Levelling the playing field: How economic policy gets captured and what to do about it

Fair and transparent decision-making in government is critical for addressing historically low levels of public trust in the UK. Recent surveys have shown that 66% of people feel they have little or no opportunities to influence government decisions while 63% believe the very rich have too much influence.

More participatory and open decision-making wouldn’t just help rebuild public trust. It would also help ensure better decision-making, widening the evidence base for policy making and reducing risks of policy capture by vested interests.

But much of decision-making in government is done in the dark. It is still far too hard to find out who is influencing decision-makers in the UK government and there are multiple loopholes and transparency deficits in the UK government’s lobbying regime. That is despite numerous expert recommendations to improve lobbying transparency. Meanwhile, recommendations made by ethics experts to level the playing field to ensure fairer access to decision-makers have gone unheeded.

Mapping the routes to influence

This report looks at who has been getting access to ministers, senior officials and special advisers in six of the UK’s government departments principally responsible for economic decision-making. We reviewed the data on meetings, hospitality and secondments in the five and a half years from January 2019 under the previous government up to the election in June 2024. We also looked at the first three months of the new government.

We looked at who decision-makers are meeting most to see whether certain groups, such as charities and consumer groups, or academics – groups that provide a public interest perspective, and a counterweight to private commercial interests – are getting squeezed out.

We went on to explore whether business groups are getting additional access and influence through other routes like hospitality and secondments and, if so, how.
Given that the main route for the public to feed into policy is through public consultations, we also looked at whether these are actually providing an effective route for participation. In particular, we focused on consultations held by the Treasury between 2019 and 2024, as the lead department on economic decision-making, to see how inclusive they were.

And finally we looked at the other routes through which outside interests can exert influence over policy making, from employing former ministers or officials, to undeclared meetings with party donors.