The secrecy around lobbying, which has been at the heart of many government scandals in recent years, is a major driver of the disillusionment in British politics.
Three-quarters of the public believe the government is “rigged to serve the rich and influential”, according to polling conducted by More in Common and University College London’s Policy Lab last year.
InfluenceMap’s findings illustrate “how inadequate and opaque lobbying rules undermine effective policymaking”, said Alastair McCapra, the CEO of the UK lobbying industry body.
He added: “Business engagement should help to build sounder policy with better outcomes for the public, but unaccountable lobbying breeds public mistrust. This important report removes the guesswork needed to piece together what kind of lobbying is taking place.”
Weak lobbying laws
openDemocracy has previously reported extensively on the ways that the UK’s weak lobbying laws allow corporate influence to secretly shape policy.
Our investigations have now been backed up by InfluenceMap, which has found a huge gap exists between the lobbying that takes place and that which is disclosed. This means the British public often has no way of knowing who is swaying policy.
Comparing transparency rules in the UK, the European Parliament, the US, Canada and France, InfluenceMap found that the UK has by far the worst system.
Of the five, only the UK exempts lobbyists who work in-house for a company, rather than for an agency or consultancy, from registering with a statutory lobbying watchdog. Less than 15% of lobbyists working in the UK need to register because of this rule.
The firms on the register must publish a list of clients on whose behalf they have lobbied each quarter. But they do not have to publish any details about the lobbying, including whether it involved written correspondence or a meeting and what legislation or policy was discussed.
Registered lobbyists also only need to declare clients for whom they lobbied government ministers and senior officials. There is no requirement to name clients when they approached other MPs and peers, including those on select committees, or influential government advisers.
The Committee for Standards in Public Life, an independent public body that advises the prime minister on lobbying and other aspects of public office, has consistently recommended the government publish a single, searchable database of all meetings with lobbyists.
Its recommendations would expand the scope of the current register considerably, requiring lobbyists to disclose the specific policies or legislation they discussed at meetings with government ministers and special advisers.
InfluenceMap has also called on the government to take up this recommendation and address the fundamental flaws in the lobbying act by including in-house lobbyists and publishing all responses to government policy consultants as standard.
Susan Hawley, executive director of Spotlight on Corruption, said the report “starkly demonstrates how major transparency gaps in the UK’s lobbying regime are undermining the development of good climate policy.”
“We fully support their recommendations to make lobbying much more transparent and bring the UK in line with international best practice. These reforms would support more participatory and open decision-making to help rebuild public trust and ensure better decision-making, widening the evidence base for policy making and reducing risks of policy capture by vested interests,” she said.
Oil and gas licensing
In 2022, the UK government quietly dropped two criteria from its ‘Climate Compatibility Checkpoint’ after lobbying from the fossil fuel industry. The checkpoint is used to assess whether proposed oil and gas licenses align with the UK’s climate change goals.
Oil giants BP and Shell and their industry association, Offshore Energies UK (OEUK), responded to a consultation on the checkpoint by objecting to the inclusion of two key metrics for measuring the impact of fossil fuels, according to InfluenceMap’s analysis of consultation responses obtained via Freedom of Information requests.
The measures they opposed would have required the government to consider ‘Scope 3 emissions’ and the ‘global production gap’ when issuing new oil and gas licences.
Scope 3 emissions are produced during end-use and contribute the largest share of all emissions from oil and gas production, while the production gap tracks the discrepancy between planned fossil fuel production and what’s needed to limit global warming to 1.5°C or 2°C.
The government dropped both criteria from the final checkpoint, which instead focuses solely on operational emissions, which represent only a fraction of total emissions from oil and gas projects.
This outcome, InfluenceMap’s report notes, strongly aligns with the positions advocated for by BP, Shell, and OEUK, suggesting their lobbying efforts were successful.
The following year, the government approved 100 new North Sea oil and gas licences, which had a potential emissions footprint equivalent to Denmark’s annual output.
InfluenceMap’s report also highlights the issues around government consultations on proposed policies, pointing out that, as in this case, lobbyists typically use these to suggest amendments in favour of their clients, but their responses are not published as standard.
Similarly, unlike in the other four Parliaments InfluenceMap looked at, corporations in the UK are not required to declare their engagement on policies, how much they spend on lobbying, or which legislation or decisions they are targeting.
It highlights that this can lead to a situation in which companies make voluntary corporate disclosures that fail to capture the true extent of this advocacy. In this case, InfluenceMap found BP published a summary of its response to the checkpoint that omitted key lines of its opposition, which were only revealed later through Freedom of Information requests.
Rachel Davies, advocacy director at Transparency International UK, said: “This report highlights, yet again, the glaring gaps in our lobbying transparency regime and the potential risks of favouring a small group of vested interests at the public’s expense.
“The UK needs to catch up to other comparable democracies and act swiftly to introduce a comprehensive lobbying register with meaningful disclosures.”
