Ed Vaizey and lobby groups

News today from Who’s Lobbying demonstrates the benefits of a welcome commitment to transparency from the new administration. The site, by trawling and scraping PDFs and other documents, has assembled lobbying information from across government and published it for anyone to view in one easy place.

More concerning is their conclusion that Ed Vaizey is the “most lobbied minister” in the UK in the period May-Dec 2010. This is, we think, in large part because Ed Vaizey likes to meet large numbers of people at once, in ‘round table’ meetings. Not a bad thing in itself, but very disappointing that no meeting with any consumer or rights group took place in that time. Those views were effectively excluded from these discussions.

In March, ORG, Which? and Consumer Focus attended a round table organised by Ed Vaizey on net neutrality. This was the first formal meeting any of us had been given, as far as we can ascertain. We found it useful: and we hope Ed found our input useful too.

Nevertheless, copyright groups, publishers and others clearly have throughout this period been discussing policies including website blocking, default blocks on adult sites and the “progress” of the Digital Economy Act. It may be that his officials are advising that consumer and rights groups are not needed at the start of such discussions; and if so, we beg to differ.

The government is committed to a “Big Society” in which civil society plays an active part; it is committed to transparency; and ministers no doubt also wish to avoid the mistakes of the recent past.

Julian Huppert recently wrote about the problems this or any government may have with digital policy. We agree that digital policy is complicated and requires balances to be struck, which is why we urge Ed Vaizey to make sure that he regularly listens to the views of citizen, consumer and rights organizations.