Tom Griffin, 28 January 2009

With Labour peers facing growing scrutiny over cash for laws revelations, the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency couldn't have hoped for a more propitious backdrop for its meeting at Westminster this morning.

Among the speakers were MPs Kelvin Hopkins and Gordon Prentice of the Public Administration Select Committee, which has made the case for a register of lobbyists in its report Lobbying: Access and Influence in Whitehall.

"I think we have a big chance now because of the things that are happening in the House of Lords, and the new revelations in the newspapers today involving Martin O'Neill," Prentice said. "Now is the moment to insist that we get these changes and at a minimum, I would say, a mandatory register."

Adequate disclosure means mandatory filings to be filed and displayed online with relatively frequent updates, perhaps quarterly, perhaps semi-annually, for all firms and clients with financial activity over a certain base amount. In the US, that is $2500 a quarter.

Data should be searchable, sortable and downloadable in XML or some other format for free to the public. It should document expenditures per lobbying client relationship, including lobbyist names, including their former official positions, resumes, connections, allowing us to track that revolving door.

It should include which agencies are lobbied, and I'm thrilled to see that in the UK there's a proposal to go beyond that and say the actual officials that are being lobbied.

It should mandate that an independent government oversight agency review filings, audit the data and enforce filing requirments. There should be consequences and they should be serious for these measures to carry weight.

This article first appeared on OurKingdom.