No 10 should bring in new fines for ex-ministers who break the rules on lobbying in time for Rishi Sunak’s next reshuffle and tighten restrictions on former civil servants, the government watchdog has said.
Eric Pickles, the head of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba), said it should be possible to draw up new rules in time for the autumn – a time when prime ministers typically shake up their top teams.
The Acoba chief has long been calling for penalties on ex-ministers and top officials who flout restrictions imposed by his committee, which are designed to prevent those with insider information from engaging in lobbying.
However, there have been a string of cases where former politicians have ignored its advice with no consequences, leading to Pickles describing his own body as “toothless”.
The government said on Friday it would strengthen the ethics regime to make ministers and senior civil servants sign undertakings that they would abide by Acoba’s rules and impose penalties for those who ignore the restrictions.
Speaking to the Guardian, Pickles welcome the reforms but cautioned against any delay, saying it should be possible to have measures in place by the time Sunak makes his next set of government appointments.
“I have strong views that the whole thing cannot work unless you have financial penalties but it shouldn’t be applied pettily. It should be for the really egregious and blatant cases and really clobber people,” he said. “I’m hoping to be part of putting that together. We are in a better place and I think this going to be better for public life.”
Pickles said it was “possible” to get it in place before the next reshuffle, which many think will take place in the autumn, and the civil service “have an obligation to do so because if they don’t it embarrasses the prime minister for not backing his statement”.
“You make it personal, when you sign something it becomes personal and not general,” he said. “I’m relatively, cautiously optimistic about this. I feel at last we are moving beyond a promise to do some improved training. But like most things, everything has to start at the top.”
Pickles also called for his committee to have oversight of jobs taken by civil servants who used to work in commercial, procurement or regulatory roles, warning that it is threatening to become “the next big lobbying scandal” as utility, water and media companies poach those who used to oversee their sectors in government. Acoba currently monitors job taken on by the very top tier of civil servants, but departments are left to oversee appointments in the vast majority of cases, often imposing no conditions at all.
The Conservative peer and former cabinet minister said it was a “fire bell in the night” moment and the government should listen to warnings that such appointments are happening with little to no oversight.
“We don’t need to do it for everyone but we do need to do it for everyone involved commercially including procurement and regulation. That isn’t such a big task. It’s hundreds rather than 30,000,” he said.
He said that in one case he had come across, an ex-minister applied for a job working for a firm set up by a member of his former private office in the sector they had both overseen in government. “I rang the department to ask what conditions had been laid down and they had laid down nothing, they’d not given it a second thought,” he said.
The Observer revealed last month that two-thirds of England’s biggest water companies employed as key executives people who had previously worked at the watchdog tasked with regulating them.
Its analysis found 27 former Ofwat directors, managers and consultants working in the industry, about half of them in senior posts. It highlighted the case of Cathryn Ross, the new interim joint chief executive of Thames Water, who is a former head of Ofwat.
In response, Ofwat said civil servants were subject to rules on “independence, propriety and probity as part of our code of conduct”, while water companies said all their employees who previously worked in the public sector complied with relevant appointment rules.
Acoba recently reprimanded Boris Johnson for notifying the committee only half an hour before an announcement that he would have a newspaper column in the Daily Mail. But Pickles said this type of job – writing for media and making television appearances – was not his main concern.
Under the overhaul of the rules, there will be a lighter touch towards regulating unpaid positions and possibly media hirings as well.
