My noble friend is now talking about moderate transparency rather than transparency, so he is already limiting it. He is very keen on “proportionate”, I have noticed; it has come up a number of times today. I am just wondering how proportionate it is to introduce a register of perhaps 350 companies when we have not established how many of them already publish their client list. If most of those who are going to be registered already publish their client list, it is proportionate at the wrong end, because there is no point, really, in doing it. It is not good enough just to establish how many would be covered by the register; we need to know whether it would actually add anything to our knowledge of what those companies are doing and who their clients are. There may not be any point in doing it.
My point is that, if you are going to do it, do it properly; if you want transparency for lobbying and you are going to be comprehensive, there will be a cost to it. If you are going to do it properly and have a register, I am afraid that you have to go down the Canadian route. My argument is that you can avoid doing that by going down my route, whereby you get transparency of lobbying, not simply listing lobbyists.
9.15 pm