Rob McKinnon, developer of Who’s Lobbying talks about a register of lobbyists, public data, and innovation, at the Open Data Campaign Camp Oxford 2011.
Rob McKinnon on open data and innovation by Andrew Mackenzie Creative Commons License: Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Now you can see Who’s Lobbying information about organisations directly on Wikipedia.org. Install our new browser extension to see summaries of ministerial meetings that organisations have had with the UK government.
Simply install the extension (a couple of clicks in Firefox or Chrome) and browse Wikipedia normally. We’ll add Who’s Lobbying information to over 3,000 Wikipedia entries, showing a summary of the ministers they’ve most often met, and a link to further information on the Who’s Lobbying website.
We’ve been playing with the extension for a few days and have found it really useful to see ambient information about who organisations are meeting in government. We hope you think so too!
The UK Government want interested parties, individuals and businesses to tell it what they think a statutory lobbyist register should look like.
The Government’s stated aim is to increase the information available about lobbyists without unduly restricting lobbyists’ freedom and ability to represent the views of the businesses, groups, charities and other individuals and organisations they represent or to deter members of the public from getting involved in policy making.
The Government has asked for your views by Friday 13 April 2012.
Details on how to respond to the consultation are here.
UK government Consultation Paper on Introducing a Statutory Register of Lobbyists. Deadline: Friday 13 April 2012
A group of 167 organisations with almost $3.5 billion of disclosed lobbying spend in the USA, are also engaged in lobbying and public affairs activity in the UK.
Research by Who’s Lobbying has identified at least 167 organisations with disclosed lobbying activity in both the UK and USA.
In the USA these 167 organisations have a combined disclosure of $3,499,731,804 total amount spent on lobbying and lobbying firms hired.
US data was sourced from InfluenceExplorer.com and OpenSecrets.org. Figures are based on lobbying activity reported to the Senate Office of Public Records. Reported dollar amounts are required to be accurate to the nearest $20,000.
In the USA there is also disclosure of the issues and bills organisations have lobbied on.
Through UK department ministerial meeting reports we know these 167 organisations have had at least 343 meetings with government, in the period May 2010 - June 2011.
The UK government’s proposals for a Statutory Register of Lobbyists does not include the requirement to disclose amount spent on lobbying, or issues being lobbied on.
The government’s proposal also does not include the requirement for in-house lobbyists to register.
Given the amount of money disclosed by these organisations in the US, there is justification for legitimate public interest in requiring disclosure of the amount spent and issues lobbying on in the UK. This could be included in legislation for a UK register of lobbyists.
The table below shows the top 15 organisations by disclosed US lobbying spend that have also had disclosed UK based lobbying or public affairs activity in the UK.
| Organisation |
US lobbying spend and most frequently disclosed US lobbying issues
covers through to end of Q3 2011 data from Influence Explorer and OpenSecrets.org |
UK lobbying spend and most frequently disclosed UK lobbying issues |
|---|---|---|
| US Chamber of Commerce |
$544,505,445
Immigration, Taxes, Fed Budget & Appropriations, Law Enforcement & Crime, Trade |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 3 meetings with UK govt since May 2010. |
| Northrop Grumman |
$163,518,093
Transportation, Trade, Government Issues, Energy & Nuclear Power, Aviation, Airlines & Airports |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 6 meetings with UK govt since May 2010. |
| Exxon Mobil |
$160,946,942
Fed Budget & Appropriations, Natural Resources, Government Issues, Consumer Product Safety, Chemical Industry |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 6 meetings with UK govt since May 2010. |
| Boeing Co |
$151,144,310
Taxes, Homeland Security, Foreign Relations, Labor, Antitrust & Workplace, Transportation |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 6 meetings with UK govt since May 2010. |
| Lockheed Martin |
$125,580,880
Homeland Security, Science & Technology, Energy & Nuclear Power, Taxes, Trade |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 8 meetings with UK govt since May 2010. |
| General Motors |
$117,371,000
Fed Budget & Appropriations, Trade, Finance, Transportation, Radio & TV Broadcasting |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 5 meetings with UK govt since May 2010. |
| Pfizer Inc |
$112,520,000
Pharmacy, Consumer Product Safety, Fed Budget & Appropriations, Agriculture, Torts |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 12 meetings with UK govt since May 2010. |
| Microsoft Corp |
$100,585,000
Copyright, Patent & Trademark, Consumer Product Safety, Science & Technology, Labor, Antitrust & Workplace, Health Issues |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 16 meetings with UK govt since May 2010. |
| ConocoPhillips |
$78,182,717
Natural Resources, Foreign Relations, Clean Air & Water, Transportation, Marine, Boats & Fisheries |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 4 meetings with UK govt since May 2010. |
| Royal Dutch Shell |
$71,508,339
Natural Resources, Clean Air & Water, Trade, Chemical Industry, Foreign Relations |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 31 meetings with UK govt since May 2010. |
| Bp |
$65,520,584
Foreign Relations, Clean Air & Water, Natural Resources, Transportation, Chemical Industry |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 21 meetings with UK govt since May 2010. |
| JPMorgan Chase & Co |
$62,759,775
Environment & Superfund, Copyright, Patent & Trademark, Education, Government Issues, Trade |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 11 meetings with UK govt since May 2010. |
| Raytheon Co |
$60,844,188
Science & Technology, Trade, Foreign Relations, Transportation, Aerospace |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 1 meeting with UK govt since May 2010. |
| Bristol-Myers Squibb |
$60,776,355
Pharmacy, Trade, Agriculture, Consumer Product Safety, Clean Air & Water |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. Had at least 1 meeting with UK govt since May 2010. |
| Abbott Laboratories |
$53,296,000
Fed Budget & Appropriations, Agriculture, Food Industry, Pharmacy, Medical Research & Clin Labs |
No UK requirement to disclose lobbying spend or lobbying issues. |
You can view the table of data for all 167 organisations lobbying here.
Less than 20 ministerial meetings disclosed by UK government departments have been with lobbying firms, from over 6,700 meetings disclosed between May 2010 and June 2011.
Mark Harper MP, Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform, has consistently stated the purpose of the proposed statutory register of lobbyists is to increase public transparency. In particular:
“‘When an in-house representative from a company comes to see me, the public knows what’s happening and that is transparent. If someone from an agency comes to see me, no-one knows who they’re advocating for – and that’s not transparent.” — source: PRWeek
Mark Harper MP, Minister for Political and Constitutional Reform, has consistently stated the purpose of the statutory register of lobbyists, as currently proposed, is to increase public transparency. Photo by Cabinet Office, some rights reserved.
Given there are so few disclosed government meetings with lobbying firms, would it not be easier if government simply disclosed further details of those meetings?
There are at least 93 lobbying firms in the UK according to APPC and PRCA public affairs registers (it’s voluntary for lobbying firms to be members of these organisations).
The public has an interest in what issues these firms are lobbying on for which clients, and how much they are being paid to do so. That is the sort of information you’d think the government should be proposing to include in its plans for a statutory register.
You can view the government’s disclosed ministerial meetings with lobbying firms here: http://whoslobbying.com/uk/lobbying_firms.
The Political and Constitutional Reform Committee is examining the Government’s proposals for introducing a statutory register for lobbyists.
The Committee wants to hear your views on the Government’s proposals, and in particular your answers to the several questions.
In order to inform the legislative process effectively the committee have asked for your views by Wednesday 29th February 2012.
Details on how to submit evidence are here.
Political and Constitutional Reform Committee makes call for evidence: Introducing a statutory register of lobbyists. Deadline: Wednesday 29th February 2012.
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:
DATA: download the full spreadsheet of UK ministerial meetings May-Dec 2010
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.
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.
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.
