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.
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
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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
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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.
November 11, 2010 at 1:35pm
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Is this transparency? No consistent format for 500 more UK ministerial meetings.
Who’s Lobbying has today been updated with over 500 new ministerial meetings from May to July 2010. The new meetings involve ministers from DEFRA, HM Treasury, DH, FCO, MoD,
and BIS.
Our updated analysis shows the nine organisations UK ministers reported the most meetings with, from May to July 2010, are:
Individual departments are reporting meetings in wildly different formats, making this analysis unnecessarily time consuming and error prone.
Number 10 has helped by providing an index to transparency information published by each department.
The PM launched business plans and “transparency database” on 8 November 2010.
Photo by The Prime Minister’s Office, some rights reserved.
The Number 10 flickr stream calls this index a “searchable online database of government transparency information”. However it is really just a page of links to department reports. Each report containing slightly different data. The reports are in a mix of PDF, CSV, and DOC formats.
Unfortunately Number 10 and the Cabinet Office have not mandated a consistent format for publishing ministerial meeting information.
The Ministry of Defence published data in a copy-protected PDF format, proventing copy and paste from the document.
DEFRA failed to publish the name of each minister in its CSV formatted report.
The Department for Transport
is the only department transparent enough to publish the date of each meeting.
All other departments only provided the month of each meeting -
was that an instruction given centrally to departments? Because of this it isn’t possible to determine if two ministers were at the same meeting. Our analysis is likely to be double counting meetings with two ministers in attendance.
Ironically, meeting dates are published in department flickr streams.
Photo by The Prime Minister’s Office, some rights reserved.
Under the previous Labour government, departments had published dates for individual meetings. In this regard, are we seeing less transparency under the Conservative/Lib Dem coalition?
Very few departments are publishing each organisation name on a new line, most give comma separated lists.
We found it a time consuming process to identify each separate organisation given the poor separation of organisation names.
The published organisation names also contained many mis-spellings and other inaccurancies. We have attempted to normalise organisation names where possible for reporting purposes.
We’d like to think these are just teething problems with department implementation of the coalition’s transparency agenda.
Who’s Lobbying will be FOI requesting the dates of meetings from each department. With the request we will share with departments our cleaned CSV formatted data, as a recommendation for how they should transparently publish in the future.
By providing this feedback, we hope to help UK government departments improve the consistency, accuracy, and comprehensiveness of their reports.
Who’s Lobbying launch reveals who’s meeting UK ministers
We are excited to announce the Who’s Lobbying site launches today! The site opens with an analysis of ministerial meetings with outside interests, based on the reports released by UK government departments in October.
Our analysis shows the five organisations UK ministers reported the most meetings with are:
You can explore the meetings yourself using our interactive treemap of organisation categories and another treemap of meeting purposes.
The category treemap gives a great overview of the types of organisations meeting each department.
For example, the treemap shows about a quarter of the Department of Energy and Climate Change meetings are with power companies. Only a small fraction are with environmental or climate change organisations.
From the treemap you can click through to more details on the Who’s Lobbying site. For example, here’s the list of meetings involving organisations in wikipedia’s climate change category:
We have matched 447 out of the 1,007 organisations meeting government to related entries on freebase.com and wikipedia.org. Using this we’re able to track the industries and categories of organisations meeting government.
We’ll be adding data to the site soon, including the most recent department meeting reports.
New UK rules deliver less government transparency
New transparency rules allow departments to refuse Freedom of Information requests for ministerial meetings. Before October 2009 you could get information on UK ministerial meetings by making a Freedom of Information request to a government department. The department would be required by law to respond within 20 working days.
Under new rules, departments are now required to publish, at least quarterly, ministerial meetings and other transparency reports. However some departments, including the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Office, haven’t published a single ministerial meeting or hospitality report in the last year.
Do we have to resort to reverse-engineering meeting details from department flickr streams?
Photo by The Prime Minister’s Office, some rights reserved.
The quarterly reporting rules were brought in by the previous government in October 2009. After the election, the coalition government placed the requirement for departments to publish “at least quarterly” in the Ministerial Code in May 2010.
Departments now refuse the release of ministerial meeting information when it is requested. Departments cite that ministerial meeting information is intended for future publication, hence exempt from release under Section 22 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
In practice, departments can use the promise of future publication to indefinitely delay the release of ministerial meetings.
In March, I sent an FOI request to the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s Office for information on their Oct-Dec 2009 ministerial meetings. On 12 April, the Cabinet Office responded:
I can confirm that the Cabinet Office holds the information requested on hospitality received by Ministers and ministerial meetings with outside interests groups, however, it is exempt from release (S.22 of the FOI Act - Information intended for future publication).
Six months later and I’m still waiting for the Cabinet Office and Number 10 to publish their ministerial meeting information for Oct-Dec 2009. Before the new rules I should have received this information within 20 working days.
Who is the Prime Minister meeting in this photo taken on 6 September 2010?
Photo by The Prime Minister’s Office, some rights reserved.
In July, I sent an FOI request to the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s Office asking for their intended dates of publication of ministerial meeting information for Jan-Mar, and Apr-Jun 2010. On 18 August, the Cabinet Office responded:
The [date of publication] information requested is not held. Details are currently being collated and will be published as soon as it is practical to do so therefore it is exempt from disclosure under S.22 of the FOI Act (information intended for future publication).
Two months later and I’m still waiting for the Cabinet Office and the Prime Minister’s Office to publish their ministerial meeting information for Jan-Mar and Apr-Jun 2010. Before the new rules I should have received this information within 20 working days.
Why is the Prime Minister’s Office not publishing ministerial meetings and hospitality quarterly?
Photo by The Prime Minister’s Office, some rights reserved.
The government’s Public Sector Transparency Board is meeting today, 12 October [was scheduled to meet on 12 October, but that meeting was cancelled]. The Transparency Board is chaired by Francis Maude, the Minister for the Cabinet Office. One of the other board members has told me that this issue has been added to the list of transparency initiatives that they will assess for progress.
The Public Sector Transparency Board should be treating department breaches of the Ministerial Code transparency promises as seriously as a breach of any other government transparency promise.
I hope the Public Sector Transparency Board members have time to review the league table of department progress in releasing ministerial meetings, hospitality, overseas travel, and civil servant hospitality.
View the Government Department Transparency Scorecard compiled on 7 October 2010.
About Who’s Lobbying? Who’s Lobbying? is a new project to develop an accessible and unified way of accessing publicly available information on UK lobbying.
Follow @whoslobbying on twitter for updates.
September 15, 2010 at 7:37pm
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UK Government Departments in breach of Ministerial Code transparency rules
Most UK government departments are failing to publish quarterly transparency reports in breach of the Ministerial Code, according to a Government Department Transparency Scorecard compiled by Who’s Lobbying? on 12 September 2010.
Departments, on average, have only published 2.4 reports out of the ten reports promised by government for the period back to October 2009.
The worst offenders are the Prime Minister’s Office at Number 10, and the Department for International Development. Neither has published a single quarterly report for the period investigated. This is despite rules set out in the Ministerial Code requiring quarterly publication.
The Ministerial Code, published by the Prime Minister, defines the standards of conduct expected of Ministers. The latest Code, released in May, requires departments publish, at least quarterly, Ministerial meetings, hospitality, gifts and travel.
The previous government had also declared departments would publish meetings and hospitality quarterly. The government’s response last October to a parliament committee report on lobbying stated the first quarterly report period would cover Oct-Dec 2009. It also confirmed senior civil servant hospitality would continue to be published quarterly.
Most departments refused to give an intended publication date for outstanding reports when asked under the Freedom of Information Act. The most common department response was that the information is “being collated and will be published as soon as it is practical to do so”.
A Cabinet Office press officer contacted last week indicated that it was “up to departments” to publish in line with government requirements and that departments were “aware of their obligations under the Ministerial Code”.
View the Government Department Transparency Scorecard compiled on 12 September 2010.
About Who’s Lobbying? Who’s Lobbying? is a new project to develop an accessible and unified way of accessing publicly available information on UK lobbying.
Follow @whoslobbying on twitter for updates.
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