David Miller 29 January 2009

Make no mistake, the House of Lords cash for legislation scandal is a serious issue for democracy in Britain. But it is by no means a problem confined to the four members of the House alleged by the Sunday Times to be willing to 'work behind the scenes' as one of them put it, to influence parliament. Nor is it a problem confined to the House of Lords. The problems exposed at the unelected House are widespread across the whole of British democracy. For example, according to the Daily Mail around 20 per cent of lords have external remunerated interests. Over at the House of Commons, moreover, MPs have an unprecedented number of business and other contracts with outside interests.

This is why no piecemeal solution will result in any improvement in the status of politicians themselves or the political system as a whole. Nonetheless, it is plain that the House of Lords does need reform. The only thing which has the potential to wean the members of the House of Lords off their myriad of consultancies is to have a fully elected second chamber with paid members. But, as the example of the House of Commons shows, even this will not stop the 'representatives of the people' from taking huge sums of money or largesse from lobby groups with deep pockets.

• a new register for gifts and other 'in kind' benefits across the whole of Westminster and Whitehall.

• A new register of meetings and contacts between lobbyists and civil servants, Lords and MPs.

On top of this the committee renewed its commitment to tightening up the so called 'revolving door' between parliament and lucrative corporate jobs. The spectacle of senior New Labour ministers going off to highly paid posts in industries that they only recently regulated is an obvious sign of institutionalised corruption. The PASC report recommended

• Reform of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments to make it 'more representative of society as a whole' and to strengthen the current position ‘with the rules as loosely and variously interpreted as they are.

An obvious reform here would be to follow Barack Obama’s new executive order increasing the 'cooling off' period before ministers or civil servants could join lobbying outfits to two years and instituting a ban on gifts from lobbyists.

The most important recommendation in the PASC report, though was the creation of a mandatory register of lobbying to be enforced by an independent body and to include the following information:

a) the names of the individuals carrying out lobbying activity and of any organisation employing or hiring them.

b) in the case of multi-client consultancies, the names of their clients.

c) information about any public office previously held by an individual lobbyist.

d) a list of the relevant interests of decision makers within the public service (Ministers, senior civil servants and senior public servants) and summaries of their career histories outside the public service.

e) information about contacts between lobbyists and decision makers-essentially, diary records and minutes of meetings. The aim would be to cover all meetings and conversations between decision makers and outside interests.

This is a useful step forward and would enable us to see a lot more of the activities evidently undertaken by members of the House of Lords as well as the commons and the civil service. One measure it does not include which is a part of current US legislation is the requirement to disclose how much money is being spent to lobby on particular issues. The Committee pulled its punches on this citing the argument of their academic adviser Paul Pross who wrote in a paper for the OECD that:

lobbying campaigns are frequently multi-faceted and expenses will be deployed to a wide range of firms and organisations. Payments will be made not only to lobbyists themselves, but to polling firms, advertising agencies, lawyers, accountants, non- profit organisations and even to charities that espouse the same cause. Forensic accountants have the skills and information needed to look at the overall effort involved in a campaign, and to arrive at a shrewd guess as to what it all costs, but such assessments are extremely expensive, and usually available to the public, and to policy decision makers, only long after key decisions have been made.

This is a point of little merit, since any money spent on any campaigning for purposes defined as lobbying could be included in a relatively straightforward register – as is in fact the case in the US. It is obviously also the case that lobbyists already seek to categorise expenditure and clients that is in effect 'lobbying' as other sorts of activities such as public relations. No doubt the lobbyists would try and find loopholes on any legislation, but this scarcely removes the need for carefully crafted rules, rather it intensifies it.

All of these measures suggested by the PASC report, plus financial disclosure would help in tilting the system towards some kind of ethical and transparent operation. But the devil will be in the detail. For example these measures need to be accompanied by easily searchable online databases so that journalists, researchers and – yes – the public – can readily find out what is going on, so that data can be analysed and connections drawn. It is only by making this kind of data available that civil society groups (full disclosure: including Spinwatch the organisation I help to run) can hope to hold decision makers and corporate lobbyists to account. As an indication that this is more than rhetoric, I would point to the case of Jack Abramoff the uber-lobbyist recently indicted and found guilty in the US. It was only because his myriad activities and links could be tracked using the then current US lobby disclosure legislation that he was flushed out, eventually convicted for fraud, tax evasion and conspiracy to bribe public officials and sent to jail for five years.

But as is the way when a head of steam builds up for change, events are now running ahead of the PASC report. There is an urgent need for a system of penalties for members of the Lords who breach ethical rules. These must have real teeth and include financial penalties and the ultimate sanction of removal from the Lords.

It is plain that the current scandal requires further measures to be put in place. These include an immediate prohibition on members of the Lords working for lobbying consultancies which would bring them into line with the House of Commons and would affect more than twenty peers who currently work in lobbying – according to the Register of Lords’ Interests.

But it is also clear that such a rule would not catch significant numbers of both Houses who currently give lobbying advice (to corporations, for example) in exchange for cash or benefits in kind. This can only be stopped by removing outside financial interests from the Houses of Parliament. MPs should represent their constituents and not special interests.

David Miller is professor of Sociology in the Department of Geography and Sociology at the University of Strathclyde and co-founder of SpinWatch.

This article originally appeared on politics.co.uk's comment pages.