Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

This week, we're going inside the sometimes hidden world of lobbying, pulling back the curtain

on transparency in politics and seeing what reforms need to be made to clean up Westminster,

and whether the new Labour administration is really sticking to its promise of restoring confidence in government.

With me to discuss all that, we have the Labour MP for Great Grimsby, Melanie On, a member of the Common Standards Committee,

Gabe Wyn, Chief Executive of the Blakeney Group, a public affairs and communications agency, John Johnston, London Influence Reporter at Politico, and John Gourless,

head of public relations and policy at the Chartered Institute of Public Relations.

So I'll start with you, John. You know, I don't want to start this by suggesting that all

lobbying is bad lobbying is not inherently a bad thing. It's often a very good thing. It can help with crafting good policy. But talk us to why you guys are interested in kind of good loveing versus bad lobbying and what you kind of want to see improve. Yeah, well, I'll start by saying that I think all lobbying can and should be good and the majority of lobbying is. And it's important part of our democratic democracy that we

have informed politicians and parliamentarians that are able to hear from a wide range of voices

on policy debates and then make informed decisions. The problem that we have currently in this

country, particularly in Westminster, is the fact that we don't have a very good system of

transparency or accountability when it comes to people that are doing that lobbying.

So we have a Register of Consultant Lobbyists set up under the Lobbying Act.

I won't give it its full name because it would take us too long.

And it is estimated that captures up to around 4% of lobbying activity that happens in this country.

Some people put it at around 1%.

When you compare that to other international registers, we are firmly in the relegation zone when it comes to

transparency. So we have around 260 or so records on our register. Compare that to Ireland, Australia,

the EU, Canada. They are in the hundreds, if not thousands. So we are lacking behind

our counterparts. And ultimately, the act was introduced to rebuild trust in politics. It was introduced

in 2014. I think when you look at any measure, any polling that's done in that time since,

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