Lobbying industry: incompetent or obstructive over transparency? PDF Print E-mail
A month ago I pointed out some serious failings of the lobbyists’ trade body, the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), to provide transparency in lobbying (The state of lobbying self-regulation: Part 1).

The government has since announced that the PRCA, among others, will continue to be entrusted with the job of revealing who is lobbying whom and which areas of public policy lobbyists are seeking to influence. Despite repeated calls from MPs and campaigners, the government rejected the recommendation for a mandatory system with a statutory register of lobbyists. In its place, the public will have to rely on the industry’s own voluntary registers of lobbyists.

The criticism in my blog of the reliability of PRCA’s voluntary registers was met with a strange reproach ten days later from PRCA director general Francis Ingham: “You've been to a partial link, and so got half a register,” he said, although helpfully, he provided a URL to the most recent ‘complete’ register.

Ready to admit that perhaps, after much searching, I had only managed to find incomplete PRCA registers, I requested he send me the actual, correct registers from the last year – it’s only with past registers that Parliamentarians, journalists and the public can see influence at work. Ingham’s answer is revealing:

“If the Cabinet Office had come to me and said ‘please give us the registers from back in history’, I would make a fair effort to go back all the way that I could in a prompt and timely manner. But that’s, as I say, the government. You’re only another organisation just like ours.”

But, given that the government has just entrusted the PRCA with providing  transparency in lobbying, is it not incumbent on them to provide the public with accurate records in a timely manner? Not according to Ingham: “I have far bigger things to do than one other lobbying organisation asking me to give far more, you know, reams of detail.” When asked if, once they’d found the correct registers for the past 12 months, the PRCA intended to put them on their site, Ingham replies: "It would be weird for me to decide to put them up just because you’d asked for them to be put up.”

Clearly Francis Ingham does not hold SpinWatch or the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency, which I represent, in particularly high esteem. That’s okay. But neither, it is now clear, does he or the PRCA consider transparency a very high priority. The PRCA’s press office said this morning that they are too busy with the PRCA’s annual awards dinner to deal with the request (the only PRCA employee who apparently knows of the registers’ existence or whereabouts is currently off sick).

What this exchange reveals is not whether the PRCA has been keeping a reliable voluntary register of its members’ clients and lobbyists. The complete registers may yet materialise. What it shows is the PRCA’s lackadaisical approach to transparency. The government’s refusal to introduce a simple compulsory register of lobbyists has left us in the hands of an organisation that is either incompetent or obstructive.
Next >