During the government of John Major, cabinet secretary Lord Gus O'Donnell, agreed to allow lobby briefings to be attributed to "Downing Street sources".
[3] An independent review of government communications in 2003, chaired by Bob Phillis, then chief executive of the Guardian Media Group, found that the Lobby system was not working effectively.
The report, presented to the Cabinet Office in January 2004, concluded that the credibility of both government and the media are damaged by the impression that they are involved in a "closed, secretive and opaque insider process".
[5] According to evidence received by the review, editors and journalists disliked public information being used as "the currency in a system of favouritism, selective release and partisan spinning".
Ministers and officials in turn complained about the media offering a partial and distorted version of events, "often with little relationship to what was said at lobby briefings and relying on off-the-record sources or, as some have alleged, deliberate misrepresentation".
Responding to an urgent question in the Commons on the walkout the parliamentary secretary for the Cabinet Office, Chloe Smith, said that briefings to smaller groups of Lobby journalists are "entirely normal, standard and routine, and have been so over successive Governments".
[12][13] The membership represents large media organisations such as the BBC or Sky News, as well as smaller and online publications such as LabourList, Left Foot Forward, and Tribune.