Meeting of the Parliament 07 January 2016
I thank the minister for confirming that he is not a Luddite and that he is a modern man in the modern age. I am sure that he will want to ensure that the bill is a modern bill for the modern age, and that the Government will come back at stage 2 with a new definition of regulated lobbying.
Professor Raj Chari said during a committee evidence session:
“I had never seen such wording before. It pains me to say that even the UK recognises that lobbying takes place by way of written communication.”—[Official Report, Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee, 12 November 2015; c 21.]
I am sure that the minister does not want to be compared unfavourably with the dog’s breakfast that is the UK lobbying act—the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014. We want a better proposal than what is in the bill. We must recognise its absurdity and fix it as soon as possible.
We also need to address the weaknesses in the provisions on who should be included in the register as having been lobbied. We all know how lobbyists target special advisers and civil servants, and they must be included in the proposals. Not to include them would leave a glaring loophole that could easily be exploited. The minister mentioned the SALT briefing that we have received, and in its polling, 91 per cent of the public believed that SPADs and civil servants must be included in the register. I hope that the minister will take that into account. There is no mention, either, of financial disclosure. If we want people to have faith in the system, it is surely vital that they know the scale of lobbying. Are people spending a fiver or five grand? That would tell us the scale of the lobbying that goes on, and 92 per cent of people support the inclusion of that information.
We also need thresholds to ensure that normal MSP contact is unaffected, that one-off or infrequent lobbying is not included and that only significant lobbying by those who invest significant amounts of money and time to influence policies or win contracts are included in any register. Failure to make that clear has led to the fear that all the activities of anyone who approaches parliamentarians will have to be registered. That was never the intention. I hope that it is not the Government’s intention—I am sure that it is not.
My original proposals also suggested that the working careers of lobbyists should be included in the register, because too often we see the revolving door in operation whereby ex-politicians, special advisers and civil servants move into new roles and, within a short period, open up their contact books to gain access to decision makers, using all the knowledge and relationships that they built up in their previous employment to influence policy or win contracts for their new clients or bosses. Again, that can lead to negative perceptions among the public, yet there is no mention of a revolving-door provision in the Government’s proposals. We need only look at what has happened with recent Governments of all persuasions at Westminster to see all that in action—for example, with the new recruits at Aberdeen Asset Management, Weber Shandwick and Charlotte Street Partners. As I said, that has happened at Westminster under Governments of all persuasions.
The bill has many flaws and some of it is a bit of a mess. At a seminar that I and the convener of the Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee attended recently to discuss the bill, an independent expert on lobbying said that, at best, he would give it two out of 10, but that he would give the US system six out of 10. That does not bode well for the bill’s claims of transparency. If the bill is to work and to enhance our democracy, it will need serious amendment, and we intend to lodge many of the necessary amendments at stage 2.
15:55