The Labour Party government is so far doing worse than the previous Conservatives on corporate lobbying, Spotlight on Corruption has warned in a briefing. And that’s saying something, given the Tories failed to commit to most of the key recommendations from the Committee on Standards in Public Life on lobbying transparency. The Keir Starmer-led administration has followed even less or outright rejected proposals.
How is Labour managing to be worse than the Tories?
Of 12 recommendations for government transparency and the lobbying register on Spotlight on Corruption’s ‘scorecard‘, the Tories fully met three, while Labour has fully met just one proposal.
Neither party has committed to including so-called ‘informal’ lobbying arrangements in the transparency releases, meaning friendly influence remains off the books. And consultant lobbyists do not even have to declare the subject matter of their lobbying at present.
The ethics committee also said that the government should incorporate all transparency releases into a single searchable database. The Tories said in a cabinet office document from July 2023:
The cabinet office is developing a single platform to collate and publish departments’ transparency returns. This will provide a single public source of transparency data, replacing the system of separate publications.
But Labour may have backtracked here and has made no public commitment to such a database.
In the only positive instance from both parties, they have met the proposal to include lobbyist meetings with senior civil servants on transparency releases. But another recommendation to move these releases from quarterly to monthly, to ensure that releases aren’t months out of date, was entirely rejected by Labour, which said:
transparency data for ministerial meetings and overseas travel, special advisers and senior officials will continue to be published quarterly.
The Tories said in their cabinet office response:
following the deployment and adoption of an integrated database, the Government will look to move departments’ transparency publications from a quarterly to a monthly basis.
Labour bowing to lobbying efforts
These comments call into question assertions from Labour’s paymaster general, Nick Thomas-Symonds, who told parliament that the new government is:
committed to transparency around lobbying. That is why we will have regular transparency updates. The approach that we take will frankly be in stark contrast with that of the Government who preceded us.
Indeed, the phrase ‘start as you mean to go on’ is impactful here. openDemocracy reported that corporate lobbyists relentlessly pursued Labour in the year up until the party entered government:
Weapons manufacturers implicated in human rights abuses in Gaza bent the ears of would-be defence secretaries. Incoming climate change ministers met with oil companies. Labour ministers who will now be responsible for curbing the excesses of the City of London were wined and dined by financial services executives.
This lobbying appears to have been fruitful.
On weapons sales, the government has suspended just 30 out of about 350 export licences to Israel. That’s just 8.5% of licenses. And it doesn’t include parts for F-35 fighter jets, which are implicated in war crimes.
On climate breakdown, Labour dropped its £28bn commitment to green energy. Instead, the government is handing fossil fuel companies £22bn for bogus carbon capture schemes. So it’s actually propping up the fossil fuel industry. Fossil fuels lobbyists courted Labour 16 times in a year.
On financial regulation, chancellor Rachel Reeves has now said that the rules imposed to stop another financial crash have “gone too far”. Labour’s plan for growth is also centred on the UK’s finance industry, rather than you know – the real economy.
Susan Hawley, executive director of Spotlight on Corruption said:
Lobbying transparency is fundamental to ensuring government accountability. The new government has a major opportunity here to show it really does mean to do things differently than the last one. It is essential that it comes forward urgently with plans to move to disclosure of meetings on a monthly basis, and expand transparency to special advisors and informal lobbying. It should also give an update on how it intends to implement the CSPL recommendations on standards across the board.
Featured image via Keir Starmer – YouTube
