Lobbying and Government Relations Editing and Proofreading Services

Government relations work is conducted almost entirely in writing that must satisfy two incompatible standards. Persuasive submissions have to make a case strong enough to move a policy; disclosure filings have to describe the same activity accurately enough to survive a registrar's review or a journalist's comparison against a minister's published calendar. Firms and in-house teams that treat the second as an administrative afterthought are the ones that end up explaining a discrepancy they could easily have avoided.

We edit what government relations practitioners and in-house teams produce — submissions and position papers to departments and committees, consultation responses, pre-budget and pre-election submissions, briefing notes and leave-behinds for meetings with officials, coalition and joint industry statements, lobbying registration and activity filings, internal compliance policies and codes of conduct, client engagement letters and scope documents, monitoring and intelligence reports for clients, stakeholder mapping and engagement plans, public affairs campaign material, and responses to registrar or commissioner enquiries. Our editors check that a submission asks for something specific, and that public-facing advocacy is consistent with what is filed on the register.

The submission's "ask" is where most of this writing quietly fails. A document can be well researched, properly evidenced and forty pages long, and never state what the reader is being requested to do. Officials read submissions looking for the action; when they cannot find one, the document goes into the consultation record and nowhere else. We rewrite these so the ask appears on the first page in the form the decision-maker would have to take it — amend this clause, change this threshold from x to y, delay commencement to this date, fund this programme at this level — so it is scoped to what the recipient can actually authorise rather than addressed to government in general, so the cost or benefit to the public interest is stated rather than only the cost to the member organisations, and so the fallback position is included, because an official trying to solve a problem needs to know what would be acceptable if the primary request is refused. A submission that gives them that becomes a source rather than a representation.

Everything you send is treated in strict confidence, including client material, positions under development and pre-submission drafts. We are editors rather than legal, lobbying or compliance advisers, and we offer no view on registration obligations, ethics rules or any policy position. What we can do is make submissions specific and persuasive, and disclosure material clear and consistent with the rest of your writing.