The Anti-Corruption Strategy – containing 120 commitments, spanning everything from tackling professional enablers to facilitating asset recovery – is undoubtedly welcome. Coming three years after the previous Anti-Corruption Strategy expired, it provides a vital reset and asserts meaningful global leadership.
Amidst all the announcements, however, those on political integrity are surprisingly weak, largely relying on existing announcements and containing some startling gaps, particularly on lobbying and ethics. This is despite the Prime Minister promising to “clean up politics”, “restore standards in public life”, and have a “total crackdown on cronyism”.
This seems particularly remarkable in the context of multiple recent stories, including former UKIP MEP Nathan Gill’s conviction for bribery, the recent record-breaking £9 million donation made to Reform UK, the lobbying conducted by Lords Dannatt and Evans of Watford against House of Lords rules, government ministers accepting freebies, and a fake Chinese investor buying access to MPs and ministers.
Ipsos polling commissioned by the government shows that 87% of respondents are concerned about corruption among elected politicians. The government will need to both concertedly implement what it has committed to in the Strategy and in some areas go significantly further than what it has pledged if it wants to leave a lasting legacy on tackling poor public trust in politicians.
Lobbying
Policy capture by private, powerful interests is a constant threat to democracy. The government’s polling found that 54% of respondents believe that politicians often accept gifts, favours, or extra money to influence official decisions. In opposition, the then deputy leader recognised this when she set out the Party’s position in favour of “an expansion of the scope of the statutory register of lobbyists”.
However, the only commitment on lobbying that made its way into the Strategy is the pledge to “continue to keep transparency around lobbying under review.” When the government has, in fact, watered down some of the previous government’s commitments, this is hardly a meaningful commitment.
Instead, the government should have taken this opportunity to listen to the recommendations of the Committee on Standards in Public Life, the House of Commons Committee on Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs (PACAC), and the Boardman Review.
If they had, they would have been in no doubt that major changes to the lobbying rules were essential, including:
- New rules to require ministers, special advisers and senior officials to not accept hospitality unless there is a genuine public interest reason to do so.
- The establishment of an accessible, searchable database of meetings, gifts, hospitality, and travel for ministers, special advisers, and senior civil servants, with minimum standards for the descriptions of meetings, updated monthly, and including meetings between ministers and party donors.
- Upgrading the lobbying register to mandate that in-house lobbyists, organisations not VAT-registered, and those that engage in ‘incidental’ lobbying have to register – and for the lobbying register to include individuals and organisations who lobby senior civil servants and special advisers, rather than just ministers.
- The adoption of guidelines for ministers, special advisers, and civil servants on how to prevent policy capture, ensure fairer access for people and organisations looking to lobby the government, and make policy in the public interest. This could include embedding participatory democracy, reducing conflicts of interest, and ensuring more inclusive consultations.
With these changes, the government could design a world-leading lobbying regime, allaying public concerns and bringing a breath of fresh air into otherwise closed rooms. It should, after all, be working to prevent – not merely wait for – the next lobbying scandal to break.
Ethics
Also notable by its absence is anything new on ethics or managing conflicts of interest. In fact, all the ‘announcements’ on political integrity in the Anti-Corruption Strategy have been announced before. These include the establishment of the Ethics and Integrity Commission and the reforming of the business appointments system (both announced in July), and the implementation of the Public Office (Accountability) Bill (laid in September).
There are again significant missed opportunities. The Anti-Corruption Strategy should have set out that:
- The Independent Adviser on Ministerial Standards and the Ministerial Code will be placed on a statutory footing to protect them from political interference or abolition.
- The Ethics and Integrity Commission will:
- report directly to Parliament rather than the Prime Minister, to ensure greater scrutiny and independence,
- be adequately resourced,
- have the power to develop codes of conduct for other public bodies,
- be placed on a statutory footing.
- The government will better manage conflicts of interest amongst ministers, non-executive directors, special advisers, and senior civil servants by having a central electronic register of interests, with departments required to make an annual declaration of their verification and sanctioning process.
- The government will publish details about secondments into departments, including the length of the secondment, the role filled, and the organisation the secondee comes from.
- The government will introduce enforceable and stricter penalties for breaking the business appointment rules. The current penalty of between £8,000 and £17,000 is hardly enough to deter a minister signing up for a job with a six- or seven-figure salary.
Yet none of these points appear in the strategy. This is despite the Public Office (Accountability) Bill – introduced in September and setting out new measures to require public authorities to adopt codes of conduct – being a ready-made vehicle for achieving them.
Without these commitments, the Ethics and Integrity Commission, in particular, risks being another under-resourced talking shop that could be shut down within a day of a new government coming into office.
Meanwhile, risks that new arrangements for policing the revolving door might lead to less meaningful transparency than under the old regime need to be addressed. Although it is early days, advice letters from the Independent Adviser are proving to contain less detail than those of the old regulator ACOBA, particularly in relation to what real or perceived conflict of interests might arise.
Political finance
On a positive note, this is the first time that a government Anti-Corruption Strategy has contained commitments on political finance. This is important given that 73% of respondents to the government’s survey are concerned about the impact of corrupt actors from abroad on the UK political system.
However, it remains the case that all of the commitments on political finance in the Strategy were recycled from the Elections Strategy published in July. While these are positive commitments, they do not go far enough. The government should use the Elections Bill in the new year to introduce changes that Spotlight, among others, has been calling for. These include:
- The restoration of the full independence of the Electoral Commission,
- A ban on cryptocurrency donations, given the way they can be used to obscure the source of the donation,
- The introduction of annual spending limits, rather than merely during the regulated election periods, to prevent excessive campaigning between elections,
- The introduction of a donation cap to prevent undue influence by mega donors,
- Stronger limits on corporate donations, with a ‘UK connection’ test to ensure that only companies with a strong connection to the UK are allowed to donate,
- A reduction in the threshold at which parties have to report donations to the Electoral Commission to £500, down from £11,180.
With all the vulnerabilities inherent in the UK political system that could allow for malign or foreign actors to influence our elections, and with the parliamentary Intelligence and Security Committee revealing that Russia and China are attempting to influence elections around the world, there is not a moment to lose. It is even possible that we could face a challenge from the US, given the ominous pronouncement in the new National Security Strategy that US policy will involve ‘cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations’.
Implementation
With the UK dropping 11 points in Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index since 2017, the task of restoring the UK’s credibility on corruption both at home and abroad is vital.
While the Strategy as a whole is a positive step in the government’s efforts to tackle corruption, the government needs to go further and be more ambitious, concrete, and specific in its implementation plans and timeframes.
We will continue to press, and work with, the government to make sure this strategy turns from aspiration to real reforms over the coming five years.
