From climate to health: the private firms helping to run MPs’ interest groups
For charities and campaigning backbenchers like the late Sir David Amess, all-party parliamentary groups (APPGs) are vital platforms for a plethora of good causes and interest areas they wish to promote. To their critics, they can appear as unreformed relics of a past, less-regulated Westminster landscape.
But amid the swirl of roundtable discussions, drinks, overseas trips and reports, dozens of communications and public affairs companies are helping to run more than 100 such groups, out of a total of 755, with sponsorship from corporate interests.
The full reach of lobbyists acting as APPG secretariats – arranging meetings and trips for members and sometimes cultivating potential funders – is revealed in analysis by the Guardian and openDemocracy.
A framework of rules applies to APPGs, setting out how to register if they wish to use parliamentary emblems and how to list the details of any secretariats. However, the system is largely self-policed.
Connect Communications, which is co-owned and run by the former Labour MP Andy Sawford, runs the secretariats of 14 APPGs. Policy Connect, a not-for-profit company that has held meetings attended by paying businesses and ministers, runs the secretariats of nine APPGs, covering issues ranging from climate change to data analytics. It said that any private meetings involving ministers were always led by the APPG chair.
Healthcare firms provided the bulk of about £250,000 worth of financial benefits-in-kind support registered in 2021 for six APPG secretariats operated by HealthComms Consulting, the lobbying firm founded by Paul Bristow, the current Conservative MP for Peterborough, and now run by his wife, Sara Petela.
Her firm acts as the secretariat of the APPGs on adult social care,
Read more on theguardian.com
