October 17, 2011 at 10:59pm
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Download UK ministerial meeting data from 2010
Some people have asked for access to the raw data aggregated on the Who’s Lobbying website.
Government departments are seven months late in publishing meeting reports. They are currently in breach of the Ministerial Code, pg 20, which states “Departments will publish, at least quarterly, details of Ministers’ external meetings”.
Departments last issued ministerial meeting reports covering the period Jan-Mar 2011. Data from these 2011 reports have not yet been extracted, cleaned, and loaded into the Who’s Lobbying database.
In an ideal world, the Prime Minister would be reprimanding departments for being in breach of the Ministerial Code’s rules on quarterly publication of ministers’ external meetings. Photo by The Prime Minister’s Office, some rights reserved.
Here is a link to a spreadsheet containing data from Who’s Lobbying’s database on UK ministerial meetings from May to December 2010.
Each organisation in a meeting is listed on a separate line, there are over 6,000 entries.
Data in the spreadsheet has been collated from previous department ministerial meeting reports. The columns meeting_source and meeting_source_uri give you the provenance of each row.
If more than one organisation was in the same meeting, then the wl_internal_meeting_id will be the same for those rows in the spreadsheet.
Often the same organisation is given a different name in different reports. Where possible a normalized form of the name is given in the column wl_normalized_name, and a normalized acronym, if any, for the organisation is given in the column wl_normalized_acronym.
Here is a list of the columns in the spreadsheet:
- department - e.g. Prime Minister’s Office
- minister - e.g. The Rt Hon David Cameron MP
- minister_role - e.g. Prime Minister
- wl_internal_meeting_id - e.g. 542
- date - e.g. May 2010
- name_of_organisation - e.g. Rupert Murdoch
- wl_normalized_name - e.g. Rupert Murdoch
- wl_normalized_acronym
- purpose_of_meeting - e.g. General meeting
- department_datagov_uri - e.g. http://reference.data.gov.uk/doc/minister/co/prime-minister
- department_wl_uri - e.g. http://whoslobbying.com/uk/prime_ministers_office
- minister_wl_uri - e.g. http://whoslobbying.com/uk/david_cameron
- organisation_wl_uri - e.g. http://whoslobbying.com/uk/rupert_murdoch
- meeting_source - e.g. Prime Minister’s Office, Ministerial meetings with outside interests, 13 May 2010 - 31 July 2010
- meeting_source_uri - http://download.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/transparency/data-pm.pdf
- meeting_source_licence - Open Government Licence – http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/
- whos_lobbying_licence - Open Database License (ODbL) – http://www.opendatacommons.org/licenses/odbl/1.0/
- whos_lobbying_attribution - Information from the Who’s Lobbying (http://whoslobbying.com/) database is available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Content from other sources have additional licences as referenced.
DATA: download the full spreadsheet of UK ministerial meetings May-Dec 2010
Copyright law should be based on evidence, not lobbying - PM commissioned report says
A new review of UK copyright and patent law, commissioned by the Prime Minister, urges “Government to ensure that in future, policy on Intellectual Property issues is constructed on the basis of evidence, rather than weight of lobbying”.
In the independent report titled “Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth”, author Professor Ian Hargreaves states on “copyright issues, lobbying on behalf of rights owners has been more persuasive to Ministers than economic impact assessments.”
Ministerial meeting data reported by departments and compiled by Who’s Lobbying, confirms that ministers have been lobbied heavily by rights holders. Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, most often met in 2010 with:
Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth - An Independent Report by Professor Ian Hargreaves.
Baroness Wilcox, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Business, Innovation and Skills responsible for intellectual property, most often met in 2010 with:
The review makes ten recommendations for strategic change in policy in order to ensure that the UK has an approach to copyright and patent law best suited to supporting innovation and promoting economic growth in the digital age.
The report identifies that “relevant institutions of Government lack access to the data upon which corporate lobbying and other positions are constructed”.
The report says it’s “important to note the need for any machinery in this area of policy and public administration to be robust. This matters because there are strong and divergent interests in play and with some of the most skilful and influential lobbyists on the UK political scene”.
It goes on to say that there is “no doubt” that “UK creative companies have distorted policy outcomes”.
To combat this problem, it endorses “an institutional environment which encourages the relevant public authorities to build, present and act upon the evidence”.
One recommendation is for changes to ensure independent economic data is used as evidence to inform policy making and judicial judgements, including giving the Intellectual Property Office a legal mandate to pursue economic objectives, powers to access data, and authority to issue statutory opinions that courts would be obliged to take into account.
Fixing the Revolving Door - a new Transparency International UK report
A new report by Transparency International UK concludes that the system for regulating the ‘revolving door’ between government and business is broken and needs a radical overhaul.
The report is titled Cabs for Hire?: Fixing the Revolving Door between Government and Business.
The title references a quote by former cabinet Minister, Stephen Byers, who said “I’m a bit like a sort of cab for hire”. Byers made this statement to journalists posing as lobbyists in a sting arranged by the Channel 4′s Dispatches programme and the Sunday Times.
The report uses a number of recent scandals in the defence, health, transport and energy industries to highlight that the current regulation system is failing the public.
Cabs for Hire?: Fixing the Revolving Door between Government and Business - a new report by Transparency International UK.
Surprisingly the report makes no reference to the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments’ letting Tony Blair keep an appointment with an oil company operating in Iraq secret for almost two years because of “market sensitivities”. For a simliar period, ACOBA also keep secret Blair’s appointment as Governance Adviser to the Kuwaiti Government.
The report makes fifteen recommendations, including replacing the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (the current body that regulates the system) with a new statutory body; setting up a register of lobbyists and introduction of legislation on lobbying; and a three-year ban on lobbying by public officials who have had responsibility for procurement decisions.
A further recommendation is that the Office of National Statistics should collect and publish information on the destinations of leavers from the Senior Civil Service.
The report emphasises that disclosure and monitoring are important parts of any revolving door regulation. It states research suggests that disclosure is most effective in reducing perceived corruption when disclosures are made available to the public.
The report concludes that either actual scrutiny by the media and the public – or the threat of that scrutiny – is most effective in constraining unethical, corrupt, or illegal behaviour.
Ed Vaizey’s response to being most met minister in 2010
Our report that Ed Vaizey was the minister with the most reported ministerial meetings with outside interests in 2010 was covered in a Public Affairs News article last week.
Public Affairs News got this comment from Ed Vaizey:
“I’m delighted to be top of this table. The only luxury of opposition was that you met a lot of people who could express their hopes and concerns. I was determined to be accessible as a minister, which is why I hold regular surgeries to allow people to come and meet me who wouldn’t normally get past officials, and why I have twice as many meetings as other ministers.”
“I also cover a wide brief, so I have to meet museums, performing arts, film, video-games, music, advertising, fashion, TV, telecoms, internet companies, and so on, so a large number of meetings in this context shouldn’t be a surprise.”
Source: Public Affairs News
On the Who’s Lobbying website, you can view Ed Vaizey’s ministerial meetings in 2010 as reported by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills.
Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries.
Photo by DCMS, some rights reserved.
Ed Vaizey was the most met minister in 2010
Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, has been kept busy by external groups, with 148 reported meetings with outside interests during May to December 2010. This makes him the minister with the most reported ministerial meetings with outside interests in 2010.
Coming in second was David Willetts, Minister of State for Universities and Science, with 120 reported meetings, and in third place was Cheryl Gillan, Secretary of State for Wales, with 91 reported meetings with outside interests in 2010.
Ed Vaizey, Minister for Culture, Communications and Creative Industries, has the most reported ministerial meetings with outside interests in 2010.
Photo by DCMS, some rights reserved.
According to department reports, Ed Vaizey met most often with Warner Bros, and with BPI (British Recorded Music Industry), formerly known as the British Phonographic Industry.
Warners Bros and BPI were each in 7 reported meetings with Ed Vaizey during May to December 2010.
Who’s Lobbying has analysed data from newly released ministerial meeting reports covering over 1,600 meetings from October to December 2010. We’ve combined this with analysis of data from previous reports covering May to September 2010.
Ed Vaizey’s ministerial responsibilities cover two departments, BIS and DCMS. Both departments report ministerial meetings with Ed Vaizey, so there’s a chance meetings have been double counted. Departments don’t provide exact dates for meetings, which makes it difficult to check for duplicates. It’s possible that 7 or more meetings are duplicates out of the 148 reported.
The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) is the department that reported the most ministerial meetings. BIS ministers have reported a total of 493 meetings with over 1,200 outside interests from May to December 2010.
Across the coalition government, the five organisations UK ministers reported the most meetings with in 2010 are:
Departments are publishing their ministerial meeting reports quarterly, with a 3 month delay after each quarter.
While we have to wait 3 months for meeting reports, some departments publish almost daily updates to their photo stream on flickr.
Prime Minister David Cameron speaks to BRE chief executive Peter Bonfield on 16 December 2010. The Prime Minister’s ministerial meetings Oct-Dec 2010 report did not mention this meeting.
Photo by The Prime Minister’s Office, some rights reserved.
A photo in the Prime Minister’s Office flickr stream shows David Cameron met BRE chief executive Peter Bonfield in December 2010. However the Prime Minister’s Office meeting report for October to December 2010 does not mention the PM’s meeting with BRE.
We wonder how many other meetings or discussions are not included in the ministerial disclosures released by departments. You can browse all the meetings that have been reported on the Who’s Lobbying website.
March 30, 2011 at 4:00pm
Notes
UKPAC’s register inconsistent with APPC’s register?
Keeping the data up-to-date at Who’s Lobbying is a labourious job. It’s not helped by when we find there are inconsistencies between the new UK Public Affairs Council register and the Association of Professional Political Consultants register.
The UKPAC register lists the firm Advocate as having 1 staff member and 3 clients for the period Sep-Nov 2010.
UKPAC Register entry for Advocate - listing 1 staff member and 3 clients for the period 1 Sept to 30 Nov 2010 - retrieved 30 March 2011, 3.26pm.
The APPC register lists Advocate with 5 staff and 16 clients for the same period.
APPC Register entry for Advocate - listing 5 staff and 16 clients for the period 1 Sept to 30 Nov 2010.
This leaves us wondering how we should represent this information on the Who’s Lobbying website. Should we stick to sourcing data from the APPC register and ignore the UKPAC register?
February 26, 2011 at 12:28pm
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Update - Data removed for review
The data that was added to the Who’s Lobbying site yesterday, 25 February, related to public affairs firms on the APPC register, their clients and staff has been removed from the site today for review.
The existing data on ministerial meetings with outside interests remains on the site.
Who’s Lobbying is an experiment to use software to automate the combination of publicly available information on lobbying activity to make it easier for the public to explore and access. The goal was to improve transparency.
Unfortunately the lack of unique identifiers for organisations and people, combined with possibly conflicting information in different locations, makes it difficult to accurately automate the connection of different datasets. Regrettable mistakes were made yesterday, which we apologise for.
There is promising potential for the approach of joining data from different sources. However we really need public disclosure publications to include unique identifiers for organisations, such as company and charity registration numbers, to allow better identification of the entities being referred to.
February 25, 2011 at 12:13am
7 notes
Who’s Lobbying launches a public lobbying register
PRESS RELEASE - February 25, 2011
Who’s Lobbying today launches a public register of lobbying activity with an analysis of the clients and staff of 62 lobbying firms listed on the latest Association of Professional Political Consultants (APPC) register.
Using software to combine this data with organisation classifications from wikipedia, and publicly available staff employment histories, the following was found:
In comparison to the United States, there is still relatively little transparency surrounding lobbying activity in the UK.
Under United States disclosure requirements specific lobbying issues, both current and anticipated, are stated in the registration, along with financial amounts received from clients, and former roles lobbyists have held in the public sector. None of these are disclosed in the UK.
The UK Government has stated plans to introduce draft legislation to create a statutory register of lobbyist activity.
The Government has indicated it will release a consultation paper on its proposed statutory register in the near future.
The recently formed UK Public Affairs Council (UKPAC) plans to publicly launch a new voluntary register any day now. It will be based on members of APPC, PRCA, and the Chartered Institute of Public Relations (CIPR) registering their lobbying staff and clients.
UKPAC has confirmed its register will not include financial information. It has given no indication that its register will include employment histories, or list specific client lobbying issues.
In a recent interview on CIPR TV, Elizabeth France, chair of UKPAC, shared her hopes that the government will adopt a light-disclosure approach in a stautory register:
“We’ve really got about a year to try to show [the government] that the scheme that we’ve set up in UKPAC works, and to try and persuade them that what they need to do is embrace that with a statutory hug rather than invent something else.”
For transparency the UK Government should follow US disclosure requirements, by mandating that a statutory register of lobbying activity include financial information, specific client lobbying issues, and the employment history of lobbying staff.
In the meantime you can explore what’s currently publicly available at the Who’s Lobbying website.
About Who’s Lobbying
Who’s Lobbying is an initiative to develop an accessible and unified way of accessing publicly available information on UK lobbying. It first launched in November 2010 with an analysis of ministerial meetings.
February 7, 2011 at 11:30am
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UK Public Affairs Council wants a “statutory hug” - and why that’d impede transparency
The UK Public Affairs Council wants government to base proposed legislation for a statutory lobbyist register around UKPAC’s new voluntary lobbyist register.
In a recent interview Elizabeth France, chair of the UK Public Affairs Council, said:
“We’ve really got about a year to try to show [the government] that the scheme that we’ve
set up in UKPAC works, and to try and persuade them that what they need to do is
embrace that with a statutory hug rather than invent something else.”
UKPAC plans to make its voluntary lobbyist register public online later this month.
UKPAC chair Elizabeth France on CIPR TV on 16 January 2011, indicated her hopes government will embrace UKPAC’s voluntary register with a “statutory hug”.
The UKPAC register will show firms and staff that have registered as lobbyists, and a list of current clients. Similar information is already public for some firms in voluntary registers run by the industry bodies APPC and PRCA.
UKPAC has stated its register will not include financial information
If the proposed UK statutory register were to follow US regulations on lobbying, then it would include financial information.
In the US, lobbyists report amounts received from clients to the Senate Office of Public Records. This allows transparency sites like Influence Explorer to make this accessible to the public.
In the US, Influence Explorer shows us that BAE Systems spent $30,417,000 on lobbyist firms from 1997-2010.
UKPAC register probably won’t list specific lobbying issues
If the propsed UK statutory register were to follow US regulations, it’d require lobbyists to report specific lobbying issues for each client.
In the US, a lobbying firm is required to file a separate registration for each client. Organisations employing in-house lobbyists must also file registrations.
Specific lobbying issues, both current and anticipated, are stated in the registration.
In the US, lobbyists must file a separate registration for each client, and report specific lobbying issues.
UKPAC register probably won’t list lobbyist’s employment history
If the proposed UK statutory register were to follow US regulations, it’d require lobbyists to report former roles they’d held in the public sector.
In the US lobbyists are required to state the executive and/or legislative positions in which the person served.
UKPAC wants to run government’s lobbyist register
In the same interview on CIPR TV, Elizabeth France went on to say:
“I would be very shocked if [the government] wanted to a new non-departmental body to do this work; which is why I am as confident as I can be, that if UKPAC can show that it can do the job, they’ll be happy for us to do that on their behalf - within a statutory framework.
Lobbying transparency requires full disclosure
The UKPAC register is light on disclosure in comparison to US registration disclosure requirements.
For transparency we need the UK government to mandate that a statutory register of lobbyist activity include financial information, specific client lobbying issues, and the employment history of lobbyists.
The UK government will be releasing a consultation paper on their proposed statutory register in the near future. That’s a chance for the public to say what they’d like to see in a register of lobbyist activity.
February 2, 2011 at 10:58am
4 notes
Over 700 new meetings … and government needs a CSV data validation service
Who’s Lobbying has this week added over 700 new ministerial meetings from August to September 2010.
Our updated analysis shows the five organisations UK ministers reported the most meetings with, from May to September 2010, are:
Departments are publishing their ministerial meeting reports 3 months after the end of the period covered.
We have to wait over 3 months after a meeting to see it reported. In contrast, some departments seem to keep their photo stream on flickr updated on a daily basis.
Prime Minister David Cameron speaks to BRE chief executive Peter Bonfield on 16 December 2010. The Prime Minister’s Office will publish in March or April 2011 the ministerial meetings report mentioning this meeting.
Photo by The Prime Minister’s Office, some rights reserved.
Individual departments are still reporting meetings in wildly different formats, making meeting analysis unnecessarily time consuming and error prone.
Most departments published the August-September 2010 ministerial meeting data a CSV (comma-separated value) formatted file.
Although easy to machine read, a CSV file is only useful if all departments publish data with exactly the same structure. Ideally that would be with exactly the same headings in the top row. Also each name of an organisation in a meeting should be on a separate line, rather than a list of names in one cell.
The Department of Health, HM Treasury, and DFID published meeting data in PDF files.
DCMS was the only department to publish the data in a RTF file.
The Home Office published more than one table of data in the same CSV file, which makes machine processing much more difficult.
DECC publish meetings in a separate file per minister, which is unnecessarily different from the other departments.
The Cabinet Office should be running a light-weight online automated data validation service to ensure the consistency of the CSV data released across departments.
Departments, before they publish, should be required to validate their CSV by submitting it to the online validation service and correcting any errors reported.
Data inconsistency is interfering with delivery of the Government’s transparency policy.
If government expects outside organisations to be building services on top of government released data then it needs to address the current data inconsistency problem in the next few months.
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