Disclosing lobbying activities

Sustained and systematic lobbying that targets Parliament and ministries must be reported to the Transparency Register. The disclosure of activities must be submitted twice a year. The lobbying activities carried out between January and June must be reported in July–August, and the lobbying activities carried out between July and December must be reported in January–February.

Which activities must be disclosed to the Transparency Register?

Disclosing the subject

The lobbying activities must be disclosed to the Transparency Register by subject.

You can describe the subject in a free-form manner or by referring to the project number.

The free-form description can have a length of between 50 and 600 characters. Describe the subject, project, legislation, budget or other similar matter targeted by the lobbying. The description should be short and clear and as accurate as possible. In other words, the subject of lobbying is any matter in which the organisation has carried out lobbying. Describe the subject as clearly as possible and do not use subjects that are too general in nature.

If the lobbying has targeted an official project you can refer to the project using the official Government project number [link], in which case no free-form description is required.

The Transparency Register is not a meeting journal, which means that you do not need to disclose when and how many times you have met a specific lobbying target.

For the subject, all lobbying targets and the contact methods used must be disclosed. Read more about lobbying targets.

Small-scale lobbying

Actors carrying out small-scale lobbying activities do not need to register in the Transparency Register. When the activities are no longer in small scale (comprise more than five contacts during a year) the actor must register in the Transparency Register.

In small-scale lobbying, there are no more than five contacts between an organisation and the lobbying targets during a calendar year.

The five contacts include all contacts made by the organisation with all lobbying targets. For example, a telephone conversation, a meeting or an email message is considered one contact. However, a contact, such as an email, may have more than one recipient in more than one organisation. It is nevertheless considered a single contact.

An organisation may already have registered in the Transparency Register and submitted disclosures of its lobbying activities. However, during a particular year, it may have no more than five contacts with lobbying targets, which means that during that year, its activities are in small scale. In such cases, the organisation only needs to state in its disclosure of activities submitted in July–August that its activities in the period January–June of that year were in small scale. However, in its disclosure of activities submitted in January–February, the organisation must also report these small-scale lobbying activities for the whole of the preceding calendar year. Read more about small-scale lobbying in sections 3–7 of the Questions and answers page.

Submitting the disclosure of activities

We will soon publish detailed instructions for submitting the disclosure of activities.