The Scottish Parliament's standards committee inquiry into commercial lobbying organisations began after allegations that executives of Beattie Media, the public relations firm, could offer clients preferential access to Scottish Executive ministers for a fee. The ''lobbygate'' allegations were not proved, but the episode threatened to undermine the ''new politics'' of openness, access, and transparency upon which the parliament was to be founded. The perception was that sleaze could be equally at home at Holyrood as at Westminster. Although it was only a perception, it needed to be addressed, for the good of devolution and the democratic process. The standards committee has produced a set of recommendations that aims to ensure that no organisation (PR or lobbying firms and certain companies with public affairs departments) can guarantee preferential access to any MSP.
That is a sound aim, but it is not certain that the committee has come up with the right proposals for delivering it. The focus is very much on lobbying firms. The committee believes that any lobbyist planning to do business at Holyrood should be registered with the parliament. If it is found to be making promises of access that breach the principle of equitable, open access and is seeking to exert undue influence in pursuit of pledges it should not have made, it would be removed from the register and be made unable to work at the parliament. Not surprisingly, there has been a good deal of opposition to the proposed registration scheme, not merely from vested interests. There are legitimate concerns that it is a skewed form of regulation that could, paradoxically, limit fair and transparent access.
In its response to the committee's recommendations, the Scottish Council for Development and Industry argues that the registration scheme as proposed is neither workable nor necessary. It has no particular axe to grind because it does not charge a fee for lobbying on the behalf of its wide membership. And when it does lobby it is on the basis of promoting its policies. The council is a stout advocate of openness and accessibility in the parliament, as its campaign against any cut in the number of MSPs shows (reducing their ranks would risk distancing them from the
public, it warns). But it believes that the bureaucratic burdens associated with registration and a code of conduct would be too much for many organisations that need to lobby the parliament but might not have the resources to do so. If that proved to be the case, lobbying could be left in the hands of a powerful ''elite''; hardly in keeping with the stated aim of ensuring that MSPs are equally accessible to the biggest multinational and the smallest community group.
The council would rather put the onus on MSPs by bolstering the current code of conduct governing their contacts with lobbyists. After ''lobbygate'', MSPs have to keep a clear record of meetings with lobbyists and the subjects broached. Nothing wrong with that; the only motive they could surely have for not keeping a
proper record would be the desire for concealment. But the council believes that regulations would be more effective and easier to enforce if the diaries of ministers and MSPs were publicly available in the parliamentary library and on the parliament's website. The committee has left some grey areas about what constitutes lobbying, and the council says: ''In an area
where definitions of lobbying activity cannot be agreed, it would be more realistic to scrutinise the lobbied than the many forms of lobbying.''
That is true. The public probably is more concerned about the behaviour of its
elected representatives than the behaviour of lobbyists. The council's proposals would probably provide a better model for scrutinising MSPs that also provided the public with evidence that they were behaving with propriety. But lobbying firms should not be let off the hook entirely. They have responsibilities, too, and there need to be sanctions available if they ignore their duties; otherwise the public will not be convinced that theirs is a legitimate activity (as it is in most cases).
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