Greensill inquiry echoes Unlock Democracy’s call for greater accountability
The Greensill scandal made it clear that a coach and horses had been driven through the sketchy rules that cover ministers and lobbying activities.
Nigel Boardman, appointed by the Government to investigate this scandal, recently published the second part of his report. It contained hard-hitting recommendations on how to promote transparency around the communications that Ministers have with lobbyists. Many of them sounded very familiar!
Back in June, Unlock Democracy wrote to Mr Boardman suggesting numerous ways in which lobbying activities should be more tightly controlled. We are happy to see that his final report contained many of our recommendations.
One of our biggest concerns regarding transparency is that Ministers do not have to report their ‘informal’ texts, phone calls and correspondence in ministerial transparency reports. We set out for Mr Boardman how that lacuna can be easily exploited by lobbyists; they contact the Government via these ‘informal’ channels knowing their communication won't be documented publicly, allowing them to conduct their business in secret.
Mr Boardman’s report addressed this problem by recommending that the definition of a ‘meeting’ in the Ministerial Code should be expanded to include ministers' informal communications. This means they will have to be published in transparency reports.
To promote transparency further, we suggested that Ministers should have to release transparency publications every month, rather than quarterly. This would improve public scrutiny and accountability. Mr Boardman recommended that transparency reporting should be ‘more frequent’.
Another concern of ours is that Ministers can communicate on messaging apps such as Signal, where messages can be set to automatically delete after the conversation. This makes it impossible for important exchanges to be scrutinised later. Mr Boardman recommended that the Government should set guidance on the use of social media for official business, and strongly discourage the use of self deleting messaging apps.
Mr Boardman’s report echoed many of Unlock Democracy’s other suggestions, including calling on Ministers to give a meaningful description of their meetings, and that a central database for transparency reports should be created.
The case for significant changes to the transparency of lobbying has now been made by both Unlock Democracy and the Government’s appointee Nigel Boardman.
We now wait to see whether the Government responds positively to our recommendations or continues to hide behind shambolic and incomplete rules which have allowed lobbyists and ministers to build cosy, covert relationships at the public’s expense.
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