European lobbying rules: more transparent but not perfect

The European Parliament in Brussels is teeming with lobbyists. The best guess is that there are around 20,000 of them – competing to protect and advance the interests of industries, charities and unions. It’s big business.

They spend around 3bn euros a year winning friends and influencing people.

The lobbyist’s aim is to change legislation and their best friend is the MEP. Unlike MPs, MEPs can directly table amendments to draft laws. So they’re very powerful. Sometimes lobbyists even write amendments and simply hand them to MEPs – who table them word for word.

There are no rules against that. But there have been lobbying scandals in Brussels.

An Austrian ex-MEP Ernst Stasser went to jail in January for taking bribes, after he was caught in a sting by journalists posing as lobbyists. He was secretly filmed being offered 100,000 euros a year in exchange for influencing EU legislation.

Transparency Register

So Brussels is thinking about tightening up the rules on lobbying.

It has a voluntary online database of lobbyists, called the Transparency Register.

If you type tobacco giant Philip Morris International into the register, you can see it declares it has nine registered lobbyists working in Brussels – and that it spends between £1-1.25m a year lobbying parliament there.

But people worried about the scale of lobbying in Brussels complain the Transparency Register doesn’t tell the whole story: it’s not mandatory so hundreds of lobbyists simply choose not to divulge any information about themselves. Even when they do, there’s no information on there about who they’ve lobbied – i.e. which MEPs.

Confidentiality

Many clients who want privacy use a law firm to do their lobbying for them. And law firms seldom put any information on the Transparency Register, citing client confidentiality.

The transparency in Brussels might be imperfect. But it’s more than currently exists in Westminster. Here, as we know, there is no register of lobbyists – although a bill to introduce one may be imminent.

But the lesson from Brussels is that a register of lobbyists alone still leaves unanswered questions. If Lynton Crosby registered on a new UK register, we still wouldn’t know who he’d lobbied.

Read more: Lynton Crosby has never lobbied me on anything, says Cameron