The pipeline of lobbying scandals and possible wrong-doing flows unabated: an ex-PM ringing round Ministerial chums to promote Greensill, a senior Minister deleting Greensill-related government messages held in a private application, an MP on several select committees briefing businesses ahead of their appearances in front of select committees, an ex-Chancellor promoting his business with senior civil servants. 

To this list should now be added MPs double jobbing as paid advisors to businesses whilst serving on All Party Parliamentary Groups (APPGs) representing those same businesses or business sectors.   The Guardian covered this story based on the research carried out by a team of Unlock Democracy staff and volunteers.  

MPs who sit on parliamentary groups face scrutiny over lobbying

Unlock Democracy has written to the Chair of the Committee on Standards regarding our research findings. 

The alarming aspect of this APPG story is that the lobbying rules are so contradictory that it is not clear whether double jobbing MPs are even doing anything against the rules.

This has to change.  

The single most important purpose of many APPGs is to use their members from the Commons and the Lords to:

 a) promote that sector to the government by inviting Ministers to the APPG to speak and answer questions, 

b) initiate parliamentary debates and 

c) to table parliamentary questions.  

In other words, to lobby the government.  Yet the MPs Code of Conduct states that MPs are banned from paid lobbying.  

And if this is not lobbying but just the perception of lobbying, that still has to be addressed. 

The lobbying rules are ‘intended to avoid the perception that outside individuals or organisations may reward Members, through payment or in other ways, in the expectation that their actions in the House will benefit that outside individual or organisation, even if they do not fall within the strict definition of paid advocacy.’ 

The perception that MPs working for a business, whilst also seeking to influence the government in ways that are relevant to that business, through an APPG, can be dealt with in one or two ways.  These are the solutions we are advocating.

Either these double-jobbing MPs should recuse themselves from any APPG activity that seeks to influence government policy, secure parliamentary debates etc.  in the area championed by the APPG.  

Or a more transparent approach, and one that could not be the subject of misinterpretation, would be for the lobbying rules to be amended to state that being a paid advisor to a company, industry or sector and being a member of a relevant APPG, or a number of relevant APPGs was a breach of the lobbying rules.

Doing nothing is not an option.  

Doing nothing would leave in place rules that are as murky as the sea on the south coast, after Southern water’s latest dump of illegal raw sewage.