Labour will not disclose meetings its MPs have with lobbyists before the general election, Emily Thornberry has said.

Speaking at a conference on transparency organised by openDemocracy, Labour’s shadow attorney general refused to agree to publish this information, which would be a requirement if the party were in government but is not mandatory for opposition parties.

“Nobody has voted for us yet,” said Thornberry. “If you’re in government, then there have to be recordings of the meetings that you have because you're having that meeting as a minister, as somebody who has power.”

The revelation means voters will approach the general election without knowing which businesses or industries have helped shape the Labour Party’s policies.

Thornberry also claimed that meeting with lobbyists is part of the role of opposition MPs and that they should not be subject to the same transparency obligations as ministers.

“It's part of my job in opposition when trying to develop policy,” she said. “I do think that it is different if you were in government.

“When you’re an opposition, you are an opposition. I think that we should not be treated as the government or a government in waiting.”

Labour, which is currently 20 points ahead of the Tories in the polls and is expected to win a large majority in the next election, has been strengthening its relationships with lobbyists over the past year.

A recent openDemocracy investigation found that at least 20 of the 215 candidates the party has so far selected are lobbyists or former lobbyists.

Thornberry conceded that this could make the distinction between politicians and people in power to lobby on behalf of certain industries “blurry”.

“There are people who have worked in and around Westminster… who have become parliamentary candidates, and still have to put bread on the table and are working perhaps on a freelance basis as a lobbyist in particular organisations,” she said.

“Are they a lobbyist? Or are they parliamentary candidate? These things get somewhat blurred.”

The Labour Party has previously tried to differentiate itself from the Conservative Party, under which transparency has declined.

In the past 14 years of Tory rule, the number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests rejected by the government has risen from 40% to almost 60%.

Thornberry said: “It is almost certain when the final [FOI] data is published, that 2023 – Rishi Sunak’s first full year as prime minister – will be established as the least transparent year in the last two decades.”

Keir Starmer’s Labour has embraced the influence of big business and lobbyists, who often seek to influence party policy through clandestine meetings, lending staff to help MPs or giving MPs gifts, such as tickets to music festivals.

While MPs must disclose all gifts received, they are not required to make public any meetings with lobbyists unless in government.

In Scotland, the lobbying register contains details of all meetings involving MSPs of every party, regardless of whether they are in government.

Thornberry, who gave the keynote speech to openDemocracy’s packed-out conference on FOI in central London, said a Labour government would stop treating transparency with “annoyance and inconvenience”.

The shadow minister said that it would not see Freedom of Information requests, which enable people to force publicly funded bodies to disclose held information, “just as a way to be open and transparent to scrutiny” but as a way “to identify the information that the public wants to know which is not currently available”.

CORRECTION 08/03/2024: This article was updated to correct a quotation from Thornberry. The word "meetings" has been incorrectly transcribed as "donations." This has now been changed.