Standards Committee - Minutes of EvidenceHC 357

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Committee on Standards

on Tuesday 2 July 2013

Members present:

Rt Hon Kevin Barron (Chair)

Sir Paul Beresford

Mr Robert Buckland

Mr Christopher Chope

Sharon Darcy

Sir Nick Harvey

Peter Jinman

Walter Rader

Dr Alan Whitehead

________________

Examination of Witness

Witness: Paul Birch, allparty.org, gave evidence.

Q93 Chair: Welcome to what is our third evidence session on our inquiry into All-Party Groups. I am going to ask you a question in a few minutes, but if you could just preface that by just introducing yourself, I would be very happy if you did that.

Paul Birch: My name is Paul Birch. My background is 25 years in IT, so initially in corporate IT and the last 12 or 13 years in internet entrepreneurship. That has worked out very successfully. I was involved with co-founding Bebo, the social network. Over the last 18 months or two years, I started allparty.org, and that is from my general interest in all things internet, so this is another dimension on that. I have been looking to do something for several years, but when I came across All-Party Groups, I found something that I thought was a project that I could pursue.

Q94 Chair: You are right into my first question: why did you create the site?

Paul Birch: When I discovered All-Party Groups about two years ago, I was intrigued by them but I had not really heard of them before. Although I do pay attention to politics, I had not come across them. I found them on the Parliament website, and the thing that attracted me to them was the vast array of topics that they covered; the fact that a lot of those were driven by public interest; they were quite dynamic-new ones were created and some were closed-and, as an entrepreneur, I could see the affinity around the fact that they are there for parliamentarians who are entrepreneurial in nature and want to pursue something of interest to them. The level of success any group has is down to the individuals involved: their passion, their enthusiasm, their experience and their skills. It felt that people could do what they were interested in.

Q95 Chair: Should Parliament do more to make its data more transparent, do you think?

Paul Birch: Yes. All-Party Groups are quasi-official in nature; therefore, they receive limited support from Parliament via the register, which does very much the functionary job that is required of it. We can certainly use that as a data source to then create an initial website that makes it easier to understand what is going on and to open it up. Some of the ideas we have in the future to progress that beyond merely being, effectively, a copy of the register are to allow, say, individual MPs or peers to publish on our website why they chose to be a member of a particular All-Party Group. Some of the more radical ideas we have are things like allowing the public to suggest what groups they think could exist that do not currently exist; MPs to maybe moot an idea they have for an All-Party Group. Obviously, that is already happening via the tea rooms, etc, but taking some of these activities online is definitely a potential for benefit.

Chair: Thanks for that. Maybe I should have said that I have interests to declare in these matters. Two of the members last week, you will see from the transcript, declared interests in a witness that we had and, halfway through the session, I found out that I had an interest to declare in that, so I am going to do it on behalf of the Committee. Many of us are active in All-Party Groups at different levels. I am going to move on to Paul now.

Q96 Sir Paul Beresford: You just said "for All-Party Groups to be successful". What do you define as success for an All-Party Group?

Paul Birch: I was looking through the purposes last night and about 200 groups mention, in the subject area-which I personally think is more interesting overall than the country topics-Parliament, parliamentarians, MPs and peers. Most of them are about allowing MPs and peers to become informed on these topics, and a few seem to have an element of promotion and publicity that looks to move outside of Parliament. The All-Party Cycling Group has clearly done that; it has been very active and it has a public profile. The Parliamentary and Scientific Committee are much more low-profile and do not have a profile, certainly, with the public.

Q97 Sir Paul Beresford: In terms of your organisation, who pays for the site, who pays for you and who pays for everybody?

Paul Birch: I have self-funded it so far.

Q98 Sir Paul Beresford: Is there no external funding apart from you?

Paul Birch: No.

Q99 Mr Buckland: Welcome, Paul. Your website has been very useful, I think, in terms of reminding Members what number of groups they are signed up to. Can I declare that I have been involved in the Missing Persons Inquiry, which is going to be referred to later in today’s session, and a non-All-Party Group inquiry into stalking, which you may be aware of, amongst all the other activities? I chair the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Autism, amongst other things. I just want to explore with you the concept of funding. I think you have said in your helpful written evidence that you would be interested to explore whether All-Party Parliamentary Groups could perhaps raise money directly from the public in order to help sponsor their activities. How would you envision that working?

Paul Birch: I think groups would have to be interested in pursuing that. I do not necessarily see it as something that a lot of groups would jump to do, because I think a lot are happy with their limited funding and perhaps do not need a lot of funding. They have wonderful rooms here to host events in, so the costs are not always that high for them. For others that are perhaps looking to have a bigger public profile, however, costs can get higher, so those groups perhaps would be more interested. The Cycling Group, for example, would be one that perhaps I would talk to first. I have not, however, spoken to any groups about that possibility yet. None are doing it currently, from what I can see, so there is no evidence to say that there is a trend in that direction, but it is a possibility.

Q100 Mr Buckland: I suppose the issue that you are trying to explore is the potential problem with a group overwhelmingly relying on funding from one source. Is that what you are perhaps looking at?

Paul Birch: I am just allowing for plurality of scenarios, really. All-Party Groups do range massively in what they do. Some are very much for parliamentarians just to participate in a certain sport, and do not have a public side to them at all-or a policy side, particularly. It is just about allowing for a range of activities.

Q101 Mr Buckland: I think Barry Sheerman told the Committee last week that a larger number of small donations from particular sources would be less problematic than, say, one big donation.

Paul Birch: If we did this, we would look to limit the individual support that one person could bring, so that it stops one or two people putting in and significantly influencing a group.

Q102 Mr Buckland: Do you think that it is a problem if one group is seen to have a lot of money from one source? Do you think that that is a problem that needs to be dealt with?

Paul Birch: I do not really have a strong opinion on that. It happens. I think the problem at the moment on that side is that the rules are open to interpretation, and some groups have chosen to interpret them in a way that means that one would assume that they would be taking significant money, yet, when they declare their support, they do not mention any pound-note numbers. Other groups that do receive significant support, however, are putting down the numbers that they are receiving. For me, that slightly feels that groups have been given too much ability to interpret the rules in a way that suits them.

Q103 Mr Buckland: Do you think that there needs to be a far more objective interpretation across the piece, so that all groups are working to the same rules?

Paul Birch: Yes, there is too much wriggle-room at the moment in the rules. Most groups have gone with the rules and the gist of them, but one or two, one would assume from the fact that they are acting differently, have taken a different-minded approach to it?

Q104 Peter Jinman: I want to explore that, if I may, a little bit further. I am one of the Lay Members, so I am on a sharp learning curve as to all that happens here. How should Parliament strike the balance between open to opinion and to information, and avoiding manipulation with these groups?

Paul Birch: I do not know. I think parliamentarians, hopefully, apply common sense in that matter.

Q105 Peter Jinman: You made the comment earlier that you thought it would be a good thing on a site to look at what the public might require in the future, and you are probably aware that Radio 4 has run a programme asking what the next APG should be, and that village halls came up as the winning item. That is a Radio 4 audience at five o’clock that is doing it; I am just wondering how you get opinion in as against a group of people who voted and who have something that they think Parliament needs to be informed about.

Paul Birch: In terms of getting opinion in, there are elements of being able to ask the public and groups being able to proactively put out a poll, effectively, of what the public think on a certain matter. There are polling organisations out there at the moment, but often the speed and self-service nature of an online service can really be helpful for getting a quick opinion and almost getting it in the meeting: at the start of the meeting, you send out a poll. If you get 1,000 people to answer the question, you can tackle that in real time rather than on a next-week basis.

Q106 Sharon Darcy: I am one of the Lay members of the Committee as well, and I am interested in understanding how much confidence the public has in All-Party Groups, and what more could be done to increase confidence. I would be interested in your views on that.

Paul Birch: The reality is that most of the public are still not aware of All-Party Groups, even despite the publicity that there has been in the last few weeks. In terms of getting confidence, I think financial transparency would help. It being easier for them to find groups helps them to get the sense that they are transparent and to easily interrogate what is going on.

Q107 Sharon Darcy: Your site is one way that data and information can be shared. Is there any information that you would like to put on the site and that is not currently available?

Paul Birch: The interesting piece of information which I and one or two other have thought of is this whole topic around being able to see the full list of members of each group. Some groups have chosen, via their own website, to publish a full list of their members, but that is a very manual process. I think information gets out of date, so I have no doubt that there are MPs being published as members of groups but who are probably not technically a member. There are a lot of manual processes around that, so if we can potentially come up with an online solution that makes it much easier and less effort for people to operate these lists, it becomes a more plausible proposition.

An idea I have had for a feature is to allow an MP or peer to visit the website, register and choose to declare which groups they are a member of. Potentially, we can then do it from another direction of allowing groups to publish their full list of members via the website. You can then have a conflict whereby a group says someone is a member and someone says they are not, but it ultimately comes down to the individual as to whether they consider themselves a member or not.

Q108 Sir Paul Beresford: I have a quick follow-up and another question. Technically, every MP is a member of every All-Party Group.

Paul Birch: They have an option to be a member.

Q109 Sir Paul Beresford: No, technically they are.

Paul Birch: Are they? Okay.

Q110 Sir Paul Beresford: That makes publishing a little tricky. The second one is that the media has suddenly taken notice of the APPGs and their almost sinister influence, but is the reality not that they have little or no influence?

Paul Birch: I think that seems to be a commonly held opinion, yes.

Sir Paul Beresford: The latter?

Paul Birch: The latter, yes.

Q111 Chair: I will open the floor to you. Is there anything else that you would like to say to the Committee at all in terms of these areas?

Paul Birch: Certainly, we have been very pleased in the last few weeks and months that the Parliament website has started opening up some APIs and publishing data. In the past, the typical technique is you run your programme to crawl round the Parliament website and pull data in, which is called scraping, whereas an easier, better and higher-quality way to do it is when Parliament publishes an API that beautifully puts out the data to us and we can receive it. That has now started to happen very recently.

Q112 Chair: What is an API?

Paul Birch: An application programming interface. Effectively, it is an Excel file of data. It is much easier to utilise than getting these pages where there is information that you want and information that you do not want; the structure of the page can change and suddenly you are scraping, so the programme has to be rewritten. Certainly, in terms of taking the AllParty data, that has cost us a lot of time and money to get that data in, whereas, had there been an API, we could have got it done in 24 hours. As it is, it is taking us months and months.

Q113 Chair: Do you think publishing APIs would be better than changing our register online?

Paul Birch: Everything is moving to being an API. What is happening at the moment is that Parliament is creating all these APIs; at some point in the future, however, they will effectively rewrite the Parliament website on top of their own APIs, so they are their own customers for their APIs. That structure of data makes it much easier to juxtapose data with each other, because you have these data in a nice, beautiful structure. At the moment, however, things are quite siloed out and it is quite hard work to put things back together into a single view.

Q114 Chair: Thanks for that lesson for those of us who need it. I think, if no other Members have any further questions, could I thank you very much indeed? I was quite intrigued by some of the issues you brought to us this morning, Paul, and I am sure we will be reading about them as well.

Paul Birch: Thank you.

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Douglas Carswell MP, Member of Parliament for Clacton, and Alexandra Runswick, Director, Unlock Democracy, gave evidence.

Q115 Chair: Good morning and welcome to what is our third evidence session of our inquiry into All-Party Groups. Obviously, you can just say a few words each about who you are and the positions that you hold.

Alexandra Runswick: I am Alexandra Runswick. I am Director of Unlock Democracy. We are a campaign organisation. We campaign for democratic reform and open and transparent Government. We also are very active at the moment in campaigning for a comprehensive lobbying register. I should also state that Unlock Democracy and its predecessor organisations, Charter 88 and the New Politics Network, were members of the Associate All-Party Group on Democracy, Constitution and Citizenship that used to be run by Dr Tony Wright.

Mr Carswell: I am Douglas Carswell. I am the Member of Parliament for Clacton, and I would like to see some far-reaching change in the way that the House of Commons and Westminster work.

Q116 Chair: I will just start the proceedings. There is a desire to end the privileged access for lobbyists. Who would you describe as a lobbyist, and what counts as privileged access? Could I ask you first, Alexandra?

Alexandra Runswick: I think I should start by saying I am a lobbyist. I think anyone beyond a constituent who seeks to influence MPs, civil servants or the legislature in terms of policy decisions and contracts is a lobbyist. I do not think it is specifically different if you are working for a multi-client agency, a voluntary-sector organisation or a trade body; it is the lobbying activity that I personally am interested in. That is why, in terms of campaigning for a lobbying register, we call for a comprehensive lobbying register that covers everybody and not just multi-client agencies. It is very easy to create the impression that, somehow, if a company is lobbying, it is bad, and if a charity is lobbying, it is therefore good. It can be both, in either case.

The issue for me is not the lobbying. It is important that MPs are able to develop their interests and policy areas, and it is important that outside interests have access to them and are able to share expertise, but what we need is transparency about what lobbying is going on. Specifically in terms of All-Party Groups, my concern is not so much that they could be used for lobbying, but where there is a financial relationship and also where parliamentary passes are being issued. My interest in this is not in trying to ban All-Party Groups per se, but in making sure that there is transparency about who is involved with those groups.

Mr Carswell: I meet lobbyists all the time. They are called constituents and they lobby me. I suppose, in a way, I am a lobbyist. I am constantly badgering my own party leadership to do one thing rather than another, or not do what I do not want them to do. You cannot have a functioning legislature and democracy without lobbying. It is a very good thing. I think one needs to be careful, however, that certain things that we all sometimes take for granted are not used as front organisations for big vested interests to do certain things that I think they should not be doing.

I am fan of All-Party Parliamentary Groups; I am a member of three or four of them myself. I think they do some very good work; they enrich the place, and we would be a lot poorer without them. There are some problems in the way that some of them are run, and I think we need to look again. The last thing we want-heaven forbid-is more compliance, but I think there are problems to do with the lack of definition. There is a fuzziness and a question mark over how active some of them are.

Far more importantly, however, my real concern is, in some cases, who provides the secretariat. I think some All-Party Parliamentary Groups cease to be a group of MPs coming together as members of the legislature to develop a commission position on something, which is a good thing; there is a difference between that and an outside organisation running an APPG in order to impress their clients and to get fat fees for supposedly influencing public policy.

Q117 Chair: Both of you feel that a charity could have as much of an interest as a commercial organisation, in a sense, or that there is no difference. Specifically for you, Douglas, is about something that you said in a recent television programme. Most of the content of that television programme is being independently investigated by the Commissioner, who sits on my right at the moment, so I do not want any comments about the generality. I understand that you did not do the editing of the programme either, but I ought to just put this to you, given that you are here: "We sometimes look at All-Party Groups, and we think they are something legitimate, but actually it turns out that they are not really all they appear to be. They are often little more than front organisations for big corporate interests." Is that evidenced?

Mr Carswell: Indeed. Before I came here, I did a quick look down the list, and I cannot help noticing, for example, one very reputable All-Party Group, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Armed Forces. What can be better than an organisation that claims "To promote in Parliament better understanding of the UK’s armed forces"? It sounds very good, until you look at who the secretariat is. The secretariat is the UK Defence Forum. Who fronts the UK Defence Forum? It is a front organisation for defence contractors. They are not neutral players in this. I have learned, firsthand, that, if you were to stand up in the House of Commons and, for example, question a £1.7 billion helicopter contract, you will soon find out that the UK Defence Forum is anything but a neutral player. I am proud to say that they posted various anonymous blog posts attacking me for my views on defence procurement. I am not saying that is a bad thing; I think it is a good thing. However, to pretend that the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Armed Forces is doing what it says, when it is run by an organisation that has a clear vested interest in trying to ensure that public money is awarded in a certain way, I am afraid, is not acceptable.

Q118 Chair: Is there not an assumption there that the members of the All-Party Group and Members of Parliament are doing as they are told?

Mr Carswell: I cannot help noticing, Mr Chairman, that I get emails sent from the mailbox account of a number of parliamentarians that have been written by the man who runs the UK Defence Forum. Rarely when people talk about putting words into someone’s mouth do they literally mean that they put the email into your inbox. I think there is something wrong with certain All-Party Parliamentary Groups. I feel very uncomfortable with it and I think, without creating a whole tyranny of compliance, there are one or two things we could do that could solve this problem very easily, which could allow parliamentarians who, as I do, care passionately about the armed forces to come together on an all-party basis, but without being party to an organisation that is basically a front organisation for the defence contractors.

Q119 Dr Whitehead: Alexandra, Peter Facey said a little while ago in The Guardian that the Government must "crack down on…the links between All-Party Groups and commercial interests", which, I assume, would be your position.

Alexandra Runswick: Yes. Douglas has already made a very strong case about when an All-Party Group can be used as a front organisation. From my point of view, any Member of Parliament wanting to be a member of that group, or any member of the public or journalist looking at that group, has to be clear about what the interests in that group are. One of the big problems at the moment is that it is not always obvious. Yes, the register is published, but it is not necessarily published in a way that is particularly accessible or searchable. It is also not always clear who the interest is at the end of it. If you dig, you might be able to find it.

The spirit of the 1985 rules on All-Party Groups was very much that, if it was a lobbying agency that was providing the secretariat, the end client had to be named, but it is not just about multi-client lobbying agencies. Yes, that is important, but it is also about trade bodies and other organisations. It is about making sure that we have that transparency, so that, if the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Armed Forces does publish a report that says, "We absolutely have to have this particular form of defence procurement," anybody looking at it and reading that report can be clear about what the interests are within that group, and any Member of Parliament who is considering being involved with it can understand that before they choose whether or not to join in.

Q120 Dr Whitehead: You have mentioned that all those links and the basis on which a group is administered-its secretariat-would, presumably, be included in that transparency.

Alexandra Runswick: Yes.

Q121 Dr Whitehead: Do you think that is enough in terms of some of the examples, such as the instance that Douglas just mentioned on the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Armed Forces? You would have to undertake quite a lot of work to make the sort of links beyond the transparent arrangements that you might have for just stating the fact that the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Armed Forces had this secretariat. At that point, that might become rather tendentious. For example, presumably the UK Defence Forum might say, "We are a wholly beneficial group. What is the problem? Why are you going down this particular route?" How might you then go beyond transparency, if you think you should, whilst at the same time maintaining a reasonably objective position as far as those groups are concerned?

Alexandra Runswick: One of the challenges with All-Party Groups is that, aside from the fact that there are a very large number of them, they operate in very, very different ways. Some are very small, internally run, and there is very little administration to them all; others have secretariats; others have financial relationships with outside organisations that fund foreign trips. It is difficult, then, to come up with a system of regulation that is not going to be too bureaucratic, but which gets to the heart of what it is that you are talking about.

I broadly support the recommendations of the Speakers’ Working Group on this. My concern is where there is a financial relationship, which includes donations in kind of a secretariat, and particularly where organisations are funding trips or hosting events in Parliament for outside interests. Groups that are functioning at that level should, I think, be made to publish accounts and minutes of the meetings. You would, however, have to some kind of tapered system.

For example, the Associate Parliamentary Group that I was involved with was basically a semi-academic forum to discuss constitutional reform. Although we were formally voting members of it, I do not think we ever had a vote. There was very little administration to it and there was no financial relationship to it. You need to come up with a system that is able to accommodate those different experiences of types of All-Party Groups. My particular interest is in financial transparency: who the ultimate client is if a secretariat has been provided, and also who parliamentary passes are being issued to.

Q122 Dr Whitehead: You would, then, advocate, in theory, some form of stepped registration.

Alexandra Runswick: Yes.

Q123 Dr Whitehead: Would that solve your problem, Douglas?

Mr Carswell: I think there is a very simple and straightforward solution to this, which is staring us in the face: all of us, as Members of Parliament, are given an allowance by the taxpayer of approximately £140,000 a year. If we want to join an All-Party Parliamentary Group, I think we should have an arrangement with IPSA whereby we sign over, say, £1,000-less than 1% of our total staff budget-towards the running of a secretariat. If we really feel strongly about these issues-if we really feel passionately about the armed forces, skin or Uganda, or whatever it is-surely signing over less than 1% of our staff budget is the way to demonstrate that. That would give the secretariat the resources. It would be a secretariat accountable to an MP, employed by an MP, with a pass issued by an MP, and funded by 20 or so colleagues. You could have a very simple system whereby, if you were brilliant at the job and managed to get 50 MPs to join your All-Party Group, every MP could get a reduced rate for employing your services. It would allow MPs to join as many of these groups as they wanted to; it would define membership very clearly; it would solve the secretariat problem; it would drive the parasitical lobbyists from the Palace of Westminster; and it would mean very little compliance. I think it is such an obvious solution that would solve the problem.

Q124 Chair: Would the taxpayer be happy giving taxpayers’ money to the All-Party Group on the Caribbean?

Mr Carswell: If I was a member of the All-Party Group on the Caribbean in the good constituency of Clacton, and I had to explain why I had been frittering away taxpayers’ funds on something as spurious as that-no disrespect to any supporters of the All-Party Group on the Caribbean-in a democracy, I am outwardly accountable to the voters. I would willingly give £5,000 to the campaign for an EU referendum, and I think, in Clacton, they would cheer me for that and they would probably want to know why I had not given more.

Alexandra Runswick: Also, public funds are already going to the All-Party Group on the Caribbean, because parliamentary facilities are made available to it.

Chair: The cost of secretariats is probably not competing with the cost of rooms. Let me just move on to Paul, because Paul wanted to come in on this.

Q125 Sir Paul Beresford: Do you not think that the reality is that the media has grabbed All-Party Groups and given them a status and power that, in reality, they really do not have? Second, you had a very broad definition of lobbyists. Perhaps one of the more interventionist groups that have a large lean on MPs-and I am not sure if they come within your definition-is 38 Degrees. We have no clarity on them but they flood us, through our constituents etc, in a way that an All-Party Group does not even touch.

Mr Carswell: Sir Paul, I think you are absolutely right. It is baffling, isn’t it? All of those of us in this room who understand how Westminster works are slightly baffled at the gravitas awarded to All-Party Parliamentary Groups. We look at them and we realise that many of them are of absolutely no consequence whatsoever. We know that lobbyists are of very little influence; often, on particular cases, lobbyists are of absolutely zero influence. However, Sir Paul, that is not how lobbyists present the world to their clients, and that is what counts. What we need to understand is that lobbyists do not say to their clients, "The decision could have gone either way, and we had nothing to do with it;" lobbyists say, "If the decision went our way, that was because of us. If the decision did not go our way, that is because you, the client, did not hire us early enough and spend enough money on lobbying."

Intrinsic to the success of the lobbyists’ business model is not the idea that they have influence, but that they are seen by the clients and the prospective clients to have influence. Having an All-Party Parliamentary Group arrangement that allows any lobbyist to basically create one off the shelf allows these people to position themselves as being at the centre of things when they are not.

You and I know, for example, in terms of the All-Party Parliamentary Aviation Group, that the Minister, in his wisdom, will make decisions on aviation that are not influenced by a lobby group. I cannot help noticing, however, that the All-Party Parliamentary Aviation Group has, as its secretariat, an organisation called MHP Communications, which takes client fees from Tesco, Oil & Gas UK, Heathrow and Shell. Do you suppose that, at any point, when pitching to those clients, the lobbyists at MHP Communications have made reference to the fact that they run the All-Party Group? Of course they do, and that is how this place is being used and what is wrong with it.

Q126 Sir Paul Beresford: Anyone who pays a lobbyist has to choose for themselves. If they are sucked in by this propaganda, that is their concern. Our real concern, however, is whether there is a legitimate or illegitimate influence-be it minor or major-by All-Party Groups. I think-and you have just said-it is minor. It does not really worry me what the lobby groups are telling their clients.

Mr Carswell: Then carry on, Sir Paul, blaming the media. In 2013, we have a right to expect that lobbyists cannot pretend to have an influence that they do not have and use AllParty Parliamentary Groups to pitch to their clients. I think that is wrong.

Alexandra Runswick: You may be right that All-Party Groups do not have very much influence, but that is not the way it is perceived by the public. The way it is perceived by the public is that outside interests can buy influence and access to parliamentarians that they, as individuals, cannot. That is why it is a problem. It is not so much that you can identify that an All-Party Group recommended this and the Government therefore acted on it. It is the perception that Parliament is not about voters or the public, but about other people being allowed to have access, which is incredibly damaging.

Q127 Sir Paul Beresford: Can I come to the first question, which was whether 38 Degrees and similar organisations are lobbyists.

Alexandra Runswick: Unlock Democracy is definitely a lobbying organisation. We lobby as an organisation and we encourage our supporters to lobby, to take part in Government consultations, and to take part in the political process more generally. We are a lobbying organisation. 38 Degrees is a complicated example, because they do not lobby as an organisation, for the most part. What they do is they get individuals to write to their MP to lobby them about something. I certainly do not want to get into a situation where a lobbying register would be trying to prevent constituents from writing to their MP, but I understand your concern about that method of lobbying.

Q128 Sir Paul Beresford: There is no transparency. The people who write do not understand who is behind 38 Degrees.

Alexandra Runswick: I think there is a lot that could be done about transparency, not just in Parliament but in other sectors as well. I do not know about 38 Degrees per se, but there are a large number of pressure groups, for example, that do not publish their accounts or who funds them. I am not saying that, somehow, everywhere outside Parliament is wonderfully transparent and that Parliament is not. There is work to be done in other sectors, too, but I think that there is a problem in terms of the public perception of APGs, and that transparency is one way of addressing that. Bluntly, if you are trying to address lobbying of Parliament, APGs are a tiny part of it. Is it right to tighten the rules? Absolutely. Is that going to solve the problem? No, because it is much broader than one issue of APGs.

Q129 Dr Whitehead: Could I just examine briefly this question of perception? I think there is an argument, to some extent. I am broadly with the question of lobbyists and the perception that sometimes they trade on, but there is an argument that, if a company wants to give some money to someone who is clearly peddling snake oil to them and nothing results from it, that is a matter of an unfortunate contract between those two people and nothing to do with Parliament. In terms of perception, it may also be argued that there are a whole range of things in Parliament that are subject to perception; for example, who dines with whom, on what occasion, and where and how. The thrust of my question, I think, is: at what point, then, does one regulate, and at one point does one take that beyond regulation?

Mr Carswell: It is very tempting to say that all these lobbyists are suckering their clients and giving them a whole load of bluff about the extent to which they have influence and, therefore, that is nothing to do with us. I broadly agree with that, until they start running things called All-Party Parliamentary Groups and using this place. Go and stand in the dining room on a regular weekday, look at how many APPGs are holding events there, and ask yourself, "Is it genuinely, in each case, a group of MPs coming together in order to promote something, or is it a lobbyist who is using that as a way of getting access into the building to impress their clients?" I think a distinction needs to be made. If a big corporate organisation is going to be suckered by lobbyists, that is their problem, but if they are going to start using the House of Commons or the name of APPGs, I think that that is wrong, and it devalues and debauches the whole currency of Westminster if we allow them to do it.

Q130 Walter Rader: As one of the Lay Members of this Committee on a fairly steep learning curve to understand how this place works, it has been helpful to hear from you this morning some practical examples of the issues that you believe should be addressed and perhaps, indeed, some solutions that you have already offered. A further dimension to that may well be beyond the specifics of APPGs-either their theme or the activities they get up to. There is of course another dimension: Associate Groups. How do you feel that contributes to the clouding of the issue?

Alexandra Runswick: I certainly think that the classification is confusing. Let us be blunt: most people outside Parliament do not understand what All-Party Groups are anyway, so the fact that there is also an Associate All-Party Parliamentary Group is confusing. I know that there has been concern that because Associate All-Party Groups have outside interests as formal members who can vote; that could be a significant step for outside interests taking over the All-Party Group. In my limited experience of being a member of one Associate All-Party Parliamentary Group, that was not how it was run, but I can see why that would be a concern and why there is a call to end that status.

The one thing I would say about Associate All-Party Parliamentary Groups which I think is quite positive is the transparency element of it, in that, because we were formally a member of the group-I hasten to add our involvement in it was about suggesting speakers for a meeting that MPs wanted to hold, and publicising the meetings to our supporters-anybody signing up to that group knew that we were involved with it, before they had anything to do with it. I think that aspect of the transparency is quite good and is possibly one way of dealing with groups that have external secretariats. I understand why, when it comes to voting, a lot of Members of Parliament are concerned that outside groups should not have that right.

Mr Carswell: We live in the age of Facebook. We are not going to be able to stop, for example, the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Multiple Sclerosis setting up a Facebook page; in fact, it would be a very good idea if they did, and I would encourage lots of my constituents to then indicate support for it, and that would be a very good thing. However, the fact that boundaries can be blurred, and that there may be a perception issue as to what the status of these groups is, is all the more reason for us to have a very simple set of easily understood rules as to what constitutes being part of the group and what constitutes not being part of the group. If you had to sign over £1,000 of your staff allowance, that entitles you to sit around the table as a member of that group.

I suspect that, if you did that, a lot of these groups would evaporate. It could be that there are some MPs who are genuinely so motivated by 80 or 90 different subjects that they decide they want to hand over the lion’s share of their staff budget, but if you had a simple system like that, you would not need any compliance or any more new rules. At a stroke, however, you would solve the issue of what membership means and what you are party to. If I was paying £1,000 of my staff allowance, I would want to know exactly what that meant and I would want to make sure that my voice was around the table at the AGMs. It would be interesting to know what percentage of members of APPGs turn up for their AGMs.

Q131 Walter Rader: I was quite astonished when I began to understand the number of these groups that there are in this place. Almost like your opening comment, Alexandra, the general public may not be aware of their existence, in many cases. Are there too many? How might they be constrained?

Mr Carswell: I do not like regulation, sir. I do not want to say that 400, 500 or 600 is too many. That is the beauty: we are all members of the legislature, and it should be for us to decide what our interests are. If you came up with the system I advocate, you would organically determine the number. I suspect, if you had to sign over £1,000 of your staff allowance, there would be many fewer, but we would soon see. I think the problem is that it is very vague, fuzzy and open-ended. Why does the lobbyist company Luther Pendragon provide the secretariat to something called the All-Party Parliamentary Intellectual Property Group? Intellectual property is hot property in the lobbying world right now. They probably run it as a loss-leader, but it is probably quite a lucrative loss-leader.

Alexandra Runswick: I do not think there is a correct number of APGs; I certainly would not want to try to set some kind of arbitrary limit. Where I do have a concern, however, which links back to Douglas’s point about what membership means of an APG, is that, as an outsider to Parliament, I genuinely do not see how you can meaningfully participate in 50 or 100 APGs and do all your constituency, legislative, scrutiny and committee work. As somebody outside Parliament, I do not understand how that can be meaningful. I would personally support there being a limit on the number of APGs-a relatively small number such as 10 or 15-that MPs could be a member of. They would still be able to attend meetings or be interested in an area.

Mr Chope: That is absurd.

Alexandra Runswick: If membership is going to meaningful, I genuinely do not understand how you can be a full participant of well over 50 groups.

Mr Carswell: I strongly disagree with the idea. I think the problem is the legislature. Members of the legislature are already tied up in knots with compliance with IPSA; heaven forbid we create an IPSA-type system to regulate these things. Talk about a sledgehammer to hit a nut. We do not need to set arbitrary limits; we just need to make MPs sign over a grand.

Chair: Robert, a supplementary, but not on IPSA, I assume.

Q132 Mr Buckland: No, we do not want to talk about that. To develop the point you make, Douglas, I was very interested in your idea about a proportion of the office allowance. Is there not, however, a problem with that, in that Members of Parliament, as you see, are free to associate with other Members of Parliament and, therefore, informal groups could be created that would get around the rules, however carefully crafted they may be.

Mr Carswell: How do you mean? If you have to spend £1,000 of your staff allowance, you are going to take an interest.

Q133 Mr Buckland: Let us say that you have a damascene conversion to the merits of the European Union, and you and I want to set up a group.

Mr Carswell: Let us not live in a fantasy world.

Q134 Mr Buckland: I am giving you a hypothesis. It could equally be that I have a damascene conversion and I came over to your way of thinking, and we set up a group that is designed to promote membership of the European Union. We do not have to do that formally. You and I could set up a group and invite other colleagues to come into rooms like this to meet informally. That is right, is it not? But it means that however carefully crafted the rules of transparency we may like to create, we can get round them.

Mr Carswell: That is fine. I hope that we sit down at lunch in the tearoom and you and I will have an informal chat. We always do. I meet Chris Chope and other colleagues on a regular basis and we talk about all sorts of issues. You cannot possibly regulate that. The issue here, I think, is to ensure that outside corporate interests that are trying to be seen to be at the centre of things are not able to use All-Party Parliamentary Groups as part of their client pitch. I think that that is the problem. I think it is fantastic that MPs associate, talk and chat informally. I think that is great.

I think the issue here is we are told that the secretariat has to be provided by some well meaning, benevolent organisation that happens to be funded by the defence contractors. I am sorry, but I do not think that that is acceptable. I think we need to draw a line and say, "No. If MPs feel so strongly about this that they want to have a group that formally meets on a crossparty basis to discuss these issues, they can jolly well provide the secretariat themselves." I do not think that that is too much to ask.

Q135 Chair: Are you saying, Douglas, that they should be an All-Party Group or not? Of course, if they were not an All-Party Group, they would not be covered by the rules on All-Party Groups.

Mr Carswell: I am strongly in favour of All-Party Groups; I am just not in favour of lobbyists using them as a vehicle for-

Q136 Chair: If MPs were to gather on a subject matter, should that only be under the guise-

Mr Carswell: No, that would be ridiculous.

Q137 Sir Nick Harvey: We have already heard that groups undertake completely differing ranges of activities; therefore, the running costs between groups would vary enormously. Are you suggesting, with your standard fee that you have to pay to join any of them, regardless of the intended activity levels, that it is not exactly a fine but a regulatory device?

Mr Carswell: If you could do it for less, fantastic. I am very against blanket rules. It was just a way of making a point. If you could do it for £300 each, rather than £1,000 each, so much the better. I strongly suspect that, with a lot of these organisations-and let us be blunt-as Members of Parliament we also have a large sum of money to employ researchers. I am quite sure that, if you ran one of these groups, in a lot of cases, where their workload was not particularly strenuous, your existing researcher could probably do it one day a week or one day a month. The point I am trying to make, however, is that we are well resourced with staff budgets and we should not be relying on outside interests to provide the secretariat and then run the group in their interest.

Q138 Chair: Some of the areas that we are looking at and on which we, as the Committee on Standards and Privileges, have agreed, are reducing the threshold for registering benefits requiring groups receiving more than £3,000 per annum to prepare financial statements, abolishing Associate All-Party Groups and requiring All-Party Group reports to be clear that they are not Committee reports-in other words, not a House of Commons or a Joint Committee of both Houses report. What more do you think we should be doing?

Mr Carswell: Transparency with accounts is good. Generally, if you run an organisation, you have an AGM and you publish your accounts and your minutes. I think that that is a good thing, but we should get away from this idea that, because we have a problem, the answer to it is more regulation.

Q139 Chair: I agree entirely with that, and this Committee would as well, but that is another story. We have what we have. Alexandra, is there anything more than those three headlines that we should be looking at?

Alexandra Runswick: I agree with the headlines. The only thing that I think you should consider, when you are scrapping the Associate Parliamentary Group status, which I do not disagree with, is whether or not, if a group has an organisation-a charity or a lobbying company-providing an external secretariat or a financial support, they should have to be formally part of the group, although non-voting, so that it is clear to members participating in that group who is involved and what the interests are.

Chair: I think we have that onboard.

Q140 Sharon Darcy: Douglas, I notice that some of the groups that you are involved with have formal secretariats from the outside, and some do not. Can you tell us a little bit about how you ensure that the groups that you are a member of act in a way that demonstrates propriety and that they are not being sidelined by interests?

Mr Carswell: That is a very relevant point. I was at the inaugural meeting of the AllParty Parliamentary Group for an EU Referendum. I will not tell you which side of the argument I was on, but it was a very fiercely contested point as to whether the secretariat should be provided by a charity that has been campaigning on these issues. The People’s Pledge is a totally legitimate organisation, but there was a strong feeling in the room that said, "Hang on, we are members of the legislature. It is our group. Surely, we should be able to do the secretariat." I do not win every battle, and I am not able to take every colleague on every issue, but I take a very close interest to make sure that any secretariat work reflects what I think are not the views of an outside organisation, and that it is very much MPs in the driving seat. I take personal responsibility to try to make sure that that happens.

Parliament First is run by Mr Meacher, and I think the secretariat is him, basically. For a lot of the work, you do not need big outside organisations. There are one or two groups that I am not and have not been involved with because I feel that I would be putting my name to a lobbyist’s front organisation. I would feel a lot more able to get involved in certain organisations if they were run by MPs, for MPs, accountable to each other, but they are not.

Q141 Sharon Darcy: How do you assure yourself that the agenda that the group is looking at really has been set by the members, who are the officers of the committee?

Mr Carswell: I meet and talk to John Baron regularly about the EU referendum. I work very closely with fellow advocates of an in/out referendum in all parties.

Q142 Mr Chope: On that example, do you think that the EU referendum campaign has been successful because of this All-Party Parliamentary Group, or do you think it would have been just as successful without it?

Mr Carswell: I think it has been largely successful because of the internet and the People’s Pledge. The advent of the internet has woken members of the legislature up to the voters in a way that they were not always aware, particularly in non-marginal seats. I think the People’s Pledge has been phenomenally successful in mobilising opinion. This Friday, we are all supposed to be voting in favour of the referendum-or some of us. However, 18 months ago, when some of us organised a similar vote, I managed to persuade only 81 colleagues to vote for an in/out referendum. One of the reasons why so many were prepared to defy a three-line whip on that issue was, I think, because of the People’s Pledge and its success in mobilising grassroots opinion locally. In a way, the All-Party Parliamentary Group is a symptom of the campaign’s success, rather than a cause of it. It is good to celebrate.

Q143 Mr Buckland: I have already asked the question about how, potentially, MPs can get round the rules, but could I just clarify that in this way? I have declared that I was involved in an informal group of MPs who prepared a report about reform of the law on stalking, with the involvement of the National Association of Probation Officers. What is to stop a similar group of MPs, perhaps with more sinister motives, from getting together, avoiding any rules on All-Party Groups and getting money from goodness knows who, to produce a report that they will then hold up as some sort of document of authority produced by parliamentarians in Parliament?

Mr Carswell: There is absolutely nothing to stop you, me and a group of colleagues trotting over to a think-tank in Westminster this afternoon, coming up with a report and publishing it, but we cannot call it the All-Party Parliamentary Group; it would not have that stamp of authority. I think having the word "Parliament" in the title should mean something. I think being a Parliamentary Group should carry weight and gravitas. Having the portcullis logo once meant something. I think we should restore gravitas, purpose and meaning to Parliament. If you call yourself an All-Party Parliamentary Group, it should be a badge that says something. I think we have devalued the meaning by allowing too many vested interests to run Parliamentary Groups as, basically, their front organisations.

Q144 Peter Jinman: I am intrigued by the language that we are using here. I noted in your comment there that there is a "stamp of authority" by saying it was a report from an All-Party Group. By the very nature of that language, it implies it has a probity and a standing that one would expect. Indeed, I note that, last week, there was a debate in Westminster Hall on the back of one of the All-Party Group reports, which the Minister stood up and replied to. It does have a sense of probity and standing. I notice that the word for "pressure group" you are accepting is "lobby group". I have been writing down, as I was listening to various comments here, that we have "campaigning groups", "advocacy groups", "think-tank outputs", "pressure groups", "lobby groups" and "promotional groups". I am beginning to feel that this is a thesaurus around the word "lobby". How does that fit with the All-Party Group, and how are we going to avoid it, or should we just accept that language as being part of the same entity?

Alexandra Runswick: I think the language point is a difficult one. In terms of the campaigning that we do in calling for a lobbying register, we have focused very deliberately on the lobbying activity, rather than specifically the organisation doing it, because we are interested in capturing that activity. I completely agree with you that think-tanks, campaigning groups and pressure groups can lobby; the distinction is often whether or not you are doing it through mass mobilisation of public opinion, through getting individuals to write to their MPs, or through the publication of reports. It is, however, still lobbying. You are right that we need to be aware of that spectrum of activity, but regulating All-Party Groups is not the be all and end all of lobbying in Parliament; it is one very specific element of it.

Mr Carswell: When I first came here in 2005, I think broadband was only just taking off. There was a clear distinction between a think-tank and a single-issue pressure group. In many ways, the boundaries between these distinctions are blurring. Is the TaxPayers’ Alliance a think-tank or a pressure group? I would say that, the way I see it in my inbox, 38 Degrees is a campaign organisation, but it does some sort of thinking. You could say it is partly a think-tank, too. It is a grassroots think-tank, but a think-tank nonetheless. The internet is refining the distinctions that we had in our A-level books about these organisations. This is where I think it is so important that being part of an All-Party Parliamentary Group should be something special. It should mean something. In the hubbub and noise that is the world of social media, having the words "Parliamentary Group" should carry weight. It carries a bit of weight, but it would carry a lot more if we were not quite so willing to let outside vested interests expropriate the name for their own purposes.

Chair: Could I thank you both very much indeed for coming along and helping us with this inquiry?

Mr Carswell: Thank you.

Alexandra Runswick: Thanks.

Examination of Witness

Witness: Ann Coffey MP, Member of Parliament for Stockport, gave evidence.

Q145 Chair: Good morning, Ann. Could I just ask you, for the sake of the record, to introduce yourself and the position you hold?

Ann Coffey: My name is Ann Coffey. I am the Member of Parliament for Stockport.

Q146 Chair: You are also a member of 10 All-Party Groups, co-vice chair of three of them and chair of two.

Ann Coffey: Three. I am co-chair of one and chair of the other two.

Q147 Chair: There you are; we have that wrong. Why did you get involved with so many and what value do you think All-Party Groups bring to Parliament?

Ann Coffey: I think part of it is the interests I took into Parliament. Before I was elected as a Member of Parliament, I was a social worker working with children and families, so that remained an area of interest for myself in Parliament as a Back-Bench MP. That led me to being interested in joining groups, which were to do with social care. The other thing that I came to Parliament with was probably a strong interest in street markets, because Stockport is a town whose town centre is changing. I represent the town centre in Stockport, in which a strong traditional market and retail is very important for us. That is how I became involved with the Retail and Market groups. It is very much pursuing interests as part of my job as a constituency MP and my particular interests.

Q148 Chair: Did you think that there were any other areas in terms of your professional experience as a social worker, such as a House of Commons Select Committee? Did you pursue that?

Ann Coffey: I was elected in 1992. As you will remember, Chairman, the way of appointing Members to Select Committees was, indeed, very different in those days. I was a member of the Trade and Industry Select Committee for a while. I cannot remember how long-a couple of years.

Q149 Chair: In a sense, taking your previous experience into All-Party Group work was doing something that you had experience and professional interest in. Was that it?

Ann Coffey: I think that is true. Also, there is another aspect to it, which is that the formal process of Parliament is often very much divided-except, perhaps, in Select Committees-along party lines. If you take part in debates, they are often done along party lines. Select Committees offer an opportunity for cross-party working. All-Party Groups do, too, because, in a sense, some of that very strict division between party lines is taken out, which enables you to work with Ministers, whatever the nature of the Government is. It gives a kind of continuity in trying to progress issues that are of particular interest.

Q150 Chair: That seems to suggest that Select Committees are probably quite restricted in the work that they can do in terms of time, or is that not the case?

Ann Coffey: They are a very formal process and a very formal part of Parliament. With an APPG, you can be much more flexible in taking up and looking at issues, I think.

Q151 Walter Rader: Some of the groups that you are associated with have support from external bodies or organisations.

Ann Coffey: They do, yes.

Q152 Walter Rader: Has that or does that present any challenges or difficulties that you have experienced?

Ann Coffey: I do not think so. At the beginning of the year, for the AGMs of the three APPGs that I am chair or co-chair of, we sit down and work out what we want to do in our programme of events. One of the things we are very conscious of is trying to reflect the interests of Members of Parliament because, at the end of the day, they are their groups. We will sit down and try to think of things that we can do-roundtable discussions or meetings that have interested them-and I think it is very much along the lines of understanding that the groups that provide the secretariat to the All-Party Groups have a particular agenda. There are, obviously, particular things that they want done, but there are particular things that we want done, and we want that to be a cooperative effort that is very much to do with how we can attract more Members of Parliament into that group and into being active in it.

Q153 Walter Rader: Are you suggesting that the views of both the elected Members and the external support organisations find a common ground in determining the business for the following year?

Ann Coffey: What the groups outside provide is an expertise and knowledge that I do not necessarily have; for example, on the All-Party Group on Missing Children, there are a plethora of organisations, intertwining with each other, which have interests in that. We have had a wide range of people come to our committee from the police and children’s charities. They have that kind of knowledge that I do not necessarily have, and it is through putting that knowledge of what is happening out there together with the interests that we may have that we come to an agenda that is meaningful in the sense of discussing the issues, both for them and for us.

Q154 Walter Rader: Is there a danger that those vital-I am hearing you say-external opinions could move across some sort of invisible line to overtly influence the work of the group?

Ann Coffey: It is a very fluid situation. As a Member of Parliament, every day of my life I am subject to lobbying. That is my job, in a sense: soaking up people’s opinions and finding a pathway through that, both as a constituency MP and someone with particular interests. As chair of an All-Party Group, part of the job is doing that. It is not something that is entirely different.

Q155 Walter Rader: Finally, part of the support that comes for the Retail group is through the British Retail Consortium, for example, which seems to make eminent sense. That does not present elected Members with any challenges or difficulties, if I understand you correctly, in being overtly influenced by that retail consortium.

Ann Coffey: We understand, as Members of Parliament, that they have an agenda as the British Retail Consortium. They have points of view that they wish to express; but equally, we understand that town centres are very important to Members of Parliament, who are very concerned about town centres. For example, next year, what we want to be doing is looking at the impact of the internet on town centres, and we would expect them to provide their knowledge, as retailers, knowing something about the market that we do not, and to make some contribution to that, so that we as Members of Parliament can better understand what is happening in retail and its impacts on our high streets.

Q156 Chair: Have you ever felt uncomfortable about some of these relationships with businesses that run the secretariat?

Ann Coffey: Not really. I would feel uncomfortable if I felt that they were making me do something I did not want to do, but they have no influence over me in that sense.

Q157 Chair: Have you had the debate?

Ann Coffey: We have had a debate when drawing up a programme about what we want to see. As I said, however, I feel very strongly that All-Party Groups are for Members of Parliament and, therefore, it is the Members of Parliament who should be saying what events and meetings should be taking place. As a Member of Parliament, I have no problem with people disagreeing with me. Over my lifetime, I have had lots of people disagreeing with me, and I have disagreed with them, but I am always very clear what I want doing.

Q158 Mr Chope: In this session of Parliament, we have the Children and Families Bill going through the House-the first time there has been legislation on that for many years and likely to be followed by legislation many years hence, so a really big opportunity. You are a member of the Adoption and Fostering, Child Protection, and the Looked After Children and Care Leavers groups. Can you tell us what influence you think those three groups had, if any, on the content of this legislation?

Ann Coffey: I do not know because I did not sit on the Bill. I spoke in the second reading, and, like other Members of Parliament, I got a lot of briefings from those groups. When Bills go through, we do, indeed, get a lot of briefings from interested groups. On the Second Reading of the Bill, I spoke about child witnesses, which is something that I do not think any of the groups that I am involved in have been particularly focussing on. I think I also spoke on fostering, but I was perhaps quite influenced on that through Paul Goggins, a colleague of mine who had taken a particular interest in it but was away at the time, so asked if I would move the amendment in his place, which I was quite happy to do.

Q159 Mr Chope: Would it be fair to say that, basically, this Bill has progressed with individual Members lobbying and speaking, but it has not really been altered in any way as a result of the activities of All-Party Parliamentary Groups?

Ann Coffey: It is very difficult, isn’t it? I do think as well that, probably, children’s charities have access to Ministers. A lot of these groups have access to the decision-makers in Whitehall, whether they are officials or Ministers in their own right. It is quite right that, when a Bill goes through this place, opinions of those outside are fed into that process, however that may be. I am sure that those groups that are members of our All-Party Group probably had access to making their views felt, but I am not sure that I could say that, as an All-Party Group, I do not recognise any direct relationship between our activities and the progress of the Bill.

Q160 Mr Chope: The outside organisations that you have referred to would have been lobbying the Government directly in order to try to change the legislation.

Ann Coffey: Yes, of course.

Q161 Mr Chope: Does that not show that the All-Party Parliamentary Groups are pretty innocuous in relation to lobbying?

Ann Coffey: What is effective lobbying? I do not know. Everybody feels that they have had some influence in changing something in this place, I think-whether or not that is true, I am not quite sure. If I go back to one of the groups, we did an all-party report last year on missing children from care. It was published on 18 June and it was quite a big inquiry. We also did one way before. It was very much parallel to what you would do as a Select Committee. The Government accepted all the recommendations in it, because the report was conducted when there was a lot of concern about children missing from care and child sexual exploitation. In that way, I think our party group had an influence.

Q162 Mr Chope: Who paid for that particular report?

Ann Coffey: The report was prepared by the Children’s Society, which is the secretariat to our group.

Q163 Mr Chope: They effectively funded it.

Ann Coffey: They paid for the report and inquiry, yes.

Q164 Chair: You may have heard me earlier asking previous witnesses about areas that we are likely to be covering, such as recommending reducing the threshold for registering benefits, requiring groups receiving more than about £3,000 per annum to prepare financial statements, abolishing Associate All-Party Groups and requiring All-Party Group reports to make it clear that they are not Committee reports-therefore, effectively, Committees of the House. Would any of these cause you difficulty?

Ann Coffey: I do not think so. Lobbying is part of the parliamentary process, and it is right that people from outside feel that they can contribute to the democratic decisions that are made. It is the strength of democracy. However, what you have to have is some kind of transparency. It has to be transparent in terms of how that process is taking place. When it is not transparent and money comes into it, you get into a very difficult area for Parliament. At the end of the day, it is to do with perhaps the standards that Members of Parliament themselves apply, and I am not sure that you can substitute any rules or regulation to ensure that people behave with integrity. At the end of the day, the final things that happen on any All-Party Group should be the responsibility of the members of that group, and they have to take responsibility for it.

Q165 Chair: We took evidence last week from one of the charities that helps the secretariat of one your All-Party Groups, and I asked a question, and I will ask you it now: would you feel uncomfortable asking these charities, not necessarily how much, but within a band, the costs of the secretariat of an All-Party Group are? Would you feel uncomfortable in doing that?

Ann Coffey: Not at all.

Q166 Chair: Being an All-Party Group on the register presumably gives a level of standing to a group. At what stage would you feel the registration requirements were so onerous that they outweighed the advantage of having one? Do you foresee that at all?

Ann Coffey: If Members of Parliament want to have an All-Party Group, they will work hard at making sure that that All-Party Group works. I think it depends on how you want to approach it, as to whether to encourage All-Party Groups or whether to discourage them. That is maybe what Parliament has to make up its mind about. That is a different issue from making sure that, once those groups are established, they act in a transparent manner and people can see what they are for, who is supporting them, the cost of them, and the activities that they perform.

Q167 Dr Whitehead: When you have a number of groups and a number of functions and meetings in the House, which involve a lot of people who are not parliamentarians-quite often, not many parliamentarians are there, and all the other people present are not parliamentarians-is that interaction between non-parliamentarians and parliamentarians in general a positive function of an All-Party Group, in your view, or do you think that sort of association perhaps needs greater regulation?

Ann Coffey: I think people outside see it as a very positive aspect of Parliament: being able to come into Parliament and being able to come to a meeting where they believe the decision-makers make decisions makes Parliament more real and more accessible to them. I think that is very important. Because we work every day in this place, sometimes we lose a sense of how it feels to other people outside, and I think that is very important. It goes back almost to the argument about EDMs. I am always surprised about the value that people place on a signature on an early-day motion, but to them it is really important because they have written to their Member of Parliament and they feel that, somehow, they have done their bit for a cause that they feel strongly about.

Often, we have a tendency to look at democracy through our eyes, as an institution, instead of perhaps also bearing in mind how people out there view us and thinking about how we can improve their connection with us. That also adds to the strength of democracy, and I just feel very strongly that All-Party Groups do provide that place for people to be; that they feel they have been here and talked. Where else can you get an opportunity whereby a Minister will come somewhere and somebody can come into a meeting and ask that Minister a question? That often happens in All-Party Parliamentary Groups. That is a tremendous strength for democracy, as is the fact that Ministers are willing to come to All-Party Groups. It is sometimes very difficult to see Ministers. It is a huge benefit.

Q168 Dr Whitehead: You and I, for example, could decide that we were particularly interested in something or other and could invite a lot of our friends to a meeting that we had booked in a room in the House. It would look very like an All-Party Group meeting, but it would not be. We could continue to do that for ever. Is that something that should quite happily run in parallel with the All-Party Group meetings, or do you think perhaps that type of informal parallel group, which on some occasions occurs where perhaps a group interest would be more party-orientated, for example, is something that needs any form of regulation?

Ann Coffey: Do you mean Members of Parliament meeting each other in a group to pursue nefarious purposes?

Dr Whitehead: Indeed, yes.

Ann Coffey: I thought they had always done that.

Q169 Dr Whitehead: Indeed, yes, and quite often for nefarious purposes-this is true. I was particularly thinking about the distinction between a registered All-Party Group, which may involve members of the public or members of the constituent supporting bodies of that group coming into fairly regular meetings, and Members who might appear to be subverting the transparency and regulation process by setting up what looks like a group, having lots of members of the public in to regular meetings, booking facilities at a cost to the House to do that, and therefore running what is an All-Party Group; only it is not an All-Party Group, thereby evading, you might perceive to be the case, any form of transparency and regulation. You have mentioned how importantly the public takes the process on occasions in a way that perhaps parliamentarians might not perceive in the same way, but is it the cachet of an All-Party Group that is important in terms of the transparency, or is it the process itself that is perhaps important?

Ann Coffey: I take the point that was made earlier that it should mean something-if you are going to have an All-Party Parliamentary Group, it should mean something. If it is going to mean something, it should meet standards in terms of registration and transparency. I think this should happen with All-Party Groups. I do not know how you stop, or if you should stop, Members of Parliament meeting each other, having people in from outside, meeting members of other parties and getting together as Back Benchers to undermine their respective Governments. I do not know quite how you stop them doing that. I think that is just part of it, really, provided they abide by the rules of the House. That is just part of a day in the life of a politician, is it not?

Q170 Sharon Darcy: I am one of the new Lay Members of the Committee, and I am particularly struck by what you say about opening up Parliament and enabling the public to see how things work. One of the concerns that various people have expressed to us is the number of All-Party Groups that exist. I think you were in the room when Douglas Carswell came up with an unusual suggestion to limit the number of groups by proposing that MPs wanting to set up a group should use a proportion of their own staff allowances to fund that group. I wondered what your view was of that suggestion.

Ann Coffey: I think that is quite difficult, really, in terms of resources and time, because we do other things as Members of Parliament. I need my research staff to look at what has been tabled in Hansard and to keep up with written questions-a whole plethora of activities. I would not like them to have to choose between servicing an All-Party Group and doing the other things that I need to do, because I also need staff in my constituency office.

Q171 Sharon Darcy: I think his suggestion was that you would choose to put a percentage of your budget towards it, so it would mean that, in effect, you had some choice.

Ann Coffey: I am not sure how that would improve the situation or otherwise in terms of the role of APPGs or transparency. I understand what he was saying, because he was seeing it as a lever of making sure that people only set up groups that they were actively interested in, and therefore putting something aside would be an expression of that interest. It goes back, however, to what I was saying before: it depends on whether you believe that APPGs are an important aspect of Parliament and, therefore, the idea is to make sure that they are there, or whether you believe that they are not and you put up barriers to them happening. Clearly, if you did that, it would act as a barrier, I think, because most Members of Parliament, faced with those choices, would probably put money into their constituency offices or research activities in Parliament to support them in their other work.

Q172 Sharon Darcy: You do not, then, take his argument that, for subjects that people were particularly passionate and concerned about, it is something that they would be willing to fund and, therefore, they would make a more important contribution.

Ann Coffey: I fund subjects that I am passionately interested in anyway, through paying a researcher to help me look at what has been tabled in terms of written or oral questions and to help me prepare speeches, so I do that anyway. In a sense, I put my money into what I am interested in, albeit through my supporting work as a Member of Parliament. It is just that, if I had to do that, I would be taking research time out of that and putting it specifically into managing an APPG. I might make the decision that I would not want to do that, but to continue to use the research time to help me make speeches and ask written and oral questions-all the things that I do as a Member of Parliament. I would not think that that is a very good choice to be faced with, because it is not an either/or. The interests of Members of Parliament who are interested in All-Party Groups are usually reflected in their other activities in Parliament, too.

Q173 Peter Jinman: I am another of the Lay Members, and learning. It is magicwand time: what would you see as the best way to increase public understanding and confidence in APGs? You have the opportunity now to change the rules. What would you like to see and how do we do it?

Ann Coffey: There are very different APPGs. They do very different things and they are involved in different areas of interest. I just think that, if we are going to help people feel more involved in Parliament, we should find better ways of advertising what the APPGs do. One of the suggestions I would have-and there is probably no money for it-is for there to be a link on the parliamentary website to an APPG site, which gave details of the groups, what they are doing, what has been happening, with minutes provided by the groups, so that there is really a sense of what they are doing. Part of the problem at the moment is that there is not very clear communication from that part of Parliament’s work to the public, although we have a very good website where people can access all sorts of things, but not necessarily as much information as I would like about APPGs. I think that might help with public participation and involvement, and having someone to write to in Parliament. They could write to the APPG if they had particular things they wanted to raise, or something like that, or any particular experiences they wanted to bring.

Q174 Peter Jinman: You are, then, suggesting that this would become a route into the parliamentary process-that the APPG would, in fact, be a portal for the public.

Ann Coffey: I do not see why it should not. It is a portal for the public at the moment, for those who physically attend the meetings, but it is not open to everybody, because Parliament is in London and most people do not have that access. We have a parliamentary website to give a portal to the public; I do not see any reason why there should not be a link on that to the work of properly constituted and registered All-Party Parliamentary Groups.

Q175 Peter Jinman: There are just a couple of other items I would like to pick up with you, because you are a chair, and I think it is quite an interesting position. You are the responsible person, presumably, as laid down in the rules; therefore, if somebody transgresses, how do you deal with it? Under the rules, you are the responsible person.

Ann Coffey: I do not think the word is "transgress"; it is probably to do with making sure that people are not attempting to use the group to pursue their particular agenda. It would be a question of having a conversation with them around, "We do not really want to do that. What we are interested in is this." I think that is the sort of thing that would happen.

Q176 Peter Jinman: It is not a problem in your experience.

Ann Coffey: It is not a problem in my experience because, when we have had disagreements within groups about where we should go, I think the views of the MPs have prevailed, because, at the end of the day, it is the group for Members of Parliament; therefore, our views should prevail.

Q177 Peter Jinman: Do you think the same would apply with Associate All-Party Groups, or would you see the demise of the Associate Groups.

Ann Coffey: I have absolutely no idea about the Associate Groups. I have never been a member of one. Even I do not quite understand the distinction.

Q178 Peter Jinman: Thank you. That is quite an interesting admission in itself. One final point, if I may: the All-Party Groups do have the opportunity for meeting in the other House and having members working with it. What do you see as the value in that?

Ann Coffey: One of the children’s groups that I am a member of is chaired by a peer. Again, it is to do with the ability to bring the expertise of Members of both Houses together, which I think can be very valuable. It is to do with being inclusive, not exclusive. In the Looked After Children group there is a peer who took part in our joint inquiry, which was very interesting, because again it was something that he was interested in and that was why he was a member of the group. It just gave it an extra depth.

Q179 Chair: I am quite interested in your comment that we should be advertising what All-Party Groups do. The first witness we had in this inquiry was Mark D’Arcy, a BBC correspondent, who suggested that, if he saw the All-Party Notice, he would be knowledgeable about All-Party Groups. Do you think we ought to release it to the media?

Ann Coffey: I do not see why not. They could probably get it under Freedom of Information anyway.

Chair: I do not know if they have tried that.

Ann Coffey: The All-Party Notice is not terribly edifying and, I think, belongs to a bygone age. It tells you very little. We should be looking at ways of perhaps modernising that particular form of communication.

Q180 Chair: As well as talking about All-Party Groups as opposed to overseas and inward delegations, etc.

Ann Coffey: Yes, I think so.

Chair: Ann, could I thank you very much indeed for your evidence this morning, and thanks very much for coming along.

Ann Coffey: Thank you.