CORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 137-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

Public Administration COMMITTEE

lobbying

Thursday 24 January 2008

PROFESSOR DAVID MILLER, DR WILLIAM DINAN, and MR PETER FACEY

Evidence heard in Public Questions 46 - 150

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Public Administration Committee

on Thursday 24 January 2008

Members present

Dr Tony Wright, in the Chair

Mr David Burrowes

David Heyes

Kelvin Hopkins

Mr Ian Liddell-Grainger

Julie Morgan

Mr Gordon Prentice

Paul Rowen

Mr Charles Walker

Jenny Willott

________________

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Professor David Miller and Dr William Dinan, Spinwatch, and Mr Peter Facey, Director, Unlock Democracy, gave evidence.

Q46 Chairman: Let me welcome our witnesses this morning; we are very glad to have you along, Professor David Miller and Dr William Dinan from Spinwatch but both academics, and Peter Facey, who is Director of Unlock Democracy. Thank you very much indeed for coming along and thank you for the memoranda you have given us in advance. This is an important session for the Committee in its inquiry, not least because in your memorandum to us earlier in the year, Dr Dinan and Professor Miller, you say that it is imperative that this Committee consider broader democratic principles, and sample opinion and evidence from a much wider range of sources than the usual insiders and vested interests who are previously participating in similar inquiries. So there we are; we have taken you at your word, you are not the usual vested interests or insiders, and we would like to know what you think about all this. Would you like to say anything by way of introduction?

Professor Miller: Briefly, I think.

Mr Facey: For us, this inquiry is part of a wider interest in terms of disconnection of politics between voters and politicians and the political process, and I do not think it should simply be looked upon as a concern between policy makers on the one hand and lobbyists, whether they be, from the voluntary sector, consultancies or business, but it is actually the third interested group which is the wider public. Particularly worrying is that in the last State of the Nation poll[1] conducted by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, when asked about influence, 17% thought voters had either a fair amount or a great deal of influence over the political system, and in comparison 67% thought that businesses had a fair or a great deal of influence. There is a perception that in politics powerful interest groups have a great deal more influence than ordinary voters, and I think the debate around transparency fits into that. Secondly-as an organisation which has campaigned around the funding of political parties and the transparency of political parties-you are now heavily regulated. If I gave you a donation or to a political party a donation of over a thousand pounds locally or £5,000 nationally you would have to say where that money came from and publish it via the Electoral Commission. As an organisation which has advocated that it is difficult for me to say that I, as an organisation which lobbies you and tries to influence you, should not in some way have to have similar regulations, not necessarily the same regulations because political parties and NGOs[2] or other organisation are different, but there should be appropriate regulation which covers the other side of politics, the people who try to influence decision‑makers. I think it would be dishonest of me to stand here and say that I myself, as somebody who runs an NGO, should not be regulated in an appropriate manner.

Professor Miller: The thing I want to talk about really is about the need for regulation, what it is that needs to be opened up and have some light shone on it. I suppose one of the key things that we are going to face in this discussion and with the lobbyists when they come to give evidence is a question of what is a lobbyist. In this area, if in no other, we are at one with the APPC,[3] the lobbyists' lobby group, which is that we think that lobbying and lobbyists are a much wider phenomenon than just the question of commercial lobbying consultancies. Peter's organisation lobbies; other organisations-trade unions, businesses-lobby directly; lobbying consultants are certainly lobbying but there is a whole range of other organisations also engaged in lobbying. In particular organisations like think-tanks, policy groups, policy planning groups are in effect engaged, we think, in lobbying, and it is important that any question of transparency, or regulation of lobbying includes and incorporates those kind of organisations. An example I have given, maybe you will come back to this later, is the example which came out in the press over the weekend, the example of TOAST, The Obesity, Awareness and Solutions Trust, an organisation which, according to its own website, engaged in lobbying of MPs and which claimed to be independent and to be funded from a variety of sources which ended up, it appeared, being funded almost entirely by one particular diet company. Now, many of the lobbyists say there is no issue here because MPs know who is lobbying them and are wise enough to be able to discount the lobbying influence, but in the case of TOAST the lobbyists did not tell the MPs. We wrote to all the MPs involved, and the Lords as well, and nine out of 21 of them have now said that they did not know about the relationship between this charitable trust and the company behind it. So we would say that there is a necessity for transparency so that MPs are protected; MPs are grown up but they need to be protected by being given proper information about what lobbyists are up to and what they do. So that is the key that is important about widening this question. There are two other brief points I would make. It is not just a question of transparency but also a question of privileged access. This feeds into a wider debate and back to the important thing last year on the destinations of ministers, MPs and civil servants in the private sector, the whole question there. There is the question of the revolving door, of the potential for perception of a kind of corruption there, and it is a question also of the privileged access of lobbyists and vested interests being able to secure privileged access to MPs, civil servants and ministers. Now, it is clear that it is the democratic right of every interest in society to be able to access decision‑makers, to petition them under the Magna Carta, for example, but it is also clear that in a democracy there ought to be some kind of level playing field in relation to access, and that for us is the question which is undermined by some of the lobbying techniques and tactics which we have talked about in our first and second submissions, so I think there is a wider question here than just the question of transparency and lobbying consultancies.

Dr Dinan: Very briefly, I am very appreciative of the opportunity to talk to you today. When we mentioned in our submission that you should sample opinion from outside vested interests we were not necessarily thinking of ourselves. I thought I would mention experience of similar debate in Scotland and Brussels because I have been tracking these for the last few years. What is striking about that is that we do believe that professional lobbyists engage in these kind of debates because it is obviously in their commercial self‑interest to do so. We think there is a wider public out there that often gets forgotten in this; it becomes fixated on what to do about commercial lobbyists. Transparency is often framed also for decision‑makers and MPs; we think that the wider public have a crucial role in this, have an interest, and we think that any transparency measures have to be accessible to the wider public. Also, experience in other jurisdictions shows that if there are loopholes in any register of lobbyists they would be exploited. Also, the fixation on commercial lobbyists is a problem, and I think we need to think about this much more widely. Civil society should be engaged in this, also NGOs, and whatever register or measures we come up with should embrace all different forms of lobbyists.

Q47 Chairman: Thank you for that. I am sure we shall explore all these matters over the next hour or so, but can we start more positively? Most people assent to the proposition that lobbying is integral to an effective democracy. We could not do our job unless we were being lobbied all the time by every outside interest group who know more about these issues directly than we do, and want an entrée into the political process to give their views and opinions. That seems to be the bedrock of the democratic system. So instead of approaching this in a rather negative way, that there is some sort of conspiracy out there to do down the public, surely we should be celebrating this activity?

Mr Facey: One of the raison d'êtres of our organisation is to increase public participation in the party political process. We encourage and work with other NGOs; we run events for young people in terms of encouraging them into the party political process. I am not ashamed of what I do for a living in terms of running an organisation which tries to develop policy and campaigns and tries to influence legislation. I am proud of what I do. It does not mean that there should not be some basic rules to govern it. I think what I do is not only honourable; it is necessary in society. But in the same way as in any activity you need some degree of regulation, you need some regulation in this. In football it is the rules of the game, and in the case of politics there need to be some basic rules of the game.

Q48 Chairman: You need regulation if there is a problem to be solved. What you do not need to do is invent regulation if there is not a problem to be solved. So the first thing to establish is whether there is a problem. If we establish there is we can then talk about the nature of any response to that, so let's stick with the first half for the moment about whether there is a problem. Now, the point I am putting to you is that I need an active world of lobbying; I need people to come to me about the Climate Change Bill and tell me: "We need more vigorous reduction targets", which is what all the green groups are doing at the moment. Presumably business groups are saying something else, I do not know, but we thrive on that. We cannot live without it. That seems to be working well. Why would we want to constrain that?

Professor Miller: Two reasons. One is the question of privileged access and there not being a level playing field, and the other is the question of transparency and who is engaged in the process. If it is clear who represents interests then we do not have a problem, but at present it is not clear who represents interests. For example TOAST, whom I just mentioned.

Q49 Chairman: You gave that example, admittedly, but on the whole we know exactly who comes and lobbies us.

Professor Miller: How would you know?

Q50 Chairman: Because we ask them and they tell us.

Professor Miller: And they say they are from such‑and‑such a company, or trust, or charity.

Q51 Chairman: We are not novices in this. We do know how the world works and we do know about lobbying, and we know that it is valuable, and we know they get up to some sort of ruses sometimes too of the kind you describe. We know all that. We do not need a great elaborate regulatory system to tell us about it.

Mr Facey: I am not sure we are necessarily advocating a great regulatory system. I am going to have to live with any system you come up with, and I do not want to have my hands tied behind my back. For example, we have been campaigning and lobbying you on the funding of political parties and how that should be changed. We have now to declare where our sources of money come from. That part of our work is funded by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, perfectly respectable, above board. They happen also to be the largest funder for the Liberal Democrats. I happen to think the grant to us is perfectly above board and transparent, but it is useful for you to know, when I come to you, that that area of work for us has an interest. Now, some Members around the table who are not from the Liberal Democrats may, therefore, question that-I hope you do not but you at least have a right to know where the sources of funding I have come from and what influence they may have on what I am saying to you, and you can hopefully judge that what we are saying is perfectly above board and based on evidence. But that information, I think, is important, and in the case of other organisations I think you knowing where their sources of funding come from is also important.

Q52 Chairman: But we ask that all the time and if it turned out that you were other than who you said you were you would be utterly discredited. So we know what the rules of the game are.

Dr Dinan: Perhaps you would know in your one‑to‑one direct dealings on that, but how would other Members know? Would you inform them you had been aware of some misrepresentation? It is one thing to satisfy yourselves, that is very important, but in the context of wider perceptions, maybe questions about probity in public life, about where influence is coming from, how do the public get to know about this and journalists? How is the information circulated through the political system? I think the wider question is quite important. In other jurisdictions where they have had a register of lobbyists it has served not just the public but other Members, because I think the assumption that information circulates quite easily perhaps is not quite the case.

Chairman: I am going to bring colleagues in but let's try and talk about whether is there a problem, and then the second area of, if there is a problem, what might the solution be.

Q53 David Heyes: I find the propositions you put to us quite persuasive and seductive, but I think we need to test the rigour of what you have been saying. If I can work from this example given already, we have already seen the political parties, the activities of politicians that are heavily regulated and very much more transparent than they were in the past. Many would argue, and it certainly seems from my position as one of those in the spotlight, that this has actually served to reduce trust, reduce openness, and in some ways has impaired the political process. Now, you are arguing for a similar approach, and I am generalising, for greater transparency on the part of lobbyists and on the part of lobbying activity. Where is the evidence? How do you prove to us that we are not going to make the same mistakes of actually undermining and taking action that is self‑defeating?

Professor Miller: The question really has to be whether there is evidence or a perception of evidence of impropriety or questions of standards in public life. If you take the example of the US, where they have lobbying registration and regulation for a long time, both at the Federal and State level, the most recent legislation brought in by the Democrats under Nancy Pelosi has tightened up the regulation there already, but the key which has been useful for transparency is that it has flushed out some key example of lobbying corruption. I am thinking in particular of the Jack Abramoff case; he was engaged in all sorts of lobbying misdeeds and bribery, et cetera. That case would not have appeared as a public issue if there had not been lobbying legislation. So in a way I am saying that it may well be that regulation uncovers previously unknown abuses, and that may have the effect, as you say, of damaging trust but in a more positive way it would have the effect of cleaning up the act of some of the lobbyists and some of the things they get up to, which is something we currently do not have on the public record.

Mr Facey: In terms of political parties I do not think anybody would say that we want to go back to the situation where we have no transparency. Yes, there have been scandals-and some of them are not scandals at all, they are just journalists putting two and two together and making five, but the fact that people know has meant that political parties are now a lot more robust about where they take their money from, and are hopefully better able to engage with the public so we can move on to an improvement of the system. But knowing what is happening is the first stage, and I hope we do not get any scandals as a result of NGOs having to declare where their money comes from; I do not want any NGOs to be in that situation. But if that is the case as a result of it then surely that is a good thing, because the reverse means we simply do not know, and I do not think not knowing about a problem is good.

Q54 David Heyes: Are there any examples we can draw from anywhere in the world you are aware of where greater openness and greater regulation of lobbying has resulted in the kind of improvements we would all want to see? Are there any valid international comparisons we can draw?

Professor Miller: Has resulted in what?

Q55 David Heyes: If we are advocating greater regulation of the lobbying process there is no evidence that I am aware of that that increases trust in government and that it is a positive thing to do. You are the academics-you must have drawn some international comparisons. Is there anywhere we can look to where greater regulation has improved things?

Professor Miller: Look at the examples that there have been recently. Hungary and Poland have just introduced lobbying regulation; in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, America there is lobbying regulation in one form or another. The tide is towards introducing or tightening lobbying regulation across the world, and that is a tide which is to do with an increase in transparency. It may not have the results you are looking for in a very clear, demonstrable way but it certainly is part of a much wider international opening up of an increasing transparency of government, of which freedom of information and funding political parties is another example. I am conscious I am not giving you the evidence that you want.

Dr Dinan: I would mention in relation to that that when we were involved in a similar kind of inquiry at Holyrood a few years ago we went to the trouble of questioning the people who ran the lobbies registers in the US and the feedback we got from them was that instead of acting as a barrier to participation it allowed smaller groups a much clearer picture of the political process, about who was trying to influence legislation policy, so in that sense it was quite positive. That is not an anticipated outcome of registration because what we hear all the time is that registration creates a barrier, adds more bureaucracy, switches people off the process and would be particularly challenging and difficult for small resource‑poor groups. The worry about lobbying is that it requires resources and expertise, and we have to recognise they are not necessarily easily distributed. If you can afford to pay or hire in‑house professionals to do this job you have a better chance of success, arguably. The reason corporations are investing in these functions is they obviously believe there can be. A study by Public Citizen in the US recently suggested that for every dollar spent on lobbying they expected 100‑dollar return for that in some way or another. Again, we can happily supply you with that report but the kind of evidence you are asking for I am not sure is out there.

Q56 Chairman: One of the best bits of evidence I have seen is by Professor Pross in Canada who has done a good survey of the whole development of thinking and legislation across countries in this area, and he says that you cannot have a uniform approach; you have to be sensitive to the political culture, the institutions of different countries. That is why the American example-and we have just been to America to look at some of this-is very unhelpful in many ways because the problem there is the role of money in politics. We do not have that here, we have really strict controls on money in politics here and we need better ones, so you cannot read across the problems from one political system to another one and invent the same regulatory structures because the problems are different.

Professor Miller: The problems are different, and there is a different scale to the problems here. I would say there is a problem of money in politics here which the regulation of political parties is one attempt to deal with, but you have also had in the last 20 or so years a move towards different ways for money to come into politics, so you have had a move away from direct political funding of political parties by some corporations into things like think-tanks and policy planning groups, and the money goes into politics in that direction so it is not so easily visible, so you have a whole range of activities going on like party conferences in the development of political process where money is coming from vested interests to pursue particular interests which people do not know about. People do not know quite often who are the particular funders of a think-tank when they do a report, or a policy planning group, or some of the discussion fora which proliferate around these buildings. There is a whole range of ways in which money is involved in the political process but we really do not have any proper way of finding out how much or where because it is not disclosed.

Q57 Chairman: But your memorandum to us says there is growing influence of lobbying on decision‑making-I used to be a political scientist in a previous incarnation-what evidence is there for that? I think you could make a very good case for the reverse actually. In the old days when the British Road Federation, the NFU[4] and all these people were inside government they were far more influential than in the kind of more open world now with FOI[5] and all the rest of it. So what is the basis for a proposition like that?

Professor Miller: The basis for this is, first of all, the massive increase in public consultancies and the massive increase in the influence industry since the 1980s. I bring this back to questions of public perception, and the narrowing of the political process, the gap between political parties, at least appears to be narrower, and the result of that amongst the public, as Peter has been saying, is that the public now are very distrustful of the political process and believe they have much less influence than particular vested interests, so I would say that part of it is in relation to how the political process has changed, and part of it is in relation to how public perception of the political process has changed.

Chairman: It could certainly come from mistrust and that is pointed out everywhere, but that is a different story. Charles?

Q58 Mr Walker: First, who exactly, in your view, has privileged access to me as a Member of Parliament?

Professor Miller: There are various ways in which lobbyists and their principals can get access to Parliament, and there are various ways in which that can happen across the whole range of organisations, from lobbying consultancies to think-tanks to NGOs and campaigning groups, but there are various schemes, for example, the Industry and Parliament Trust ‑‑

Q59 Mr Walker: No. Who has privileged access to me as a Member of Parliament? You said groups out there have privileged access to Members of Parliament. I am a Member of Parliament, and I am asking you and the panel who, in your view, has privileged access to me as a backbench Member of Parliament?

Professor Miller: I would say that organisations like the Industry and Parliament Trust are ways of bringing business into close relationships with MPs and other staff in the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Now, I do not have a problem with that as a scheme but there is no similar scheme which is called, say, the Environment and Parliament Trust, or the Trade Union and Parliament Trust.

Q60 Mr Walker: Shall I tell you who has privileged access to me? My constituents. I do not really give-and I am sorry I am going to swear-a rat's arse what most people who are not my constituents think, to be honest. I will meet them to be polite, but the people who have privileged access to me are Mr and Mrs Bloggins who are having problems with their neighbours, they are the people who have privileged access to me, and I think you are creating a sort of concern that simply does not really exist, because most Members of Parliament will tell you that the people who have really privileged access are their constituents. I am surprised you have not touched on that and you do not even recognise that, and it suggests you perhaps need to do a little bit more research to find out who we do meet and whose cases we do pursue.

Professor Miller: This is a question about access, yes, to MPs but also to the Civil Service, and the question is is there a level playing field and is there any public information available about who it is who is approaching MPs or ministers or civil servants ‑‑

Q61 Mr Walker: We live in a democracy. People have every right to come and talk to me about things that matter to them-be it Greenpeace, be it a pharmaceutical company that generates billions and billions of pounds for this economy and pays billions of pounds in taxes and employs hundreds of thousands of people. What is the problem with people coming to see their Members of Parliament in a democracy?

Professor Miller: None whatsoever.

Q62 Mr Walker: You seem to think there is. You seem to think it is all for nefarious, underhand reasons? That it is a corruption?

Professor Miller: No, not at all. It is question of the transparency of the political decision‑making process.

Q63 Mr Walker: I have read certainly your two academic CVs, and basically you are conspiracy theorists. Is that not the case, that you believe there is a big conspiracy? I am reading through your publications that you have put your names to. You think there is generally a co‑ordinated conspiracy on behalf of business to corrupt democratic systems around the world. Is that a correct analysis of your work?

Professor Miller: No. Certainly it is the case that business attempts to influence the political process, as do trade unions and NGOs and others. The question we are raising here is the question, on the one hand, of transparency and, on the other, a level playing field for different actors so that the democratic process can work more effectively and decisions can be taken on a basis which is more open and which takes more into account a range of views than it currently does.

Mr Facey: Can I give you a practical example? If I want to influence a Member of Parliament I know as a campaign organisation the best way of doing it is to get your own constituents to write to you in their words not in mine, because that has a hell of a lot more influence than me sending you a briefing. That is absolutely true. It is also true, though, if you look at the trend in terms of companies and organisations, that if you want to get a minister with somebody in a one‑to‑one position that is nowadays a lot easier to do by giving a donation to a think-tank to organise a pamphlet or do a seminar and then have a one‑to‑one with the sponsor and the minister than it is doing it the other way around. Now, I do not have a problem with that as long as it is transparent and known about. I also recognise that the best way of influencing you as a Member of Parliament is to go through your constituents, and that is as it should be. Both are proper as long as they are known about. I encourage people to badger you. We were involved in the Sustainable Communities Bill campaign and it worked because thousands of people's constituents wrote them. That is great, fantastic, and what we want to encourage is more of that and we want to reduce the cynicism that politics is about having a backroom deal with a minister.

Q64 Mr Walker: But you are feeding that cynicism. The way you have presented yourselves is that you subscribe to this view that politics is a grubby little business, and I think you are part of this group that is promoting this at every opportunity. We see it now wherever we turn. You rightly said journalists will take two and two and make five, and I think you are just feeding that cynicism.

Mr Facey: Can you show me evidence of things written where we have said that ‑‑

Q65 Mr Walker: I have lists of that here.

Mr Facey: On what Unlock Democracy has said? In what we have said on party funding we have turned off journalists because when they have come to us and said: "Is there any evidence of corruption?" we have said, "No, we do not have any evidence of corruption". We have talked about problems in terms of party funding; we have been very careful not to go into it. As an organisation we believe that politics is a positive. We believe that political parties are a positive. We criticise them and politicians for not defending political parties, so I do not think you can accuse us of being anti-politics. There is a culture of being anti-politics out there and the question is what is the best way of combatting it. I happen to think one of the best ways is by having transparency.

Q66 Mr Walker: Finally, because I know my colleagues want to come in, we have all these registers now of MPs' interests, we have much more transparency in MPs' expenditure, and all this was justified on the basis that if it is out in the open the problems will go away, and the more that is put in the open the more the problems mount, the more the press just feed off the back of them, the more the press just promote this line of corruption, snouts in the- whatever, whatever. It just seems the more transparency there is, the more there is a loss of confidence and trust in politics.

Mr Facey: The solution you are therefore advocating is to remove transparency which I do not think will work, and ‑‑

Q67 Mr Walker: I am not saying remove it; I think there is just a flaw in your argument. We have greater transparency. We have these poor ministers and shadow ministers having their names dragged through the mud because they did not register a small bit of money, and it has got to the ridiculous levels, now. These people are not crooks or criminals.

Mr Facey: We have never said they are and in some of cases it is their fellow MPs who are dragging them through the mud. You have to have a situation in reality where basically, if we can have a broadly transparent system, then we can at least deal with facts. If it is not transparent then you cannot deal with facts because you do not know, and that is when I think the conspiracy theory has built up. If you do not have the evidence and you cannot find out, then you can draw a connection. There is a teething problem in that we have introduced transparency in funding and the way political parties work, and you have this pack of piranhas out there who have gone overboard, but that is a problem that built up over a long period of time and we now have transparency. In 20 years' time hopefully that will not be the case, but I am here volunteering my organisation to be in the same position as you. I cannot see how I can advocate to you that you should be transparent and I do not have to do it.

Chairman: I think we are going to have to find out at some point what we think this transparency is. We have not quite got there yet. Jenny?

Q68 Jenny Willott: I want to pick up on a point that Charles was just picking up on in that I think to some extent you might be overestimating the influence of lobbyists on MPs. We are all quite a cynical bunch in a lot of ways and do not necessarily believe everything everyone tells us; Peter you quoted at the beginning that 17% of the public think that voters have a fair amount of influence but 67% of them think that business has a lot of influence. That is perception rather than the reality. Does it matter if they are completely wrong?

Mr Facey: Yes, it does matter.

Q69 Jenny Willott: Why?

Mr Facey: Because in a democracy we need our citizens to participate; we need them to be able to, but also think they can, change society with a vote. If you want citizens to do that one of the greatest barriers is a perception that they have no influence, that they cannot change anything. My bugbear in our political culture is our fellow citizens have an attitude that they cannot change this country or defend it, and you just have to look at allegoric evidence from going to family do's-people do not think they can change the way in which this government operates, and when you try to tell them they should be involved in that process, if they think they have no influence, why get involved? Why not just simply watch EastEnders or Portsmouth-hopefully-win ‑‑

Q70 Chairman: There is an answer to that, by the way!

Mr Facey: As a Portsmouth fan I think it is a very important thing to go and do, but we need to convince people that politics and democracy work. If they have, and it becomes, an accepted perception that that does not work then I think for those of us on my side of politics and on yours we have a problem, and it is a real problem even if it is just a perception.

Q71 Jenny Willott: Has there ever been a time when that perception did not exist? When people had faith and trust in politics?

Mr Facey: I am not worried about faith or trust; I am worried about their belief they can influence it.

Q72 Jenny Willott: But was there ever a time when people thought they could?

Professor Miller: More so than now, yes. It used to be the case that there was much more trust in politics. There were also other things about it that people might not like so much. There was more deference, whether it was a bad or good idea, but also more trust.

Q73 Jenny Willott: But if there was more deference did they think they had any influence? Because my perception, which obviously could be wrong, is that politics is much more open now, politicians are much more available now than ever in the past, it is much easier for most people to rock up to Parliament or come along to a constituency surgery, and MPs are more available than they ever were 40, 50, 60 years ago. So has there ever been a time when the perception has been the other way around, that people thought MPs and officials were more open and available than they are now?

Professor Miller: On the contrary, you are right, that MPs and officials, especially in the Civil Service, were regarded as being much less open than is now the case. There has been a sea change in that respect. But there was also in that period, 1945 up to the 1980s, a sense that there were different political parties which represented different interests, and therefore the way to influence politics was to get involved with one or other, or maybe more than one or other, of those parties. That sense has been diminished, I think, as part of this process.

Mr Facey: There was also a sense that you could have major change; that you could, I am not in favour of it, nationalise the banks, you could fundamentally change society, and I think one of the problems and challenges for politics today is lots of people do not see it as being able to change things, and that is where I think those stats come in. If people do not believe that the political process can change and affect their lives, why get involved in it? I am a political anorak; I watch American elections as much as I watch ours. I am not normal in that sense. But for most people politics is about their ability to have an impact on something. If they can have an impact, they get involved; if they cannot, they do not care about it.

Chairman: Can we try and keep it back on to the lobbying area rather than going on to the rather broader issues of what is happening to our political system, because that may not help us eventually.

Mr Walker: It did make sense.

Q74 Jenny Willott: I want to pick up on something that you put in the document that you have prepared for today about the Industry and Parliament Trust (IPT). I am going to declare an interest because I have just finished a fellowship with them in Rio Tinto, a big mining company. You described them as a "lobbyists' dream" and seem to be suggesting that particularly arms companies have far too much influence and it is a way for them to exercise influence. You seem to be suggesting that it is a completely one‑way street, that arms companies and so on get involved in the IPT because there is a massive benefit they can accrue from that, not necessarily taking into account the fact that it is not a one‑way process; that, for example, the reason that Rio Tinto was interested in me doing a fellowship with them is that my background is in international development and poverty alleviation and so on, and they wanted somebody with a completely different background who was going to question everything they did, and you build up a relationship so I question them and I learn as much from them as they do from me. Now, why would that be a bad thing?

Professor Miller: It is not necessarily a bad thing. There are two questions. One is the question of transparency, do people know about it; the other is the question of privileged access. Is it the case that it is only companies that have this kind of scheme? It seems, maybe I am wrong, to be the case that there is only a scheme like this for companies and not one for trade unions or teachers or environmental groups.

Q75 Jenny Willott: That is not true. There is a scheme for scientists being paired up with politicians, and academics-you might get involved in that; there is a whole wide range of different schemes which provide partnerships between MPs and people where it would be useful. The IPT also has a scheme with civil servants ‑‑

Professor Miller: It does.

Q76 Jenny Willott: ‑‑ so I have had civil servants paired with me and shadowing me in my constituency, so there is a whole scheme out there for MPs to learn about different sectors of society.

Professor Miller: I think that is great but it could do with being a bit wider, so there is a wider range of experiences available both to MPs, decision‑makers and also to groups in civil society. That is the question. It is not a question of it being wrong for organisations and society to contact MPs; on the contrary, it is great, but the question is whether there is privileged access and, if there is, there should be transparency about it and there should be a level playing field. So the more that that can happen the better.

Q77 Jenny Willott: Do you not think there is transparency in the IPT? The information you have got comes from their magazine which is quite public.

Professor Miller: I have no beef on transparency with the IPT, no.

Q78 Jenny Willott: Another issue you picked up in your document is the issue of parliamentary passes, which is an old subject that comes up regularly. I wanted to ask what difference you think it makes if somebody has a parliamentary pass or not. Does that give them extra power, cache?

Professor Miller: To take this a step back, it used to be the case that MPs could work directly for lobbyists and for lobbying consultants. Now it is not the case. Members of the Lords still can, I think, but that was perceived as not being a good thing and was stopped. Now, as a result the debate has moved on to things like parliamentary passes. I do not have any strong sense that that has particular defined advantages, but the question has to be how are the passes being used and who by. If the system allows people access then that is fine but I am not sure that is the case, and the question which arises here is the question particularly of passes for people who work directly for lobbyists or as lobbyists. That is the question behind this.

Q79 Jenny Willott: But what difference does it make if they have a pass or not? I am not trying to be difficult; this is a genuine question.

Mr Facey: It may not make any difference but it can make a difference in terms of being able to talk to Members more regularly, having access, sitting down in the cafe downstairs and being able to regularly get hold of people. If you are running a campaign or an EDM[6] or a whole range of things, having that regular amount of access to MPs, even if it is just brief conversations, does help. I used to have a parliamentary pass, not for my present employer but in the past, and as a House of Lords of pass that made a difference to me trying to influence. The problem for me is that it is not transparent because effectively you are saying that you are working for a Member, or a Member of the House of Lords, and the reality is you are not. You may do the occasional bit but what you are actually doing is your job as a campaigner or whatever else. I would much prefer to be in the situation where you could have passes which give you access to use some of the facilities and talk to people in a way, but for me there is something not quite right about the fact that you have passes as a researcher when you are not necessarily being a researcher.

Q80 Jenny Willott: One of the things also picked up is about former MPs having passes, and it occurred to me that that would also apply to MPs' partners who have passes as well. You flag up that you think it is an issue in your memorandum, a problem ‑‑

Professor Miller: Not necessarily.

Q81 Jenny Willott: How could it be regulated?

Professor Miller: It becomes a question if former MPs have gone on to become lobbyists and are working in that kind of capacity and have a pass, but we do not know if that is the case or not.

Q82 Jenny Willott: Would it be a problem if it was the case? And how would you regulate it?

Professor Miller: I think for the same reason, that people should not be having passes in-I am not wanting to say false pretences, but where there is something else going on besides them having passes for the stated purpose.

Q83 Jenny Willott: So how would you regulate that? What would you do about it?

Mr Facey: If you are working as a researcher then you have to effectively work as a researcher and be a researcher for the person you are getting the pass for, and be able to demonstrate that in some way, and hopefully have a situation where you then have passes for other organisations which can have access.

Q84 Jenny Willott: If you were a former MP, for example, you might well be wanting to come in here, go to the bar, see your former colleagues.

Professor Miller: It is tricky and I am not sure we would have a solution for that, but it is not really an ideal kind of situation if there is a dual use being made of the pass.

Q85 Jenny Willott: Finally, you are basically lobbying us here today. How should this be regulated?

Professor Miller: In the same way as with every other lobbyist. Maybe this is where we move into the question of what should be done about it. To the extent that organisations are engaged in lobbying for a certain fraction of their time then it should be disclosed, and their sources of funding and clients should be disclosed too. I think that should apply to us and to Peter's organisation as it should to anybody else. Transparency is the key.

Jenny Willott: Thank you.

Q86 Julie Morgan: As we have all said, we are lobbied all the time and from a huge range of different interests. I am lobbied a lot by the voluntary sector because of my background there, and in children's work. Do you make any distinction between charities who are lobbying, voluntary bodies who are lobbying, and the bigger lobbying firms connected with big business?

Mr Facey: Internally before we signed up to the submission we talked about that and I do not think you can. I like to think that I am on the side of right, but that is for you to judge. I cannot say that you should regulate those horrible people in industry or business and not regulate me. I do not think you can. We are all involved in trying to influence policy, and if it is about transparency that should apply across the board, so it should apply to me in the same way. Now it may be that there need to be different types of adaptions to the regulation so it is appropriate for the sector, or it allows and does not prevent very small organisations being involved in lobbying, but to say that if you work for UNICEF[7] you are not regulated but if you work for the CBI[8] you should be I do not think can be justified.

Q87 Julie Morgan: What about these small grassroots organisations that have very few employees and who make often a very powerful case? Do you think they should be drawn into this sort of regulation?

Mr Facey: I think that is about the appropriateness of the regulation, and I think you then get on to finding a way which actually does not stifle what you want to encourage but does it in an appropriate way. It may be there is a threshold because the reality is that an organisation like mine with a budget of around £400‑£500,000 a year can probably bear regulation of some form, whereas an organisation of the sort you are talking about which may have a budget of £50‑£60,000 a year, if that, or in some cases two ha'pennies, should not have to have the same level of regulation. The same argument is being used with political parties. It is now accepted to have a lower level of regulation for small political parties than for the Labour Party, the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats.

Q88 Julie Morgan: I think there is a real danger that you are stifling democracy by these suggestions because you said earlier on that people do not feel they are able to change things and do not work through political parties any more, but they certainly do work through pressure groups. There is a huge growth in the number of small active pressure groups, some with no employees, and that is a way of people making their views heard.

Mr Facey: In which case they should not be regulated. For me, if you employ the equivalent of basically one person on it, so you are talking about a salary even for a small organisation of £25/26,000, then I do not think you should even have to be involved in that. It is at the point when you are effectively hiring professionals to do it that I think you step over a mark.

Q89 Julie Morgan: So it is only organisations that hire professionals?

Mr Facey: Which hire staff to do it, whether that be a campaign ‑‑

Q90 Julie Morgan: Parliamentary officers? Those sort of people?

Dr Dinan: Yes. I think in‑house functions should be captured. One of the problems previously has been that there has been a tendency to focus exclusively on commercial consultants who represent a multiplicity of clients, and it seems to me there should be transparency there. But if you accept the principle that organisations trying to shape politics should be regulated or registered or have to declare things or make things transparent, I do not think there is a reason to separate the voluntary from the private sector or companies. In terms of the probity of public life and confidence in decision‑making transparency should apply across the board.

Q91 Chairman: We have a spot of confusion here because you started off by saying, Peter, that you had these conversations beforehand, and you thought everybody should be treated the same, that you should not make distinctions between these commercial/non‑commercial organisations, big and small. But then you finish up by saying you want to exempt sectors now from doing this.

Mr Facey: Not exempting sectors, because I am the same sector as that small community group, but the difference is having an appropriate level of regulation. I am not saying that if a commercial company spends £500 on lobbying they should have to go for regulation which costs them more than the £500 they spend; that would be inappropriate regulation. Where you are spending a reasonable amount of money, and we can debate and you can suggest what is a reasonable amount of money, you should treat everybody equally, but if I get together with my neighbours in my street and we raise £500 and we lobby our local council on a crossing, we should not have to be covered by regulation.

Q92 Chairman: It may not be money; it may be influence. You can lobby influentially without money. How do you regulate that?

Mr Facey: I do not think you can. I cannot stop a well‑known individual coming to talk to you and saying he should be registered, but at least he is doing it on his behalf. You do not regulate in the same way the funding of an individual as you do a political party. If somebody is independent he is not regulated in the same way as a political party; you treat him differently. In this case I am saying that you can treat people differently. Ad hoc, small organisations, or even large organisations who spend a small fraction of what they do on influencing policy, should be treated differently than those organisations which are involved in it as an on‑going part of what they do, whether that be a consultancy or an NGO.

Professor Miller: I think the experience in the US is instructive here. All systems which have some form of regulation define a minimum above which people have to register and disclose, so very small organisations are universally exempted from that, but the issue which does come up when these things are discussed is the question which you raise, which is a good question about does not this stifle democratic process and do the opposite of what we think it would do, and I think you need to look at the way in which these systems operate around the world. As Will mentioned earlier, in discussing this with the Scottish Parliament a couple of years ago we surveyed a whole range of Federal level and State level regulators in the US and asked them these questions and not one came back and said that as a result they get lobbied less or that it has stifled NGOs and small community groups. On the contrary, they said it has helped the system to operate more effectively; that was their view.

Q93 Mr Burrowes: I am struggling to understand the principle behind you wanting to propose a mandatory statutory register of lobbyists. If you are concerned, as you say in your documentation, about lobbying which involves misrepresentation or deception, if your concern is on the broad principle of transparency, why do you then get involved in the issue of it being all lobbyists with a significant annual lobbying budget, which then becomes the issue of how much money they are spending on their lobbying, as being the trigger point for any registration? Why not look at the principle that people are lobbying and that there has to be universal registration?

Professor Miller: I am not sure I understand.

Q94 Mr Burrowes: Well, effectively you are requiring on a mandatory basis the registration of lobbying interests when those lobbyists are spending a lot of money in their budget rather than the principle of them actually doing the lobbying?

Professor Miller: The triggering level could be discussed. In the US it is currently more than 20% of the person's time, or an equivalent amount of money, that is the level they have set it at which is not a huge amount of involvement but a significant amount. On the question of deception and lobbying tactics, we give an example of a company ‑‑

Q95 Mr Burrowes: I appreciate that. Let's make the leap that there is a problem and look at some of the solutions and logic behind it, because effectively what you are wanting to do is require that legislation to apply to all lobbyists with a significant annual lobbying budget, so those that spend a lot of money, and it is going to inevitably mean to the big players that you are wanting to legislate for them.

Mr Facey: It depends what you call "significant ‑‑

Q96 Mr Burrowes: This is what you said.

Mr Facey: I would say "significant" would be if you have a parliamentary officer as an organisation. I think you capture that sort of level above. The reason for not capturing everybody on principle is because it is unworkable. The fact is you could not have a register, and I am not sure it would be helpful, which basically said that everybody who does some form of trying to influence policy, whether it is writing a letter to the local paper, has to be registered. Therefore, if you think that there needs to be a register of some form, then you have to do it so that it captures the bulk of what you want to deal with in a way which does not actually stifle it. I do not want to stop lobbying, I think it is a good thing, but ----

Q97 Mr Burrowes: But what you want to do is to regulate big-business or big-money lobbying?

Mr Facey: I do not think I am actually big money ----

Q98 Mr Burrowes: No, I am not talking about you. I am talking about the proposal you have made.

Mr Facey: But I would be captured by this.

Q99 Mr Burrowes: Let us not personalise it to you.

Mr Facey: Organisations like mine which have budgets for or have three or four members of staff, I think, would be included. I do not think we would regard that as big, but we are significant players in some fields in relation to influencing policy. This is not, for me, a crusade against business or large organisations, so it is trying to capture the bulk of what goes on.

Q100 Mr Burrowes: In the Spinwatch document, they seem to have conflated in some ways the whole issue of lobbying and business and particularly big business.

Professor Miller: There are two issues here, it seems to me. One is the issue of transparency where you have a register where people will have to disclose their clients, so that is one issue which we can talk about, but the other issue is the question of enhanced ethics regulation which means that there are certain kinds of lobbying which ought to be, in some form, disclosed or probably outlawed.

Q101 Mr Burrowes: So what should not be part of that? What lobbying is defined so as not to be part of that?

Professor Miller: Well, deceptive lobbying, I think, is ----

Q102 Mr Burrowes: But what is it or what should not be part of that?

Professor Miller: Well, almost all lobbying undertaken by corporations or by other public relations almost always is not deceptive.

Q103 Mr Burrowes: Almost always?

Mr Walker: Yes, almost always it is not deceptive. Where clients are disclosed, where interests are disclosed, where there is not the creation of fake letters or some of the attempts which we have seen at some levels of lobbying, that kind of thing really is something which undermines the democratic process, it seems to me, and misleads both decision-making and the public, so that kind of thing needs to have some form of regulation, it seems to me. Apart from that, the people who are representing themselves and being open about it, no problem.

Q104 Mr Burrowes: But, in terms of transparency, is it not sufficient that there should be openness to those that they are lobbying and there should be that transparency so that they know who they are being lobbied by and that is the level of transparency? Ideally, you would want it universally to apply to the public.

Mr Dinan: Well, I think there is a public interest in this. I think the public have a right to know who is trying to influence policy. I accept you are representatives of the public, but again with the Canadian system, when they introduced a register, one of the key beneficiaries was other elected representatives. They suddenly got a much richer and more detailed picture of where pressure was being brought to bear on legislation and policy. I think that, if we accept that there is a decline in trust in politics, we have to think of something to do about that, otherwise it is counsel of despair and we will come back to this issue again and again. I actually see it as a kind of positive initiative. I do not see anything wrong with transparency and I think people should be signed up for that. I think it is one of the concrete and tangible ways that we have of actually addressing these wider issues and, if this stuff is not in the public domain, and I take it you are all very busy people and you would not have time to circulate information about lobbying that was done to you to other Members informally, so we need some mechanism of making that public. I think that is what we are driving at with this register.

Q105 Mr Burrowes: In terms of those areas that cover commercial confidentiality or, let us say, price sensitivity, say, for example, a company wants to make ministers and officials aware of a new healthcare product at design stage so that it can be factored into future planning, how should registration affect that example?

Professor Miller: Well, in the notional register we are talking about, the lobbyists involved in that, whether it is in-house from the company or from a lobby consultancy, they would disclose their client, they would disclose how much money they were spending on this campaign and, preferably, they would disclose the topic that they are lobbying on, so that would not involve disclosing commercial in-confidence information, although there is an issue which has been raised in the evidence so far given to the Committee in relation to particularly lawyers; lawyers particularly object to the question of disclosure. For example, the APPC, the lobbyists' lobby group, they object less, it seems to me, than some of the lawyers do, but what you have got to do is look at the experience in other places. When the lawyers, the accountants or the management consultants, whoever it is who is engaged in lobbying, when they say, "Well, we don't allow it", et cetera, if you look at what happened in the US or in Canada or in Australia when it was brought in nationally, they are able to comply, the lobbying organisations and the law companies are able to comply. This is not about law companies representing clients in court, it is nothing to do with that, it is to do with engaging in a lobbying activity, so I think commercial in-confidence information is raised as an issue, but I think it is a misplaced issue.

Q106 Kelvin Hopkins: Can I just preface my remarks by saying that I very strongly agree with what Peter Facey was saying earlier on about democracy in Britain and a declining interest in the work by John Curtis the people at CREST and others have shown, but that is a broader issue. Would your case not be easier to make if you did draw a very, very firm distinction between commercial lobbying for contracts and the influence of big business, on the one hand, and campaigning, like I do, for the National Pensioners' Convention, who have not got two beans to rub together, representing poor pensioners, if you made that distinction and said, "What we're really after is to make sure that government is not perverted by big money?

Mr Facey: I think the problem with that is that you are actually saying that business and commercial interests are not legitimate or are less legitimate than voluntary-sector organisations. As an organisation, we do not try and get involved in that. We actually think that being involved in the process across the board is a good thing and I think there are good examples of the commercial sector being involved in that and I think there are bad examples sometimes in my sector. In the same way, in politics, there are individual cases of politicians producing fake leaflets for other parties, sometimes campaigning groups use bad campaign tactics or get involved in things; it is about saying that all of us are. Now, I happen to think that the reality is that it is not actually going to be the small organisation with very little money which is the problem because all they can actually do is get your constituents to write to you. It is likely to be the organisations which actually can spend large amounts of money doing the kind of glitzy stuff or the other bits and pieces which may actually be where there is a problem, but I think it has to apply to everybody. I do not think you can get into this thing of saying, "We good, them bad, regulate them, don't regulate us". I do not think I can stand here before you and say that and, therefore, I think you have to say, "Let's find a way of doing it which doesn't put too much of a burden on people and applies across the board" so that it is not ideological about whether you think this sector is good or that sector is bad.

Q107 Kelvin Hopkins: I have some sympathy and the argument for registration of all organisations, it seems, is a good one, but at the same time should there not be different rules for organisations which have no money and are lobbying on behalf of citizens as opposed to those which are lobbying on behalf of business for contracts and also indeed to change legislation?

Mr Facey: You may want to have tougher rules on certain aspects because, if you are lobbying to get business, then you may want to have stronger rules on it. You may want to have different rules in terms of-for instance, when I have talked to the APPC, I have no problem in declaring where our donations come from and the exact amount and we publish on our website any donation over £5,000 from any source, whether it be government or private. They would have a problem in, say, publishing the exact amount of their fees because they argue that that would get in the way of their commercial business. I do not have a problem with you setting a regulation which says that they have to declare the brackets of which the money comes from rather than the exact amount because I am not trying to put them out of business or make their life difficult or hopeless and the people who hire them get paid higher fees or lower fees, so I think there may be a case of adapting it to the people you are dealing with, but in general the broad principle should apply to everybody. How you implement it, I am not here calling for over-regulation and I do not want you to impose huge amounts of things on me, but the question as to whether there should be a minimal level of regulation, yes, and I cannot see how a register where I have to declare that actually we do lobby and broadly the sources of income from it and what we actually do in a very simple way should be something which any organisation of our size, or even smaller, whether commercial or voluntary, should not be able to do.

Professor Miller: I would add to that that in the question of procurement, the question of perception of fee kick-backs is a question which does not just to apply to business, it also can apply to NGOs and civil society groups who are engaged in trying to get money from government, so I would say it is the activity and you might want to regulate procurement issues more strongly, but that should apply also to NGOs and trade unions actually as well as to the corporations. I think you need to be consistent on that, that it is the activity as opposed to the organisation.

Q108 Kelvin Hopkins: Another distinction that I have made in previous sessions is between Members of Parliament, backbench MPs and where the real power is in Whitehall and Downing Street. Is it not the case now that the really serious business lobbyists do not bother with people like me, and they would not get much sympathy from me anyway, but they go straight to a reception at Downing Street or even a private meeting with the Prime Minister and say, "We want to set up big gambling casinos all over Britain. We want you on our tab", not quite saying it overtly, but effectively, and then expect the Government to deliver. In that particular case, of course the House of Lords stopped them and they could not get their big casinos and the American corporations walked away from Downing Street, disappointed in the weakness of the Prime Minister. Is that not what we are really aiming at?

Professor Miller: I think that process and the perception of that process is part of this wider question about the disillusionment of politics. It is perceived that power has moved from a chamber like this up the road to Downing Street and to ministers. That is a common perception. It is also true that lobbyists do predominantly target senior civil servants and ministers and they want to find ways into that, so they do it directly, yes, but they also do it by trying to populate what they call the 'information environment' by doing it through party conferences, putting on events, funding think-tanks and all those kinds of things. That is the way in which the lobbyists operate, lobbyists for corporations as well as for other organisations. There is the perception that power has kind of evaporated a little bit from Parliament.

Mr Facey: We all know that, once you get a piece of legislation, changing that piece of legislation is extremely difficult, very, very, very difficult. In fact, it is news when the House of Commons amends a piece of government legislation and you get stories about revolts, et cetera, so the reality is that, if you want to get something through, you have to concentrate in some ways, if it is at legislation stage and you are trying to stop it, you are fighting a guerrilla war to stop something. If you can get it beforehand, it is a lot more effective, so, if you can persuade a governing party to actually introduce a piece of legislation which you want and you can influence civil servants and others in the drafting of it, you are going to be a lot more successful than you are once you have a piece of legislation or a piece of draft legislation and are trying to persuade you and your colleagues to amend it because it is a lot, lot more difficult, and that is the reality of the political system.

Q109 Kelvin Hopkins: Even more worrying is what do you do, and what would you suggest we do, about inviting the money-lenders actually into the temple, you know, the high priests invite the money-lenders in, like, for example, the Commercial Director at the Department of Health who worked for Amey and was responsible for digging PFI[9] contracts out of the Government and was then invited into the Government as the Commercial Director to deliver PFI from the inside? He is a Texan and he will no doubt go straight back to the industry when he leaves and will be well-rewarded for his trouble. Is that not a problem too which you might well focus on?

Professor Miller: We raised that in our submission, the question of the revolving door and those kinds of relationships. That is an issue which causes public disquiet and it is an issue which you have already reported on in your previous reports on the whole question and this Committee's view, it seems, was rather critical of the way in which the system is currently operating, and we would share it.

Chairman: There is the idea that somehow people do not know what is going on. We are going to get an announcement today on revisions to the capital gains tax proposal. Now, we know full well that over the last several months every kind of business organisation in the land has been lobbying hard about this and we do not need a register to tell us this. That is what goes on, that is what we know goes on, and the Government is required to take a view on it and then to answer to Parliament and the public for it. Since we know all that, it is not some great sort of conspiracy that is going on out there, that is how government operates, so why do we need a device to tell us what we already know?

Q110 Mr Prentice: Can I just ask for the evidence of the abuses because, and it gets back to what Tony said at the outset, what is the nature of the problem? Do you have a compendium of abuses that you could let us have?

Professor Miller: Sure. We have given some examples in the submission today.

Q111 Mr Prentice: Well, we have had TOAST, but going beyond TOAST.

Professor Miller: There are lots of other examples, yes. I think there are two answers to Tony's question, but relating to the abuses, it seems to me that they relate to two issues, one of transparency and the other the question of deceptive tactics, so the abuses involve not being clear ----

Q112 Mr Prentice: So you could catalogue all the abuses for us?

Professor Miller: Not all of them, no.

Q113 Mr Prentice: But you could catalogue enough abuses for us to think about going down the regulatory road which you are advocating? There is a problem big enough to warrant this elaborate architecture of regulation and sanctions?

Professor Miller: Well, we think there is a problem big enough. As we have said, we do not think that there should be an elaborate architecture; it should be a straightforward, quite simple and proportionate kind of regulation.

Q114 Mr Prentice: Well, just let me stop you there because you are a signatory, you sign up to Spinwatch, do you not? We have got a short submission from Spinwatch and they advocate the recording of formal and informal meetings between elected Members, officials, lobbyists, the logging of correspondence to be made available on a fully searchable, on-line database. That seems quite elaborate to me.

Professor Miller: That is already required of ministers under the Nolan principles. This is already supposed to happen.

Q115 Mr Prentice: Is that a searchable ----

Professor Miller: It is not on-line, but the recording -----

Q116 Mr Prentice: A fully searchable, on-line, and that is not Nolan, is it, a fully searchable, on-line database?

Professor Miller: No, it is not.

Q117 Mr Prentice: I am saying that that is quite a big deal to move to a system where you have a fully searchable, on-line database. That is a big thing, is it not?

Mr Facey: To be honest, if you actually just published it on-line, some voluntary-sector organisation would then work out a way of making it searchable. There are enough examples in the world. If you wanted to publish it on-line, I am sure TheyWorkForYou or one of the other organisations which mine information would find a way of doing it. If we and the rest of society can have access to it, we can probably find a way of making it searchable, even if you and the regulator do not, as long at it is actually publicly accessible.

Q118 Mr Prentice: Okay, and the disclosure of resources spent in lobbying campaigns, itemising expenditure and so on, that is quite a big deal as well, is it not?

Professor Miller: Over a certain limit. That would be what the lobbyists would be required to do. That is what happens in all the other jurisdictions.

Q119 Mr Prentice: The buzzword at the moment is "proportionate", is it not?

Professor Miller: Sure.

Q120 Mr Prentice: It is whether all this effort and energy required is proportionate to the alleged abuses that you and your fellow academics have identified. It is like a sledgehammer to crack a nut, that is basically what it is.

Professor Miller: Well, we think that it is proportionate. We think that there is a serious problem both in fact and in perception and that, if we want to deal with that problem, a useful first step is some form of lobbying transparency. We act like they are a maximalist kind of position, but that is kind of what we would like to see. We are in favour of any kind of advance on the transparency position at the moment.

Q121 Mr Prentice: You also in Spinwatch talk about the extended cooling-off period of one year for ministers, elected Members and senior officials before they can start working for lobbying groups and lobbying consultants. Tell us a bit more about that. Why one year? How do you police this regime?

Professor Miller: There is already a mechanism, is there not?

Q122 Mr Prentice: Is it adequately policed? That is what I am asking you.

Professor Miller: Probably not, and I think we would probably agree with the Committee's report on that. I think the question that you have to recognise here is: what is it that happens to people once they leave the Civil Service or cease to be ministers? If they go straight into a large corporation or a lobbying group, there is a danger there of potential perceived conflict which is what was outlined in the Committee's ----

Q123 Mr Prentice: You do not make a distinction between former ministers going into multi-client lobbying groups and taking up jobs in a single company? For example, it has been in the press that Patricia Hewitt is taking up a job with Boots the Chemist. Now, do you make a distinction between the multi-client lobbying groups and former ministers who get jobs with individual companies?

Professor Miller: At present, the position seems to be that largely what happens, and this is the case with Tony Blair as well, is that the appointments are approved on the condition that they do not personally lobby for the first 12 months.

Q124 Mr Prentice: Well, we know from an article that appeared recently in Public Affairs which quotes Lord Mayhew who is coming before us in a week or two, he is Chair of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, he is quoted as saying, "It would be a mistake, I think, for us", that is the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, "to define 'lobbying'",[10] so the organisation that tells ministers they should not lobby for a year has not got round to defining what "lobbying" is. That is point one. Point two, after former ministers have been told not to lobby, the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments does not check, does not go back. They would not have gone back to Tony Blair to ask him about his job with the bank at $5 million or whatever it is, so there is a problem there, is there not?

Professor Miller: Well, I think there is, yes. Am I agreeing with you? I am not sure if I am agreeing with you, but I think there is a problem.

Q125 Mr Prentice: Well, I am inviting you to.

Professor Miller: I think there is a problem there. I think that, although they do not define

"lobbying", what they have in mind is face-to-face meetings between, for example, Tony Blair and a decision-maker. Now, that is not how lobbying works.

Q126 Mr Prentice: I want to know how lobbying works because this is a great conundrum, is it not, that, even people involved in lobbying cannot tell us what "lobbying" means. When former ministers are taken on by companies, what are they taken on to do? Is it for their contact book? Is it for their networks? What is it? We have 11 ministers from the Blair Government, 11 now former ministers, who are now working for other organisations. What is it they want from those 11 former ministers, including the former Prime Minister?

Professor Miller: Yes, it is their contact book, yes, it is their networks, yes, it is their knowledge. It is all of those things, is it not, and the name and it is the advice that they can give them. Lobbying involves yes, contacting a senior civil servant or a government minister, but it also involves giving advice on strategy, internal information about how policy processes work, about how departments work, who to contact, all those things.

Q127 Mr Prentice: How can you regulate that? It is like having a conversation in a pub about things, is it not? How do you regulate that?

Professor Miller: Well, you regulate it by requiring the lobbyists to disclose who their clients are, how much money they spend and what they are lobbying on, and that needs to capture not just, "We went to meet the Prime Minister", but also what else they were doing.

Q128 Mr Prentice: How many former MPs have gone on to become lobbyists? You have studied this for years, so you will be able to tell us.

Professor Miller: I cannot tell you the number, but there is a lot of them. We can come back with a list. The interesting thing is that you asked us about the distinction between corporations and lobbying consultancies and I have noticed in the current list that there is one former minister or specialist adviser, I forget which, who has gone straight to work with a multi-client lobbyist and was not required to have any cooling-off period, so that was regarded as less serious than going on to advise JPMorgan Chase or Boots in the example, so there is an uneasy distinction in there as well about what kinds of things are involved. What I would say is that, when you go to work in a corporation as an adviser, you are there to advise on their political strategies. That is, in a word, lobbying, so I would not make much of a distinction between the two of those.

Q129 Chairman: As I understand it, but just to be clear, you are not saying you are against the activity, you are just in favour of more knowledge about the activity? Is that right?

Professor Miller: In terms of extending cooling-off periods, if you look at the two points at the top of the guidance from the Committee on Business Appointments, the reason they say that they are there is to avert potential suspicions that there might be some kind of arrangement entered into before the person leaves to advantage in some way the interest.[11] I think that is the main worry here and that is why there ought to be a longer cooling-off period so that the vested interests cannot exploit previous contacts or immediate past knowledge.

Q130 Kelvin Hopkins: Is it not more worrying that ministers might be influenced in office by the potential of making money after they have been in office and they might be soft on companies, knowing that they might be well-rewarded for their efforts after they have been in office?

Professor Miller: I think I agree with you. I think both are a worry, but yes, I think I agree with you.

Q131 Paul Rowen: I would like to pick up some of the earlier discussion about ethical standards employed by lobbyists because in your paper one of the examples you quote is actually effective in my constituency and that is the Spodden Valley campaign and the way countryside properties went about putting up fake websites. They also put out a glossy leaflet that went to 20,000-odd people around the thing in which they said there was no asbestos on the site and there was also some possibility of fake letter-writing. We are talking about disclosure, but how do you regulate a company that decides to use what are clearly very unethical methods to actually go about obtaining what in this case would have been multi-million pound planning permission on a very lucrative site?

Professor Miller: This is why there is a need not just for transparency, but also for ethics regulation. One of the lobbying companies involved in that, PPS Group, is a member of the Association of Professional Political Consultants, but their code does not deal with this question in any real way. This kind of tactic is not used by all lobbying companies and PR companies by any means, but it is a well-known tactic which has been used since the early years of the 20^th Century, it is called the 'third-party technique' where you put your words in someone else's mouth. It has graduated to the technique of fake letter-writing, inventing people and using people's names to write letters to decision-makers where these people do not exist. That seems to me to be a problem and to undermine democratic decision-making, and that is a problem, whether it is done by an NGO, a trade union, a lobbying company or a corporation. That is the kind of thing which needs to be regulated by ethics regulation. The third-party technique, in my view, should be entirely outlawed. It should not be allowed that organisations engage in creating fake letters or fake websites and pretend they are somebody else.

Q132 Paul Rowen: What sort of penalties? We are talking about a cooling-off period for ministers, but what sort of penalties would you want to see for those lobbyists that engaged in that?

Professor Miller: This is a process, the question of increasing transparency. At present, in the US there are fines and potential custodial sentences for those kinds of things.

Q133 Paul Rowen: So you would want to see a similar sort of system operating here?

Professor Miller: The first step would be some kind of naming and shaming, I guess, but you need to have some method of outlawing that kind of practice, I think.

Mr Facey: If a political party breached the same sort of rules, and there are sanctions already for political parties, I do not see why political parties, which are voluntary organisations, should be treated in one way and actually potentially, if you are an agent and you do something like that, you can actually have criminal proceedings against you, why organisations, which lobby them, should actually have no sanctions against them if they use activities for political parties would be beyond the pale.

Q134 Paul Rowen: But spirits are high, are they not? In this case, you are talking about a housing development that is worth several hundred million pounds and is there not always a temptation, even though you say, "Oh, it's outlawed. We don't approve of that", in this particular case, if you are going to make £500 million on a housing development, you are going to take the risk and are you going, therefore, to have the fine commensurate with the risk that is involved?

Mr Facey: It may actually be that you may want to consider that, in those circumstances, it is criminal, not civil. In the case of political parties, you can get fined, and it is also the case with political parties that, if you breach certain rules, you can actually get sent to jail. That rarely ever happens, but it is actually there as a sanction. I think the same thing would have to apply, but, if you had the level of abuse which you are talking about and it could be proven, then I think you are potentially looking at something which should certainly not just be a matter of naming and shaming, but ultimately should be a criminal sanction because you are talking about defrauding the process for commercial gain, and I happen to think that is wrong. Now, you may hear from other people who could say better than me how you could craft that, but I would certainly say in principle that I cannot see how that behaviour should simply be something to which you said, "There, there, that's really bad behaviour".

Q135 Paul Rowen: In your experience, how widespread do you think it is? You quote PPS as being involved several times in doing this sort of activity. How widespread would you say it is, I am not saying at the high end, but in general terms? We all know, if you look at complaints made against local councillors, most of them actually occur in the planning area because that is the area where there is obviously most possibility for gain.

Professor Miller: What I would say about that is that we could, as Gordon has been suggesting, catalogue some of these things, but I suppose I should say a bit about our background here. We have been engaged in academic research on lobbying and PR for some years now and it was as a result of that that we got involved with the Spinwatch project. As part of that research, we travelled to a large number of public relations and lobbying conferences and spoke with, and listened to, PR and lobbying professionals. The third-party technique is a standard and very widely used technique in public relations and lobbying and it goes back to the very early years of the 20^th Century in both this country and in the US, and it is still very widely used. Now, there is a debate within the PR industry and the lobbying industry about the ethics of the third party technique and whether there is an ethical third-party technique. I think there probably is not, but there is no denying that actually the third-party technique is a standard technique in the public relations and lobbying industry and it is used very, very widely.

Q136 Paul Rowen: But how do you draw the distinction? I, and I am sure other colleagues here, have had standard letters which may have been written by a local charity or campaigning organisation sent to me; I am on the Pensions Bill at the moment and I have had several letters from pensioners, that the Government are going to introduce the legislation for the people who have lost their pensions, and it is all very standard what is being said. How do you distinguish between that, which is actually about legitimately trying to support a particular point of view by a very worthy cause or worthy organisation, and the other aspect of it, which is that I get my mother to write a letter, saying how wonderful such and such an organisation is and do not disclose that we are related or whatever and that helps to benefit something.

Professor Miller: I do not think your mother writing a letter really is a problem actually. The problem is if you invented a mother or five grandmothers!

Q137 Paul Rowen: Or if I wrote it for her.

Professor Miller: Some of our students do not give their essays in because their grandmother has died for the fifth time! That is a little bit fraudulent. If PR or lobbying companies are inventing people or using people's names without their knowledge, then that is deception and that is different. With Greenpeace campaigns, they write postcards, they write the letters themselves, but it is a real person sending it.

Q138 Mr Walker: But occasionally I have had these postcard campaigns and I think it is from Greenpeace and others where I have got a letter back from a constituent, saying, "You have written to me on this, but I never wrote to you". They could well have forgotten they had done it, but you must have had these. You think, "Hold on a second", so I agree with your view. I think a lot of charities have to get their own house in order as well as businesses and I think, at least if a business comes and sees me, I know what its end objective is, but I think there is concern with charities. Yes, there is this charitable front, but actually who is pulling the strings behind.

Mr Facey: We always say to our supporters when they write to Members of Parliament, "It is a lot more effective if you write it in your own OlHowords and you write it rather than copying it, but here is what we would like you to say". Now, as long as that person is a real person and a real constituent, it is up to you then to judge what worth you put on it. If I made up the constituent and actually got a load of addresses from your constituency and created fake people who do not exist, that is a completely different category of thing than me facilitating and getting some of my supporters or people who agree with us on an issue to write to you or send you a postcard. I happen to think that postcards are a lot less effective than an individual letter, but sometimes it is easier to run a postcard campaign than a letter campaign, but that is not fraudulent. The question is: is it fraudulent? If there are organisations out there making up people to write to you, then personally I think that is something which should be a criminal problem, not a question for you to judge whether it is effective or not because at least my members are human beings.

Q139 Mr Walker: I just think you guys could earn a lot of money actually. You could actually advise lobbying companies on what strategies actually influence behaviour and decision-making. You have been to all these conferences, you have obviously studied this in great depth and, if I were a lobbying company or a business, I would actually be looking to sign you up, and whether you would accept an offer of having your programmes funded by a third party would be for you to decide. Just exploring your own moral maze, you are academics at an established Scottish university, I believe. Have you ever given paid advice or unpaid advice to someone, a Member of the Scottish Parliament, for example?

Professor Miller: Paid advice, no.

Q140 Mr Walker: Unpaid advice?

Professor Miller: We have advised MSPs, MEPs, MPs. We have submitted regularly to consultations, as we did this one.

Q141 Mr Walker: But have you ever advised MSPs that perhaps were favourable to your position and you knew that, if you supported their activities, it would promote your position and concerns on this matter, so you have actually worked closely with them to promote your own agenda in this area?

Professor Miller: We have been engaged in activities which we would define as lobbying, yes.

Q142 Mr Walker: Can you name some of the MSPs perhaps that you have talked to or political parties?

Professor Miller: We have given advice to all the Members of the Standards Committee of the Scottish Parliament, for example. We have written to them, we have submitted evidence to their consultations, we have appeared before them, so those kinds of activities, and I regard those as lobbying.

Q143 Mr Walker: So have you ever provided, say, more party-political support in a sense to any party in the Scottish Parliament?

Professor Miller: No.

Q144 Mr Walker: So, as far as your activities are concerned as academics, where would you see you in this whole sort of hierarchy of registration because there are issues here? You are trying to influence policy and you have privileged access, to some degree, by the fact that you are experts in this field. Do you understand what I am saying?

Mr Dinan: I think you are absolutely right and I think for this kind of function we should declare the preparation we make for this and the time we invest in this. That is what we are trying to get at, where the effort to influence policy is coming from so that people can see that, so I would be more than happy to declare the amount of time I have spent on submissions and work in this area. I think that is absolutely legitimate. If people want to know that, why not? This is why I think that drawing a distinction, say, between businesses and commercial interests and voluntary-sector interests and civil society interests is problematic. I think we are on safer ground if we stick with the principle that anybody who is trying to influence policy should be registered or regulated because I think transparency is a very positive, enabling thing. I think it is problematic if you just have a target of, say, commercial consultants with multiple clients and not actually other organisations. One of the things I do not think we have mentioned is that in the States where they did target just commercial consultancies, you found that a lot of businesses, in particular, funnelled money into charities and there was a loophole there and it was exploited. I think, if we are going to proceed from this and people think a register is a good idea, in principle, it should apply to everybody.

Mr Walker: I would say that there is an area of concern where Members of Parliament are lobbied by so-called charities where actually they are significantly supported by donations from companies that have a vested interest in their work, and I think there should be a little bit more transparency there.

Q145 Chairman: Can I just bring us back to where we started which is the question of whether there is a problem and, therefore, is there a solution to match the problem. As Gordon pointed out, your central recommendation to us through Spinwatch is this idea that there should be, and these are your words, "a mandatory system of electronic registration and reporting for all lobbyists with a significant annual lobbying budget", and then it goes on to say how you have got to describe how much was spent on particular lobbying operations and so on.[12] As Gordon says, you are talking about quite an elaborate system here. It is matching that against the problem and the real-world issue. The other day, just to make it more concrete, I had a visit from Marie Curie Cancer Care which I have been involved with for some years, and they have got a campaign to enable people to die at home and they are pressing the Government on this programme and so on. They came themselves and they came with the lobbying group that they use because they find it helpful to have a group to help them to access government on this. As I understand it, your proposal is that Marie Curie would have to register because they devote resources in their organisation to lobbying, the lobbyists would have to register, there would have to be a record of my contact with them a few days ago, every time they see a minister or a civil servant it would have to be recorded, the amounts of money that Marie Curie spend on this particular part of their activity would have to be recorded. We are talking about a huge, elaborate system here to deal with what I do not see to be a problem, which is that they have come to speak to me about the need for people to die at home. What I am putting to you is this question about the mismatch between the realities of the problem and the elaborateness of the solution.

Professor Miller: Well, these systems operate in many other jurisdictions without any problem and they do not cost a lot of money.

Q146 Chairman: Let me just try the second aspect of this then, which is that you have talked about this as though somehow the political system is the recipient or the victim of this lobbying activity and we need to make sure that people understand how that operates. In fact, a lot of the work that we do, as elected representatives, is lobbying. We are lobbied, but we, in turn, go out and we lobby. We lobby private business to give business to our constituencies, we lobby the public sector to deliver services to our constituents, we go to hospitals and we say, "There's someone on the waiting list who's waiting" or, "Will you get this child into a school". That is what people come to us for. Surely we have got to regulate all of that as well, have we not?

Mr Facey: I happen to think that politicians are probably regulated enough in terms of their transparency, and even I do not call, as an organisation which is interested in it, for you to be regulated more in terms of transparency.

Q147 Chairman: But this is privileged access.

Mr Facey: Yes, but you are elected people who have privileged access because you are elected representatives of the rest of the population.

Q148 Chairman: But surely the need for transparency is as great in that area as it is on the other side. People ought to know who we are lobbying.

Mr Facey: I would have no problem about whether you wanted to declare that, and actually most MPs do declare it because they actually use it to get elected and they actually tell people and transparency is fairly good on it, and actually I do not know an MP who is actually quiet about getting better services for their constituents. The difference is that on the other side I am not sure that people are as, shall we say, open about what they do and it is about making sure. If everybody who lobbied you shouted about it in the same way that MPs did and put it in leaflets through everybody's door, we probably would not need a register, but, as far as I know-even I do not put on leaflets through people's doors what we have done, though we cannot afford the leaflets. MPs do actually tell people the lobbying they do. In fact, there is a whole argument about now MPs using their expenses to write to people to tell them what they are doing and at the last election I got a number of letters from my then Member of Parliament telling me of his lobbying on my behalf over post offices, so I do not think there is a transparency issue in relation to MPs.

Q149 Mr Prentice: When I was first elected, Frank Dobson said to me, "Never do good by stealth"! I have never forgotten that.

Mr Facey: I do not think that there is a problem there, but maybe you do.

Q150 Chairman: I was being pushed by your maximalist position to try to get maximum transparency here.

Mr Facey: If you accept our general argument that there should be regulation, but you actually feel that what we have proposed is over the top, then please come back with something which is more appropriate. For me, the general principle is the one which is important. It may be that some of these things can be done in a lot less intrusive way and it may be that you want to recommend starting there and then looking at how that works. I do not think that gets in the way of the general principle that actually there should be transparency, and it may be that you are better able to actually work out what that level of transparency should be, but the idea that one side of politics should be regulated and the other side should not at all I do not think is a strong argument.

Chairman: Well, we have had a good run round the issues and we wanted this session to be that from people who have said some challenging things to us about the need for action in this area, so we are very, very grateful for that. If we have been, in turn, challenging, it is because that is what we have to do to get the value from these sessions, but we are very grateful for what you have said and also for the material that you have given us and, if you do want to give us any further material, we would be very glad to have it. Thank you very much for coming and talking to us.

[1] The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, State of the Nation Poll 2006: Summary Findings, December 2006, p 4

[2] Non-Governmental Organisation

[3] Association of Professional Political Consultants

[4] National Farmers' Union

[5] Freedom of Information

[6] Early Day Motion

[7] United Nations Children's Fund

[8] Confederation of British Industry

[9] Private Finance Initiative

[10] "Paddy's Power", Public Affairs News, January 2008, p27

[11] Guidelines on the Acceptance of Appointments or Employment Outside Government by Former Ministers

of the Crown

[12] Lob 16