After years of criticism, the Whitehall body that regulates the revolving door between those in public office and subsequent private earnings is to be scrapped.
Described as “toothless” in a 2017 parliamentary report, the effectiveness of the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments (Acoba) was greatly limited by the rules set by the government on former ministers and senior civil servants. Those rules were deemed “dead in the water, next to useless, utterly pointless and in need of reform” by Acoba’s final chair, the Conservative peer Eric Pickles.
