Hansard

I rise to speak in the debate with a feeling of dismay about the bill that we are passing today. I say that as someone who was not initially a supporter of the idea of a lobbying bill—in fact, as some colleagues know, because I have told them so, I was one of those who sat on the Standards Committee in the first session of this Parliament and decided that we would not have any kind of regulation of lobbying. However, I am now in favour of legislation on lobbying, and I would like to explain why.

As a member of the Standards and Public Appointments Committee, I decided that I would keep an open mind and listen to the arguments and the evidence before coming to a decision about whether I would vote for the bill. The committee took evidence from a number of eminent people with great experience in the area—people who had helped shape legislation in other countries, people who were advocates for greater transparency in politics and people who lobbied for a living. We also heard from charities and the voluntary sector, and we discussed with them their concerns and the points that they made. Then, the committee debated what we had heard and drew up our stage 1 report. We made a number of recommendations to the Government about ways in which the bill could and should be improved. Many of those ideas have been debated today, so I will not rehash them now.

It became clear that the Scottish Government was going to take on board only a few of our recommendations, so I lodged amendments to give effect to some of the committee’s stage 1 report. I should say that, at that point, I still was not entirely sure that we needed a lobbying bill. However, I was absolutely sure that, if we were going to have one, it needed to be the best bill that it could possibly be. In that regard, although I know that it is rehashing what I said earlier—I make no apologies for that—it is ludicrous, in the 21st century, to exclude communications other than face-to-face communications. However, perhaps unsurprisingly, all my amendments were voted down at stage 2, in spite of the fact that they simply reflected the views of the committee. How that can happen in a Parliament such as this, I leave others to consider. Today, once again, similar amendments were voted down.

While the committee was scrutinising the bill, my colleague Neil Findlay tried to obtain information through the FOI system about ministers’ engagement with lobbying companies. Most of the information that was requested could not be supplied because to do so would take the cost over the £600 threshold. On that point, I wonder whether the Scottish Government needs to examine the system that it uses for recording such information to see whether it might be equipped with a proper search facility that would allow such information to be abstracted more easily and—crucially—cheaply.

Gradually, over time, I came to the conclusion that a lobbying bill was required because, in principle, people should know what their elected members do and who has influence over them. It also seemed to me that the Government was going out of its way to ensure that the bill would be as ineffectual as possible, although I genuinely do not understand why it would want to do that.

Earlier, when we were dealing with amendments, Patrick Harvie made the point that we should, at this stage, include other categories of civil servants and that, if that were found to be too onerous, or if it did not work, we could reduce the numbers but that, until we had the information, we could not make that judgment.

That amendment was defeated, but it is not beyond the Scottish Government to record that information internally and feed it into the review when the review takes place. It is only by having that kind of information that Parliament will be able to make a properly informed judgment. Will the minister consider that today?

Mr FitzPatrick has made great play of the idea of the bill having to be proportionate. I agree with that. We all want to be transparent and open, and we want our constituents to have as much and as easy access to us as possible. What we disagree about is the way in which that should be handled in legislation. We have ended up with a complicated, labyrinthine bill that might do more harm than good—I genuinely hope that that is not the case, but I fear that it might be.

It is the passage of this bill that has made me think that a lobbying bill is needed. The problem is that what is needed is not the bill that is before us, which is a pale imitation of the robust bill that a Parliament such as this one should have.

I sincerely hope that, when the legislation is reviewed in the next session of Parliament, there is a Government and a Parliament that is not afraid of transparency and openness and which will create a new bill that is proportionate and does what it says on the tin, because this one does not.