Lobbying scorecard: what has happened to lobbying transparency under the new government?

Today we are releasing a lobbying scorecard on where the new government has got to on lobbying transparency. While the previous government committed to implement three major recommendations to enhance lobbying transparency, the new government appears to have stalled. The current state of affairs is deeply unsatisfactory and risks making government decision-making deeply unaccountable.

Three years ago, in November 2021, the Committee on Standards in Public Life (CSPL) made several recommendations for improving lobbying transparency as part of its overview of the UK’s framework for standards in public life. 

It delivered a scathing assessment of the current state of affairs:

“the current system of transparency around lobbying is not fit for purpose. It is too difficult to find out who is lobbying government; information is often released too late; descriptions of the content of government meetings are ambiguous and lack necessary detail; transparency data is scattered, disparate, and not easily cross-referenced; and information in the public interest is often excluded from data releases completely.”

Of the nine recommendations made by CSPL to enhance lobbying transparency, just three were taken forward under the last government, another two were rejected out of hand, and four were only partially implemented or committed to.

Ahead of the election in May 2024 the Parliamentary Committee on Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs (PACAC) revisited some of the recommendations CSPL and others had made on lobbying transparency and reiterated “significant concerns” at the state it was in. 

Despite Labour in opposition pushing the last government to fully implement the CSPL commitments, there have been few public commitments made by the new government on improving lobbying transparency so far.

Last week Nick Thomas-Symonds, the Paymaster General, told Parliament in response to a question that the 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.”

However, other recent statements and lack of action by the new government suggest that it may in fact be rowing back on three of the main recommendations that the last government had committed to implement. There has been no public commitment made for instance to having a central public database for departmental transparency releases. Even more worryingly, the new government has publicly said that it does not intend to move to monthly releases as recommended by both CSPL and PACAC. 

As PACAC noted: 

“if the Government’s transparency releases are to provide the public assurance they are designed to, timeliness is important. Yet with quarterly publication, the information may be several months old by the time it is released.”

As our article last week pointed out, the current situation means that no-one will know who has been seeking to influence the new government’s policies until nearly six months after it took power – and that’s only if transparency releases are made on time. Departmental transparency releases are currently running at least two months behind their existing quarterly schedule – if this continues the first the public will only know about who’s been meeting with government eight months after the new government came into office. This risks making government decision-making deeply unaccountable.

Meanwhile, as we pointed out in that piece, new guidance to ensure the public has a better understanding of what was discussed appears not to have made a huge difference across government, suggesting that compliance with it is not being monitored or enforced. 

Future-proofing the UK’s standards regime couldn’t be more urgent. The government has yet to respond to the May 2024 PACAC recommendations on lobbying, so there is time for it to significantly raise its ambition on this. And it should do so to show that it does intend to govern differently from the last one, and before an almost inevitable lobbying scandal lands. We hope that PACAC members will be holding new ministers to account on the lacklustre implementation of crucial lobbying transparency reforms to date and pushing them towards that ambition.