All-party parliamentary groups may be informal, but they provide a great service in our democracy. In good hands, they can foster better relations with other countries, keep a weather eye on an authoritarian regime, or bring into sharp focus a policy issue that may otherwise have been forgotten.
In that vein, I set up the APPG on acquired brain injury, which produced a report with a list of recommendations after a series of round tables with patients, families and practitioners. Just before Christmas, that bore fruit in the shape of a government commitment to launch a new national strategy on the issue. So an APPG can make a big difference, and the vast majority are run simply and cheaply on the back of the enthusiasm of a few MPs and peers without any extra spending.
It’s also an important way of baking cross-party working into the system. No MP can launch their own APPG with the support of their party colleagues alone – they need support from across the benches.
But I worry that the number of APPGs has risen dramatically in the last few years. Instead of one cancer APPG, there are now more than a dozen.
Some industries are especially well-resourced, with every part of the supply chain and every trade body getting its own group. Some countries have more than one. We now have more APPGs than we do MPs. It sometimes feels as if every MP wants their own APPG, and every lobbying company sees them as an ideal way to make a quick buck out of a trade or industry body. “Look,” they say, “if you really want to get this on the agenda politically, we can get you access to MPs, peers and ministers – but the more financial support you give the APPG (through us, of course) the more effective the group will be.” Hence the rise in the number of APPGs that are serviced by lobbying, PR or communications companies.
There are several problems with this. For a start, nobody should be touting access or influence on behalf of an APPG. Second, the rules on what APPGs have to register are pretty clear, but until now this has virtually been a self-policing area of policy. The Commons authorities have neither the powers nor resources to investigate every APPG, and since we abolished the requirement to get permission to launch a new one, the only substantial requirement for an APPG to keep going is to hold an annual general meeting. Sometimes these are so poorly attended as to make one question whether they are really an APPG or just a personal campaign or money-making venture masquerading as a parliamentary affair.
I don’t think anyone is concerned when an APPG is supported by a charity. (The acquired brain injury APPG, incidentally, is supported by the UK ABI Forum.) But it may be time for us to ban commercial operators from acting as the secretariat for APPGs, unless they can prove a public interest and enough interest from a larger number of MPs and peers. When lobbying firms are effectively driving a group in the interests of their clients, we should not only know who those clients are, but we should be able to close down the group where there is a clear conflict of interest.
Which takes me to another point. The House of Commons and the Lords both have formal select committees covering all the government departments. Proceedings in these committees, and their publications, are covered by parliamentary privilege, which is an important aspect of ensuring MPs and peers can speak without fear or favour. It would be – and is – wrong for any APPG to give the impression that one of its reports or publications has a parliamentary imprimatur or seal of approval. Newspaper editors would be well advised to stop referring vaguely to “a committee of MPs” and to start drawing a clear distinction between the authorised, privileged work of a select committee and the unauthorised work of an APPG.
If you have evidence of something that doesn’t smell right in the way an APPG is run, the Committee on Standards on Public Life will run an inquiry into it. We can’t investigate individual groups, but we’d be happy to hear from you as background for our inquiry.
I certainly don’t want to curtail the work of APPGs so much that their valuable work comes to an end. They are a vital tool in many backbench MPs’ campaigning armoury. But if an APPG feels like front-of-house for a direct commercial interest or a cover for free trips to exotic locations, or if it’s the brainchild of a lobbying company, then MPs and peers should run a mile.
Chris Bryant is the Labour MP for Rhondda
