# Lobbying in Westminster: what the rules allow and what slips through > The statutory lobbying register captures only consultant lobbyists contacting ministers and permanent secretaries, leaving in-house lobbyists, APPG secretariats, secondments and the revolving door governed by disclosure regimes with little enforcement. *Section: Politics — By Sarah Mitchell — Published July 12, 2026 — 4 min read* Canonical URL: https://dailyjunction.org/politics/lobbying-in-westminster-what-the-rules-allow-and-what-slips-through Tags: lobbying, westminster, transparency, appgs, influence ## Key takeaways - The 2014 Lobbying Act registers only consultant lobbyists who directly contact ministers or permanent secretaries, so in-house lobbyists — the bulk of the industry — never appear on it. - All-party parliamentary groups give outside interests a parliamentary badge, with secretariats and foreign trips frequently funded by the very sectors the groups discuss. - ACOBA vets post-government jobs for ministers and senior officials but its rulings are advisory only, and no former minister has ever been sanctioned for ignoring them. Britain has a statutory lobbying register, which sounds reassuring until you read the statute. The Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 created a Register of Consultant Lobbyists, overseen by a registrar, and it covers exactly what its name says: consultant lobbyists. A public affairs agency paid by a client to contact government must register and name that client each quarter. An energy company, bank or tech platform employing its own government-relations team in-house registers nothing, because it lobbies on its own behalf rather than for a client. Most estimates put in-house lobbyists at well over three-quarters of the people working in the influence industry, which means the register was designed, from the first clause, to miss most of the activity it appears to govern. The definition narrows further. Registration is triggered only by communication with a minister or a permanent secretary — the top official in a department. Contact with a special adviser, a director-general, a bill team or the officials who actually draft the clauses falls outside it. The Greensill affair made the gap vivid: David Cameron sent dozens of texts and emails to ministers and senior officials on behalf of Greensill Capital, and none of it required registration, because he was an employee of the firm rather than a consultant. The register worked precisely as written and captured nothing. What fills the space around the statute is a patchwork of disclosure rather than regulation. Departments publish quarterly lists of ministerial meetings with external organisations, but months in arrears and with descriptions like "discussion of business environment" that convey almost nothing. MPs and peers record gifts, hospitality and paid interests in the registers of interests, enforced by the parliamentary commissioners for standards. The rule that an MP may not act as a paid advocate — initiating proceedings for the benefit of someone who pays them — does have teeth, as Owen Paterson discovered in 2021 when the Standards Committee found he had lobbied ministers and regulators on behalf of two companies paying him over £100,000 a year. His case triggered a botched government attempt to rewrite the disciplinary system, a U-turn within a day, and eventually his resignation. ## The APPG economy All-party parliamentary groups are where influence acquires a parliamentary letterhead. There are several hundred of them at any one time — the number has fluctuated around 700 — covering countries, industries, diseases and hobbies. An APPG is an informal cross-party club, not a select committee, yet its reports look official, its events happen on the estate, and its officers are sitting parliamentarians. The interesting part is who pays: many APPG secretariats are run by PR agencies or trade bodies funded by the relevant sector, and country groups have long been vehicles for foreign governments to fund travel for MPs. The Standards Committee has repeatedly warned that APPGs are the next lobbying scandal waiting to happen, and tightened the rules in 2023 by capping officer numbers and requiring disclosure of secretariat funding — disclosure, again, rather than prohibition. ## Secondments and the revolving door Two quieter channels matter more than any register entry. Companies and the big accountancy firms second staff into Whitehall departments, where they work on policy from the inside; the arrangement is recorded in scattered departmental disclosures rather than any central register, and the secondee returns to their employer carrying relationships and drafting knowledge no external lobbyist could buy. Traffic in the other direction is vetted by the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, which considers whether former ministers and senior civil servants should take particular jobs within two years of leaving office. ACOBA can attach conditions — a waiting period, a ban on lobbying former colleagues — but it cannot enforce them. Its own chairs have described the system as toothless, breaches carry no penalty, and some departing ministers have simply not sought advice at all. The pattern across all of it is consistent. Westminster's lobbying rules prohibit very little; they mostly require that certain narrow categories of contact be written down somewhere, eventually. The consultant register, the meeting lists, the APPG entries and ACOBA letters each illuminate a strip of the industry while the working assumption of the system — that publication is punishment enough — goes untested, because the audience diligent enough to cross-reference four lagging datasets is small, and the people being lobbied already know who paid for lunch. --- Daily Junction — https://dailyjunction.org/politics/lobbying-in-westminster-what-the-rules-allow-and-what-slips-through