My Lords, I thank noble Lords, in particular, the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, for the detail of the various amendments. I will take them all back and consider them. First, on Amendment 10, it was absolutely the intention of the Bill to capture consultant lobbyists who lobby as a profession, not the neighbour who is lobbying for a friend about a housing development, or whatever, for no payment. That is part of informal campaigning, which is different from the professional consultant lobbyists with whom Part 1 is intended to deal.
I clearly need to have a long tutorial with the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, and I promise that I will give him a good deal of my time, but I hope that that gives him some comfort. I also take the noble Lord’s point, which I had noted in the committee report, about not only direct lobbying but the sort of indirect lobbying that comes through professional advice and the danger that public affairs companies will retreat from saying that they are lobbying to saying that they are merely providing advice. We clearly need to ensure that we cover that.
On the question of VAT, the Government were looking for a simple means to exclude the very small fry from the Bill. It was felt that whether or not a business has a large enough turnover to have to register for VAT was the simplest and easiest method to exclude the small fry and include the large ones. That is the intention. If the noble Lord has a better way to do it, I look forward to discussing it, but there is nothing more intended by that provision.
The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, had an interesting thought about whether communications include interventions. I am advised that interventions are communications, but, again, we will consider in detail the subtle differences that may occur. I am certainly advised that it is established practice in legislative drafting that the now ubiquitous nature of electronic communications is accepted as being included in the term “writing”, except in cases where the context specifically demands otherwise. The Bill therefore makes no distinction between a handwritten note, a typewriter-produced letter—if such still exist—a dot matrix-printed telegram, a fax, an e-mail, a text message, a personal tweet or a BlackBerry messenger conversation, so I assure the noble Lord that the amendment is not necessary.
On the inclusion of “European” in the Bill, I understand that the intention is that lobbying the UK Government in respect of European legislation will be captured. Our understanding is that lobbying with respect to government policy, including government policy towards the European Union, is covered by the Bill but we will look at that to make sure that it is fully covered.