Who meets whom: Access and lobbying during the coalition years

Abstract

In 2010, the incoming Coalition government announced that it would publish details of meetings between ministers and outside interests. We have collated and coded these data and, in this article, describe patterns of access between 2010 and 2015. In some respects, access is notably fragmented. No single organisation attends more than 2.5% of the 6292 meetings held by ministers. On the contrary, business, collectively, attends fully 45% of all meetings: more than twice the share of any other category of organisation. We also find evidence of distinctive policy communities characterised by high levels of access between particular interests and ministers within specific departments.

Opaque: an empirical evaluation of lobbying transparency in the UK

“…Among groups that meet with ministers that are also listed in the register, the top decile of most frequent visitors accounts for 64% of the meetings (45% in 2015 alone), and the top 1% are present at 14% of all meetings with department officials (8% in 2015 alone). This uneven distribution is evidence that some lobbyists have far greater access than others (also see Dommett et al 2017). Yet users of the two data sets know nothing about the identities of these lobbyists, what measures they are lobbying about, or how much money may be involved.…”

“…Some reports contained only meetings with external groups, others combined these with gifts, hospitality, and overseas travel reports; some reports separately reported meetings of individual ministers or secretaries, others synthesized all meetings of a department's senior staff in one document; occasionally data from more than one quarter were included in a single document. As a result of these challenges, the meetings data are seldom analyzed (exceptions are Dommett et al 2017 and Transparency International 2015). 9 Focusing specifically on the evaluation of the usability of transparency data for member of the public (one of the CPI's stringency criteria mentioned before), we follow Piotrowski and Liao (2012), who identify a set of criteria-accuracy, accessibility, completeness, understandability, timeliness, and low cost-which can be applied to any government transparency data.…”

Insider lobbying and government contracts: The moderating role of firm size

“…Meetings between government ministers and representatives of “inside” interest groups are an everyday part of the process of governing in many liberal democracies (Dommett et al, 2017), and can reduce the transaction costs government officials confront in seeking to understand the needs of different industries and sectors of society (Broscheid & Coen, 2007). Nevertheless, lobbying is still regarded as deeply unethical in some countries and is frequently subject to much stricter regulation than is currently present in the UK, with fewer legitimate opportunities for directly influencing policy‐makers (Chari et al, 2020).…”

“…This unique source of information enables us to identify “insider” interactions between firms and politicians. Details specified in the quarterly meeting reports include: the date of the meeting; the meeting participants; and the purpose of the meeting (Dommett et al, 2017). The data we collected relate to meetings between private firms and the following MOD ministers: the Secretary of State for Defence; the Minister of State for Defence; the Minister of State for the Armed Forces; the Minister for Defence Procurement; the Minister for Reserves; and the Minister for Personnel and Veterans.…”

Who’s listening to whom? The UK House of Lords and evidence-based policy-making on citizenship education

“…It is this process, as one understanding of effective evidencebased policy-making, that I believe has failed in the case of citizenship education and possibly Conservative/Coalition policy-making more widely. It is no coincidence, for instance, that up to 60% of all ministerial meetings across civil service departments between 2010 and 2015 were with particular business and media organisations (Dommett et al, 2017 Exley and Ball., 2011, p.108). This has arguably created an echo chamber of policy entrepreneurs who are influencing government policy in both tone and content, and undermining a logic of consultation with the core policy community (see also Dicken et al, 2001).…”