The point behind this is that the Bill is addressing an issue that does not really arise. The vast majority of the work that takes place is lobbyists training and advising others how to do their own lobbying. They will not get caught by this. The reality is that the Bill will not cover anybody. The numbers are going down all the while. We will end up with a register with nobody on it; there will be no fees to run the register. I am not criticising this; it is a perfectly respectable way to work. I do not want to criticise people who train others how to lobby; it is a bit like training others how to legislate. But that is what the industry told the Select Committee in the other place about how the industry works. This Bill is a complete waste of time and does not address the issues the Government set out to address. That is what is behind Amendment 12, simply the way it works.
6.30 pm
On the VAT thing, I am not really clear. I have read the clauses on this. I know that the noble Lord, Lord Norton, has tabled amendments on it and I will be interested to hear what he has to say. I think we should take out the bit about the VAT registration. I am suspicious as to why it is in there. It seems to be done in such a way so as to avoid people having to be up front. That is why I query that. Amendment 15 is purely a probing amendment.
Amendment 30 might look a bit juvenile. It says that communications,
“must take place in the presence of a civil service note taker”.
This is born out of my experience: Ministers do meet non-civil servants without the presence of civil servants and then make decisions which they promulgate to the department to act on, and there are no notes. I have been on the receiving end of it myself in the past four years—of being given an instruction that came about because of such meetings where there was no access to the notes because there was no note-taker present. I did not follow that instruction, by the way. The Food Standards Agency is open and transparent and we said no. We were instructed to do something—to stop a process—and we said, “No, we’re not doing it”.
In my early days of my 12 years as a Minister, I was a bit irritated that you could not go anywhere without somebody there writing down what you said. I soon learnt that it is a massive protection to have a note-taker present. It is not so much what you are being told but what you say that you must have a note of so that you cannot be misrepresented later on. It should not require a note in the legislation but I am suspicious because the Bill does not reflect the way in which the industry works, so I wonder why we have the Bill and think it is probably a good idea if we can be assured that there will be notes of such meetings if they are face to face with a Minister.
I do not think that the Bill will stay as it is but let us assume that it does: if a lobbyist has personal contact with a Minister or Permanent Secretary—there is a question over how we define personal contact—it is axiomatic that there has to be a note-taker. In the previous Parliament, one of my colleagues in this place, a Minister, made some incredibly important decisions one weekend in the middle of a crisis and did not have a back-up civil servant with him. It was an issue. It is a protection for the Minister. The civil servants in the private office will make sure that it happens, as long as they know about the meetings, of course. That is the other issue: the meetings have to be in the diary anyway.
Amendment 51 seeks to cover the issue of in-house teams, those who make,
“communications on behalf of another person irrespective of whether the individual is an employee of that person”.
The in-house teams of the big corporations should be covered. They are the employees. Let us take a FTSE company. It does not have to employ lobbyists: it has its own people, in-house. They are not covered by this Bill. I think they should be. That is what this amendment is, inadequately, designed to cover deep in the issues in Schedule 1. I looked at what the Minister in the other place said and, to be honest, the answers on this aspect were not satisfactory. There is a powerful case for the in-house lobbyists of a company to be covered; they are not consultant lobbyists but salaried employees. By definition the company will be big enough to have its own team—rightly so. I am not criticising any of this at all; it is a perfectly respectable activity.
I would just like some answers to those questions so that I can decide whether in about three months’ time—or maybe six months’ time—I will have to come back on Report with other amendments.