The Lobbying Register needs real reform more than an outsourced digital glow-up

The Scottish Lobbying Register published its annual report last week detailing how it has been working to increase transparency in the Scottish Government. This Register is one of Common Weal’s earliest policy successes and we remain supportive of it - democracy is meaningless if we cannot see who is lobbying our politicians, when they are doing it and what they are talking about.

Our support is such that we do not shy away from critique of the register and the legislation underlying it. Two years ago, we broke the story we had been forced by the legislation to be less transparent in our own lobbying than we wanted to. The reason for this is that the legislation defines “Registered Lobbying” far too tightly. It only covers instances where a paid staff member of an organisation lobbies a politician. In our case, several of our lobbying meetings had been conducted by an unpaid volunteer or by an unpaid Member of our Board, without a paid staff member present. As such we were not allowed to register these meetings and had to delete from the register similar historic meetings that had been registered previously.

Other loopholes are more well known - such as meetings conducted via Zoom being registerable but only if the camera is switched on, and a blanket exemption from registration for any organisation that employs fewer than ten FTE staff members (which covers most of the think tanks in Scotland, including Common Weal though we register our lobbying regardless).

The largest issue we have with the Register though is the fact that we, as the lobbying party, have to register our activities. We must state when we have interacted with a politician in a way that we think may have been lobbying (this does include a conversation at a mutual friend’s child’s birthday party that ends up straying into politics just as much as a meeting in a Minister’s office in Parliament).

The result of the current system is that many organisations must interact with a web-based IT system that the annual report admits has its failings. It is far too easy for registration deadlines to be missed for various reasons such as organisations forgetting to check their admin email inbox or the staff member responsible for the Register leaving the organisation and their duty not being reassigned (this is easy to do if your organisation lobbies only infrequently and thus the main duty consists of checking one box twice a year to say that you haven’t done any lobbying in the previous six months). The report states that fully one third of all registered lobby organisations in Scotland have found themselves in breach of the law at some point for reasons like this.

The annual report mentions that reforms of the frontend of the Register are underway. As is all too typical from the Scottish Government these days, rather than tackle this in-house the job has been outsourced to a company based in Middlesex. A consultation earlier this year on improving the Register focused largely on user experiences of the platform rather than actual reform.

The changes being made may well make it easier for organisations to register their lobbying but there are still too many loopholes and failures in the system that will only be fixed if legislators do their job of ensuring proper transparency of their work. Our suggestions are that as many of the loopholes are closed as possible - especially loopholes around the medium that the lobbying is undertaken. An audio-only phone call should be given the same weight as the same conversation taken at an invitation-only private dinner, for example.

Loopholes around who is lobbying should also be closed to prevent organisations reliant on volunteers - like us - from being blocked from registering our lobbying and, more critically, to prevent large corporations hiding their lobbying by sending an unpaid intern to do it.

The biggest reform is the one that would largely avoid having to spend public money on outsourcing new “digital solutions”. Instead of organisations having to register when they have lobbied a politician, the politician in question should be the one who registers when they have been lobbied. This would mean that only a couple of hundred MSPs, Special Advisors and their staff would need to be trained centrally by Parliament to use the systems rather than the more than 1,600 organisations currently registered. This would also mean that failure to register lobbying could be made a censurable offence on the part of the politician rather than the fines currently in place (fines which are high enough for small organisations but barely worth the invoice for large corporations).

As said though, these reforms are not something the staff at the Register can do. They are bound by broken legislation. Only Holyrood can make the change needed. In 2016, the parties came together to unanimously pass the original Bill and to bring democratic transparency this far. Why can’t they do it again to finish the job?