House of Commons - Introducing a statutory register of lobbyists

Introducing a statutory register of lobbyists - Political and Constitutional Reform Contents

5 Ministerial meetings

73. Regardless of whether the Government introduces a statutory register of lobbyists, a number of relatively simple steps could be implemented quickly which would improve transparency regarding who is lobbying whom. On 29 May 2010, shortly after becoming Prime Minister, David Cameron spoke on the issue of transparency in a Number 10 podcast. He stated:

So we're going to rip off that cloak of secrecy and extend transparency as far and as wide as possible. By bringing information out into the open, you'll be able to hold government and public services to account...

With a whole army of effective armchair auditors looking over the books, ministers in this government are not going to be able to get away with all the waste, the expensive vanity projects and pointless schemes that we've had in the past...

We saw what happened with MPs' expenses once they were put online, out in the open. No one will ever be so free and easy with public money again.

But it's not just about efficiency and saving money. I also think transparency can help us to re-build trust in our politics. One of the reasons people don't trust politicians is because they think we've always got something to hide.[86]

74. The consultation paper states that

the Government does not propose that any information on meetings should be included in a register. Details of meetings between Ministers and third parties are already published regularly, and the Government feels the provision of duplicate information in a statutory register of lobbyists is unnecessary.[87]

However, the Confederation of British Industry stated: "we agree that information should not be duplicated but are concerned that the Government's argument is undermined by the way this information is currently presented in practice".[88] We heard evidence from witnesses that Departments were not releasing details of ministerial meetings in a timely or efficient manner. Francis Ingham, Chief Executive of the Public Relations Consultants Association, concurred with this view, stating:

Ministerial diaries could be improved considerably; they are frequently late or inaccurate. I think transparency cuts both ways and it would be a good thing for ministerial private offices to be a bit more open about who they meet, as well as the demand for lobbyists to be more open about what they do as well.[89]

75. The Minister, Mark Harper, talking about meetings with third party lobbyists, stated "the Minister may know—in fact, will know—but the outside world will not, and that is the gap we were trying to close in our proposals".[90] Central Lobby Consultants a public affairs firm, told us that it would be extremely rare for them to meet Ministers without the client being present.[91] If the Government is adamant that the problem which needs to be solved is that people do not know the clients of third party lobbyists, the Government could simply disclose whom the lobbying firm is representing when the detail of the meeting is published.

TIMELINESS

76. Who's Lobbying, a website that collates and presents data on ministerial meetings, told us that there were issues with the way that ministerial meetings were currently being disclosed by Government Departments. Departments had last published meeting reports for the period July to September 2011, and in some cases the public had to wait up to eight months for departments to publish reports, which, Who's Lobbying stated, "is a denial of transparency in a way".[92]

77. Section 8.14 of the Ministerial Code states that:

Ministers meet many people and organisations and consider a wide range of views as part of the formulation of Government policy. Departments will publish, at least quarterly, details of Ministers' external meetings.[93]

We wrote to the Cabinet Secretary, Jeremy Heywood, asking for confirmation that ministerial meetings should be published quarterly. The response stated that "the Government's commitment is to publish this information on a quarterly basis".[94] The Cabinet Secretary added: "I do agree that this information should be published as quickly as practically possible, and I have asked Departments to continue to work to speed up the process".[95] When we asked the Minister about the timeliness of disclosures of ministerial meetings, he replied "one of the things that slows it down is checking what is published, so the more you publish, the more it has to be checked".[96]

78. However Rob McKinnon of Who's Lobbying pointed out that many Departments managed to update social media on a monthly, or even weekly basis:

many government departments now have a photo publishing account on a website called flickr.com, and they are regularly publishing information in quite a timely fashion there. Here is an example from the No. 10 stream. I am holding here a photograph of a meeting David Cameron had in May 2010. In the same month that photo was published on flickr.com, and then we had to wait until October 2010 before the report of that meeting was published as part of the regular ministerial meeting reports from the departments."[97]

If Government can publish photos of meetings within a month it should not take up to eight months to publish lists of meetings with outside stakeholders. We recommend that Departments publish details of ministerial meetings no more than a month after the month in which the meeting occurred.

THE FORMAT OF MEETING DATA

79. We heard from Who's Lobbying that ministerial meetings were not currently published in a consistent format, which made collating and analysing the data difficult. Rob McKinnon told us: "there are over 24 department websites you need to visit to find this information. Currently, it has been published in over 150 different files. If you had a researcher trying to collate this information, it might take them days just to collate the activity of a single organisation right now if the Who's Lobbying website was not there."[98]

80. When we put this point to the Minister, he stated that data on whom Ministers and officials were meeting were "pretty straightforwardly published in the two different file types".[99] The majority of files on ministerial meetings are published in either PDF, or CSV format, which are machine readable. However a quick trawl of Government Department websites also found data on ministerial meetings published in Word on the Business Innovation and Skills website, and Rich Text Format on the Department for Culture, Media and Sport website.[100] The more Government publishes data in consistent file formats the easier it will be for 'armchair auditors' to analyse the data and hold Government to account for its decisions. We recommend that the Cabinet Office publish a ministerial and official meeting template in a specific machine readable format for all Departments to adhere to when publishing details of ministerial meetings.

LEVEL OF DETAIL IN MEETING DISCLOSURES

81. Additionally, Departments are providing only very basic details of the meetings. As Who's Lobbying told us, "the current Government meeting reports do not provide a date. They only provide the month of the meeting, so it makes it very hard to do further analysis".[101] When we put this to the Minister, he told us that "this Government are being far more transparent than any previous Government have been in terms of publishing the details of ministerial meetings, who Ministers are meeting, when those meetings are with external organisations, and the purpose of those meetings".[102]

82. However, a comparison between details of the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change's meetings published under the previous Government and this Government reveals that ministerial meetings declared under the previous Government routinely showed the date of the meeting, while now only the month of the meeting is declared. Our decision to use the Department for Energy and Climate Change as a comparative example stems from the fact that they retain records of ministerial meetings from the previous Government on their website, when many other Departments have not. We consider such transparency to be positive.

Department of Energy and Climate Change, Quarterly information 1 July - 30 Sept 2011, Meetings with External Organsiations (including meetings with newspaper and other media proprietors, editors and senior executives,)
Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change

Date of Meeting Name of External Organisation Purpose of Meeting

July 11 Mainstream Renewable Power; Dong Energy, EDP Renovaveis, Enevo Wind UK To discuss energy and climate change issues

July 11 Ovo energy; Good Energy, Cooperative Energy; First Utility, Cornwall Energy, Ecotricity To discuss energy and climate change issues

July 11 CBI To discuss energy and climate change issues

Department for Energy and Climate Change[103]

Department of Energy and Climate Change, 1 October 2009 to 31 December 2009
Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change

Date of Meeting Name of Organisation Purpose of Meeting

1 Oct 2009 Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment Climate change

8 Oct 2009 Green Alliance, E.ON, RWE, Npower, Scottish Power, Scottish & Southern Energy, Greenpeace & European Climate Foundation Climate Change and Energy Issues

8 Oct 2009 BA & Virgin Atlantic Airways Environment

22 Oct 2009 RWE Npower Energy Issues

22 Oct 2009 Green Alliance Climate change and energy issues

28 Oct 2009 National Federation of Women's Institute Climate Change

4 Nov 2008 WWF, Greenpeace, ActionAid, Oxfam & Friends of the Earth Climate change and energy issues

Department for Energy and Climate Change[104]

83. We understand that there needs to be a 'safe space' where officials can give Ministers full and frank advice regarding policy proposals and policy development. However, stating the date a meeting took place could help improve transparency surrounding lobbying and improve public confidence without violating this 'safe space'. For example if a Department announces a policy that would be favourable to a particular sector at the beginning of a month, then has meetings with lobbying organisations associated with that same sector later in the same month, the way that the meeting is currently declared could lead some to believe that there had been undue influence because it would not be clear whether the meetings had taken place before or after the policy announcement. If the specific date of a meeting were declared there would be less scope for unfounded allegations of undue influence. We strongly recommend that Departments publish the date and topic of a meeting with Ministers and officials.

84. The Minister told us: "we already publish not just the fact of meetings and who Ministers are meeting, but the purpose of the meeting, which therefore gives an indication of the topics being discussed".[105] However, the term 'general discussion' appears to be the most used phrase when departments are describing the purpose of the meeting, which does not, by itself, give any indication of the topic being discussed. General terms such as 'introductory' and 'catch-up' are too vague to be listed as the topic of a meeting. We recommend that the Government publish the specific topic of the meeting, unless there are immediate security concerns preventing disclosure.

85. Rob McKinnon of Who's Lobbying, stated that he had found many variations of company names, including acronyms, in the lists of disclosed ministerial meetings, which could make it difficult to collate the lobbying activity of particular companies. He told us:

almost 30% of the organisations that are declared in government meetings have been put into reports with a variant of their name, which makes it very difficult to collate their activity by organisation. I would strongly recommend any proposal by the Government require that any time a legal entity is mentioned, if it is a company, that the company number be provided, if it is a charity, that the charity number be provided, And if it is registered in a different jurisdiction, that the jurisdiction and the registration number in that jurisdiction be provided.[106]

The practice of requiring a company number and trading name of an organisation to be listed on the lobbying register is already a feature of the Australian lobbying regulations. The Government does propose that lobbyists be required to register their company number and registered address. This is a sensible proposal that we think should also be used when publishing data about whom Ministers are meeting.

86. We recommend that the Government provide the company or charity number of any organisation Ministers meet. This would ensure that even if a company is listed under an acronym, or a trading name, its identity can be verified. Companies and charities will be aware of this information and it should provide no undue burden to require them to give this information to Departments when meetings occur.

A CENTRAL GOVERNMENT PORTAL

87. The Government may wish to take heed of the website Who's Lobbying, which uploads details of all ministerial meetings, Select Committee hearings and publicly available details of lobbyists. We are concerned that such a valuable source of information on who is meeting with Ministers, officials and appearing before parliamentary Committees is reliant on the goodwill of a software developer uploading the information in his spare time. If Mr McKinnon decided to discontinue the Who's Lobbying project there would no longer be a single website with a free, publicly searchable way of ascertaining how many meetings an organisation had with Government, although the information would still be released individually by Departments. This would be a blow for transparency regarding whom Ministers and senior public officials are meeting.

88. We note that Government has recently been trialling a single Government domain, with ten Government Departments keeping the site up to date at the same time as managing their existing websites.[107] The results of this trial have not yet been published, but given the experience of Mr McKinnon, it should not be particularly costly or time consuming to put this data in one place, particularly if Government moves to a standardised format for disclosing who is meeting Ministers. We recommend that the Government publish details of ministerial meetings on one website. The experience of the Who's Lobbying project suggests that it is possible to do so.

86 Text of David Cameron'spodcast on transparency, 29 May 2010, http://www.number10.gov.uk/news/pms-podcast-on-transparency/ Back

87 HM Government, Introducing a Statutory Register of Lobbyists, January 2012, p14 Back

88 Ev w8 Back

89 Q 245 Back

90 Q 404 Back

91 Ev w10 Back

92 Q 329 Back

93 HM Government, The Ministerial Code, May 2010, Section 8.14. Back

94 Ev 135 Back

95 Ev 135 Back

96 Q 453 Back

97 Q 376 Back