in the quarterly return and would have been far more targeted to the actual policy that was being announced. Such a reform is essential for tackling declining trust in politics, as has already been referred to.

The 2014 Act, as I argued, was an output of the “something must be done” mentality. Scandals surrounding lobbying are nothing new, and, as we have heard, they undermine public trust. Simply requiring lobbyists—or rather some lobbyists—to be on a register has not really tackled the problem. As we have heard, the objection to extending the register to cover in-house lobbyists is one of cost, yet what we have is a limited register that requires a bureaucracy, albeit not a large one, that puts a burden on the public purse. As it stands, I am not sure it justifies the expense. We expend the money for no clear benefit in public trust. We need a radical reset if we are to ensure that lobbying operates in a fully transparent manner. The problem is not so much one of resources but of political will.

The answer is to ensure that there is transparency at the point when a policy is announced. If the representations made are revealed, then one has openness. It produces discipline, with Ministers knowing that what has been put to them is known. That should help to bolster support for their policies, if they can show the persuasive arguments that have been placed before them. The focus shifts from the status of those lobbying to the content of the lobbying: in essence, it removes the need for a register. As I said in 2013:

“Any representations made to anyone in the department would be shown. It would not matter who the lobbyists were: full-time independent lobbyists, in-house lobbyists, part-time lobbyists or individuals making representations on that particular issue—all would be caught. We would thus have true, comprehensive transparency. That is the key point, and it is important that we establish the principle”.—[Official Report, 5/11/13; col. 191]

The Minister responding to that debate was the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. He said of my amendment:

“I took him down as saying that the Government believe in transparency but not too far. I would say that the Government believe in transparency, but want to be proportionate in our approach”.—[Official Report, 5/11/12; col. 196]

That was an interesting concept. Perhaps the Minister today can tell us the threshold for determining disproportionate transparency.

The public money used to maintain the register could be deployed instead to facilitate the release of representations made to government. Such transparency was achievable when we debated the Bill back in 2013 and, given the strides made in technology since, this can now be achieved far more efficiently than was the case then.

This takes us beyond the content of the Bill before us, but it helps make the case for it. The argument I have deployed emphasises that what is before us is a modest but necessary measure to address a deficiency in the 2014 Act. I hope the Minister will give it a fair wind. It would be even better, of course, if she announces that the Government are prepared to go further and ensure that we have full transparency. Let us pass this Bill, and then get on and be a leader internationally in ensuring the transparency of lobbying.