My Lords, I support the amendment moved by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, provided that “government” is defined not as it is in the Bill but as it is in the
amendments standing in the names of the baronial opposition Front Bench, by which I mean Amendments 33 and 43.
I approach all this with a certain bemused detachment. I have to intervene because the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, appeared to imply that Permanent Secretaries are not important, although I am sure that he did not mean to do so. I say “bemused detachment” because none of this would ever have applied to me—not the Bill as it stands or with any of the amendments, even the wide-reaching, admirable amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. I was never a civil servant. I was a Permanent Under-Secretary but I was never a civil servant. The Diplomatic Service is a separate service. I apologise for making a rather pedantic—indeed, possibly, pompous—point, but there is something wrong in the drafting. I was a public servant but not a civil servant.
When I was a Permanent Secretary I never met a consultant lobbyist, thus proving the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Norton. They do not come to see Permanent Secretaries. If you are Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office, the people who come to see you are CEOs or chairmen of companies that are in trouble and want the help of an embassy or high commission somewhere around the world. They do not send government affairs people, so widening the definition would not bring in Permanent Secretaries—they come themselves. They certainly do not send a professional consultant lobbyist to see the Permanent Secretary or, I think, the Minister. I think they do to see special advisers, so I think that is a very important addition which has to be brought in. They tend to see the relevant desk or the Under-Secretary. They do not come near the Permanent Secretary.
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I was, for a time, head of the British negotiating delegation in Brussels. In that capacity I saw professional consultant lobbyists all the time. Brussels is a mass of lobbyists, and some of them are actually not too bad. I had to see a great deal of them but I was not a Permanent Secretary and would therefore not have been covered by the Bill. All their approaches to me would therefore have been irrelevant to this Bill. Even if wider definitions were brought in, their contacts with me would still have been exempt because I was never a civil servant. When I was running UKRep I was still a member of the Diplomatic Service.
At least three drafting points therefore need to be looked at. You need to deal with the distinction between the Diplomatic Service and the Civil Service, and include the Diplomatic Service. You also need to look very closely at Schedule 1, in which the definition of “government” seems to be strikingly and dangerously wide. I do not know what is meant by the inclusion in the schedule of a reference to the institutions of the European Union. It is every citizen’s right to approach the European Parliament, lobby the European Commission or approach the Permanent Representative and his office to register their views in the Council. I am not terribly happy about that reference, or the reference to other sovereign Governments, in Part 1 of Schedule 1.
Even if these definitional points were tidied up, I am still bemused. I am not quite sure, despite the noble Lord’s elegant explanation, what the problem is that we are trying to fix. As the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in the other place pointed out, it is not clear that transparency in lobbying is a significant problem. However, if it is a significant problem but a problem that applies only to Ministers and Permanent Secretaries, and that is all, and we keep a narrow definition, it is a problem that we can solve this afternoon. We need to change the Ministerial Code and the code of practice for civil servants, and we need a clear instruction to all Ministers’ private secretaries that in any contact with a lobbyist it must first have been established who the client is—who the lobbyist is acting for. Problem solved. You do not need a Bill to do that if you are dealing with the narrow problem that the Minister says the Bill is dealing with.
However, if you are dealing with a much wider problem, and most of the amendments assume that you are doing so, you are still in difficulty. I would have loved to go down the road that the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, suggests and regulate the activity rather than the individual doing it. But where then do you draw the line? When I was Permanent Secretary, senior trade association representatives or senior company executives did come to see me and did ask for help. Were they lobbying? They were not professional lobbyists but were acting for their company and asking for the support of the Government, high commission or embassy in question. If you legislate on the activity you need a recherché definition of what exactly lobbying is. Of course, that is not in the Bill because the Government have ducked the problem by going for the individual and a particular narrow category of individual.
It would be good to go wide rather than narrow, so my heart is closer to amendments such as that of the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, than it is to the Bill as originally drafted. It is an uneasy mix and it does not quite work.