The statutory Register of Consultant Lobbyists is live. Under the Lobbying Act, organisations that conduct the business of consultant lobbying are required to join the Register and declare whether or not they subscribe to a relevant code of conduct. All registrants must also declare the names of the clients on whose behalf they have lobbied Ministers and Permanent Secretaries in each quarter. The Office of the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists has the ability to enforce registration using both civil and criminal powers.
From 9am this morning, registrants have been able to create an account to apply to join. Organisations can apply to join the Register at any time as long as it is before conducting the business of consultant lobbying as defined by the legislation. The publicly available Register will be populated as organisations join and declare their clients at quarterly intervals. The online Register is due to show newly registered consultant lobbyists within a maximum of four days from application. Within the first 90 minutes of the Register going live, four firms had been listed.
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Alison White, the Registrar of Consultant Lobbyists, said, “I’m announcing today that after just 130 working days, the Register is open for business. The Register is intended to help improve the transparency of the democratic process and allow members of the public to review whose interests are being represented by consultant lobbyists. My role as Registrar is to ensure that all those that are required to register, do so. I will continue to work with consultant lobbyists across a number of sectors to make sure that they understand their statutory obligations.”
The first consultant lobbying firm to sign up to the register today was PLMR. Speaking ahead of the launch of the register Elin Twigge, PLMR’s Deputy Managing Director, commented "PLMR has always been an advocate for transparency across our sector and we have long subscribed to voluntary codes of conducts and willingly published who we lobby for” and although criticising the Lobbying Act said "Whilst we had hoped the definition of lobbying and scope of the Act would be broader, we see the launch of today’s register as a step in the right direction”.
Responding to the launch the PRCA has strongly criticised the Register’s minimal reach, high cost, and failure to provide any meaningful level of disclosure. PRCA Director General Francis Ingham commented "The Lobbying Act's Statutory Register has finally launched and no one who supports transparency can possibly [be] pleased with the result."
Ingham said “The Statutory Register was doomed to fail well before today's launch. The Government - inexplicably - guaranteed it would ignore the 80% of our industry represented by in-house lobbyists by using such a narrow definition of lobbying”. 14 months on from the Lobbying Act receiving Royal Assent “hundreds of thousands of pounds have been spent already to deal with this poorly-written legislation. The public and our industry will equally struggle to see the justification for such a high cost register with so little information” summarising that a "flawed definition; an overpriced IT system; and an industry compelled to sign up to an irrelevance that contains far less detail than is already in the public domain via our own voluntary registers”.