Tamasin Cave 10 November 2009

UPDATE: The lobbyist's trade body, the PRCA, is now refusing to provide transparency campaigners with previous registers of lobbyists, although it says it will give them to others. To ask the PRCA to publish registers for the past year online, contact them here.

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.”