Letting the London lobbyists off the hook

Admirable words from David Cameron. But as the date of this speech makes clear – February 2010 – they were uttered before he became Prime Minister. Alas, it seems like it is rather harder to “be the party that sorts all this out” when you are actually in government, as their proposed Bill to regulate lobbying makes clear.

The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill, to give it its full name, will be discussed in the House of Commons this week and it has managed to unite MPs on both sides of the House in derision. One Labour MP has called it a "dog's breakfast", while a Conservative MP said that was inaccurate because "far more thought has gone into pet nutrition".

So what is wrong with the Bill? The Bill would introduce a statutory register of lobbyists for the first time in the UK, but only those individuals or companies whose “main business” is lobbying would be required to register. Such a narrowly-defined version of lobbying creates a massive loophole that in-house lobbyists working for major corporations or larger public affairs companies would be able to slip through. Furthermore, there will be no code of conduct setting out standards to regulate lobbying and the government instead seems content to allow the lobbyists to self-regulate.

Much of the London lobbying world must be jubilant about the Bill's weaknesses. Peter Bingle, formerly of Bell Pottinger (a lobby firm at the heart of a lobbying scandal in 2011), said, “I will not be covered by the bill as it is drafted and nor will most of the major players in the public affairs consultancy world.”

Spinwatch has called the proposals a “fake lobbying register” and it is clear that the UK government has failed to learn the lessons from the EU's lobby register, where its non-mandatory nature and definition-loopholes also let many of Brussels biggest lobbyists, law firms and others off the hook.

Craftily the UK government has managed to all but silence media debate on these elements of the Bill by making the rest of legislation "the most pernicious assault on campaign groups in living memory", at least in the opinion of Greenpeace.

The Bill will introduce expenditure limits on the amount of political campaigning that trade unions, NGOs and others can do around an election year. NCVO, the organisation representing many voluntary organisations in the UK, has argued that this could “seriously [hamper] the ability to speak up on issues of concern”. They cite an example of a health charity publishing a leaflet highlighting the dangers of smoking. “If smoking legislation became a party political issue in an election, this activity could be deemed to have the effect of supporting a party’s campaign, and be subject to regulation,” NCVO argued in a letter to the responsible minister, Chloe Smith MP.

It's clear that this dangerous Bill needs a massive re-write. Otherwise, the Cameron government runs the risk of forever being branded the lobbyists' champion, hardly a desirable legacy for the man who said he would “fix our broken politics”.

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