A former PM’s political aide and special adviser to UK business and energy secretary Greg Clark is now a director at fracking and chemical giant INEOS’s lobbying firm. Yet under the broken system regulating the revolving door between big business and politics, the public often has no automatic right to know about such appointments writes Melissa Jones.
Earlier this summer amid the furore ignited by Theresa May’s disastrous snap election, Meg Powell-Chandler, a former special adviser to UK business and energy secretary Greg Clark, quietly slipped into a new job at heavyweight lobbyists Burson Marsteller (B-M).
The agency’s clients include INEOS, the £36 billion firm spearheading fracking in the UK, which months earlier had led a lobbying effort to use Brexit as a way to exempt the chemicals sector from climate policy costs.
Twenty-six-year-old Powell-Chandler’s appointment as a B-M lobbyist followed her failed bid as a Conservative candidate to win the Birmingham Northfield seat on 8 June. Yet until the end of August, neither B-M nor the government had officially announced the ex-civil servant’s new public affairs director role.
The global PR giant’s initial months-long silence was unusual for an industry that typically boasts of ex-government hires. It contrasted, for example, with the news in August that Theresa May’s former energy adviser, Georgia Berry – an ex-Centrica spin-doctor who’d spent just eight months working in Downing Street - would join Ovo Energy as a top adviser in September.
We’d first spotted Powell-Chandler’s new B-M role on her own LinkedIn profile. A day after we updated her new lobbyist status on our Powerbase wiki on 23 August, B-M suddenly tweeted a blog by their newcomer. Curious, we trawled gov.uk for the latest ‘business appointment’ transparency releases. Powell-Chandler’s name was not among them.
So we asked the Cabinet Office, and the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS), why not?
Turns out that Powell-Chandler - despite her three-and-half years at the highest levels of government working for a sitting Conservative cabinet minister and former prime minister - was not on a senior enough paygrade for the public to be told she was now lobbying for a private PR firm with close links to the Tories. Nor were we entitled to see what, if any, restrictions her former BEIS bosses had stipulated or the dates she sought approval to take up her new role. As a former spad, she is (in theory) barred from personally lobbying the UK government for a minimum of 12 months after her last day in October 2016.
We asked twice for a copy of BEIS’s conditions. The department refused, stating it could only confirm Powell-Chandler had followed the correct procedures. Most farcically, it said we could use the Freedom of Information Act – which takes 20 working days. Our hunch this would prove futile was spot-on. ‘We do not think that it is fair to release details of the specific timings and content’ of the personal correspondence of Ms Powell-Chandler,” BEIS argued in its FOI response.
So much for the Tories’ ambition to be the ‘most transparent and accountable government in the world’.
Meanwhile in the lobbying world, the latest APPC register lists Powell-Chandler as ‘conducting public affairs activities’ for B-M’s lobbying arm between June and 31 August. Which is somewhat confusing given that she had only left BEIS 7-8 months before joining B-M, and was supposedly barred from lobbying government until this month. In practice, though, these un-policed rules are inadequate. All they mean is that ex-advisers can’t directly petition government themselves; a moot distinction as we’ve often pointed out before.
Besides, Powell-Chandler is now ‘officially’ free to discuss business with former boss Greg Clark whenever she likes.
A broken system
Powell-Chandler’s case is not a one-off. Rather, it exemplifies a broken and opaque system; one so chock-full of holes that, in July, a National Audit Office (NAO) investigation into the government’s management of its ‘business appointment rules’ concluded it was ‘not clear whether the publicly available transparency data are complete’ nor ‘possible to know…whether ‘all those leaving the civil service that should have made an application…did so’.
An earlier report in April by the House of Commons public administration and constitutional affairs committee found evidence too of ‘a clear lack of scrutiny and transparency in departments’ monitoring and reporting of civil servants below SCS 3 [director general level]’. (To put this in context, that’s more than 98 per cent of all such staff.)
On top of all this, the Sunday Times recently exposed how the government had released only half the required general transparency disclosures since Theresa May became PM last year. Nine of 22 departments were either late or had never bothered to publish business appointments details.
Special advisers (‘spads’) departing government previously had to ask the semi-independent, albeit toothless, Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba) for permission to take up new jobs in the private sector. This was meant to help avoid possible (and perceived) conflicts of interest, particularly given their status as political appointees. But then the Coalition relaxed these exit rules in October 2014, and only the most senior aides at director general level (SCS3) needed Acoba approval. All others had to go through their departments, and of these, only those approvals above a certain senior paygrade [SCS1] had to be published.
The move has since shielded a raft of ex-spads and other officials turned corporate lobbyists from the public gaze. Lengthy delays by departments in releasing what little data they must publish have also ensured that light-touch restrictions for some high-profile spads, like Sue Beeby who worked for cabinet ministers Jeremy Hunt and George Osborne, escape scrutiny until long after their new jobs have begun. Beeby’s inexplicably short six-month lobbying ban only emerged in the government’s pre-Xmas transparency data dump last year, despite her joining Lexington Communications after the summer break.
Then there’s ex-Cameron chief whip Alistair Masser who joined Newgate Communications (lobbyists for fracking trade lobbyists UKOOG and Third Energy) as an associate partner in January. The Cabinet Office waited till 4 July –six months after he had started - to publish details of his new job and conditions– by which time he had actually left. He’s now at Legatum Institute, a think tank keen on influencing the government’s Brexit agenda (and run by high-profile Tory ex-spad, Phillipa Stroud).
Another ex-Number 10 adviser whose move into lobbying a year ago does not appear in gov.uk disclosures is Tomo Davies, also an associate partner at Newgate. Before joining them he did some work for Welsh lobbying agency Deryn, which he reportedly didn’t even need to register. Like Powell-Chandler, Davies ran unsuccessfully as a Conservative candidate in the June election. His ex-Westminster and Whitehall credentials are highlighted on Newgate’s ‘Supporting you through Brexit’ brochure, which boasts: ‘Tomos brings…unique insight into the way Government works, having been both a civil servant and a Special Adviser to two Cabinet Ministers’.
To an outsider, the logic of transparency disclosure or lobbying ban length solely based on paygrades, without regard for whom an aide works for or how long, is hard to fathom.
Why should Sue Beeby, Meg Powell-Chandler or Tomos Davies, who have all worked for cabinet ministers, face any less rigorous restrictions or less public scrutiny than those barred for two years such as ex-Number 10 head of broadcast Caroline Preston? She worked in government less than a year and is now at Stonehaven Campaigns, whose clients, like Lexington, include another fracking firm, Cuadrilla.
What’s indisputable is how incredibly useful these ex-political insiders are to commercial lobbyists like B-M, Newgate and Lexington and their deep-pocketed corporate paymasters. 'Meg’s insights and experience from working in the heart of government will be an invaluable asset to our clients’, said B-M boss Stephen Day, himself a former Tory spad.
Newgate chief Gavin Devine, another ex-Westminster insider similarly extols Davies’s talents: ‘He has unique insight into the way this Conservative government operates, as well as a deep understanding of the way politics and regulation impacts on business.’ His colleague Simon Gentry adds: 'Tomos of course also knows the administration in Cardiff which is a huge benefit to Newgate’s local engagement specialists PPS Group too.'
Unfortunately we have no way of knowing exactly which businesses Davies, Powell-Chandler or Beeby now all represent as paid lobbyists; the UK government’s abysmal lobbying register only compels agencies to name clients who have had contact with (un-named) ministers or permanent secretaries, and not their own staff approaching them or any other government insiders.
What we do know though is that both INEOS and fracking trade lobbyists UKOOG, a Newgate client, are regular fixtures on that register. And as one of B-M’s most lucrative clients, INEOS will doubtless cross Powell-Chandler’s desk now she is free to directly lobby government. Indeed, in August before her new role was even announced, her LinkedIn profile liked a news item about INEOS director Tom Crotty’s latest extra role as head of a new Brexit-focused CBI manufacturing council. Crotty also leads the Chemistry Growth Partnership, the very lobbying group mentioned earlier, that pushed ministers for climate costs exemptions.
So, where to from here? At a time when the revolving door has reached 'epidemic’ levels according to Private Eye, and both the PASC and National Audit Office have flagged serious failings, it is clear the Cabinet Office must get its transparency house in order.
It could, for a start, publish in a central place, real-time information on the post-government jobs of all special advisers - who are, after all, temporary political appointees paid for by the taxpayer.
The
- Business appointment rules
- National Audit Office
- PASC
- BursonMarsteller
- Ineos
- Lobbying
- Fracking
- Newgate
- Blogs