Yesterday the House of Commons held a debate about lobbying in an attempt to make the process more transparent and accountable. This mornings blog offers an example of how difficult it will be for the Government to carry through on these proposals without making major changes to some long standing traditions. I wrote previously about the Bilderberg Association, a charity which counts amongst its three Trustees Ken Clarke, at one time the most senior lawyer in the UK, someone who should know how to run a charity! As I reported Mr Clarke admitted in Parliament a few weeks ago that although he has been a Trustee for some time, he had only discovered this recently and he has never attended a Trustees meeting. By implication he has no knowledge of the decisions that the charity has ever taken, even though that is a core functions of all charity Trustee.

The work of the Bilderberg Association which got its name from the Hotel in which the first meeting took place has just become a headline for the residents of Hertfordshire. The main role of this charity is to organise International meetings and the organisers decided to hold this years event in Watford. It has now been disclosed how much this years event has actually cost, or at least the Policing elements of it. According to this report the exclusive conference cost around £1.3M to police and the Hertfordshire PCC claims that this is £300,000 more than the £1M which was anticipated. He suggests that the £1M was budgeted for and this would have been cost neutral, which presumably means that the organisers or their 120 – 150 guests paid £1M for the Policing of their two day conference. The total policing cost equates to around £10,000 per guest on top of all of the other costs for a 24 hour networking event. Not wanting any of the burden to fall onto local residents, the PCC is understandably asking the Home Office to find the additional £300,000. Either way it appears that UK residents will pay a significant sum for this meeting, despite the suggestion that the meeting was of no interest to Parliament, let alone you and I.

The conference has a helpful website which explains what takes place at these events as well as who attends. It explains in the notes for the meeting this year that “Bilderberg was founded in 1954 to be an annual conference designed to foster dialogue between Europe and North America.  Every year, between 120-150 political leaders and experts from industry, finance, academia and the media are invited to take part in the conference. About two thirds of the participants come from Europe and the rest from North America; one third from politics and government and the rest from other fields. The conference has always been a forum for informal, off-the-record discussions about megatrends and the major issues facing the world. Thanks to the private nature of the conference, the participants are not bound by the conventions of office or by pre-agreed positions. As such, they can take time to listen, reflect and gather insights. There is no detailed agenda, no resolutions are proposed, no votes are taken, and no policy statements are issued.”

The attendance list is available from the website and shows 21 British guests of whom five are currently Party Politicians plus a cross bencher from the Lords and Peter Mandelson. The other 14 guests are mostly from the world of business with a strong emphasis on banking and oil although there are two academics and two senior  journalists. As the text above makes clear, there will be no notes published so for 2 days senior people from Shell and BP along with HSBC and Barclays are able to meet with the PM and Chancellor, along with the shadow Chancellor to discuss whatever they wish. Next year Bilderberg will celebrate its 60th Anniversary and one can hope that this might be a trigger for some form of a review. One of the items from the agenda this year was the theme of “Jobs, entitlement and debt”. On the British guest list there are no names of people who have a professional or personal understanding of debt or entitlement in the context of the agenda item (no one would suggest David Cameron and George Osborne do not understand entitlement in another sense). Let us hope that at a public cost of £300,000 or more along with the commitment that David Cameron suggests he is making to be transparent, along with the failure of at least one high profile Trustee to be accountable for his actions might lead to a root an branch change to the way in which this group of people do their creative thinking!