Part 1 of the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act 2014 created a Statutory Register of Consultant Lobbyists. When combined with ministerial meetings data, this was intended to give the public a complete picture of who is trying to influence policy making.

In practice this has not been the case. The narrow scope of the lobbying register combined with problems of accuracy, timeliness, meaningfulness and scope of ministerial meetings data means that lobbying remains largely in the shadows. Academic research concluded that “wide variation between the two sets of data, along with other evidence, contribute to our conclusion that the Government could have made, and still should make, the lobby register more robust.”