My Lords, in moving Amendment 65 I shall also speak to Amendments 67, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77 and 113, which are in the names of my noble friends Lady Royall and Lady Hayter. This is an extensive group of amendments but the main focus is to expand greatly the amount of information that the register holds. For example, one of the key amendments in the middle of this group concentrates on the detail of spending by lobbyists. This is important as, without these details, it is possible
only to build up a very limited picture of the lobbying activity taking place because, as Unlock Democracy says in its briefing to noble Lords:
“A good faith estimate of what it being spent on lobbying would also show scale, disparities and trends in lobbying”.
Compare the current, limited proposals in the Bill with the level of transparency in place in the United States, where it is relatively easy to find out how much is being spent, and by which companies and sectors, using publicly available information. For example, the Senate record of spending shows that Boeing spent $15,440,000 on lobbying in the US in 2012. General Electric spent $21,200,000. These are very significant sums and they are spent by in-house lobbyists. As we know, this can have a marked effect on policy and the discussions around it. For example, an IMF working paper from 2009 draws a direct link between the amounts of money spent in lobbying by financial services firms and high-risk lending practices before the financial crisis. Ameriquest Mortgage and Countrywide Financial, both of which were at the heart of the crash, spent $20.5 million and $8.7 million respectively in political donations, campaign contributions and lobbying activities from 2002 to 2006. The IMF paper concludes that,
“the prevention of future crises might require weakening political influence of the financial industry or closer monitoring of lobbying activities to understand better the incentives”.
This is still pertinent here. As recently as 2 July, the head of the Prudential Regulation Authority was reported in the FT as saying that he was going to draw up rules to prevent the banks lobbying parliamentary officials against new requirements for leverage. Under the proposals in the Bill, we will not get any of the same transparency when it comes, for example, to lobbying by the big six energy companies. It has been reported that Ministers from the Department of Energy and Climate Change have met representatives from the energy giants on 128 occasions since 2010, yet have held talks with the main groups representing energy consumers only 26 times during the same period. We need much more information about what is going on here.
Amendment 65 would exclude the option of an individual residence being listed as the address of a lobbyist. Our concern is that this seems to represent a potential loophole, which we urge the Government to reconsider. The effect of the Bill, if passed in its current form, is that the level of transparency for the register is limited to the individual name and address of a main place of business or, if there is no such place, the individual’s residence. This is surely a loophole that would bar us from knowing who the individual works for. That concern fits into the wider point raised by our Amendment 67: that an increase in transparency should allow us to see who is lobbying on behalf of a company and which members of staff are engaged in that lobbying.
There are also a number of amendments in this group in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie. We should be very grateful for the way in which he has gone through the Bill with such forensic attention to detail. His amendments have similar intentions to ours and we support them. I beg to move.