Controversies
In 2019, Nigel Farage, then-Leader of the Brexit Party, alleged that Lister was involved in intimidation and offering bribes in exchange for political candidates stepping down.
In February 2021, The Sunday Times reported that Lister was on the payroll of two developers, Stanhope and Delancey, while serving in government as chief strategic advisor to prime minister Boris Johnson, a role which commanded the highest salary band of any special adviser, between £140,000 and £149,000 a year. Lister did not declare these interests in the parliamentary records despite having been ennobled in the summer of 2020. That Lister invited Delancey owner, and Conservative Party donor, Jamie Ritblat into 10 Downing Street at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic to advise on government policy relating to the construction sector, while being remunerated to sit on its board, a fact that was not then known, has also raised conflict of interest concerns amid the Greensill scandal. In 2014, two years prior to joining Delancey, Lister had presided over the firm's planning application for the revamp of the Olympic media centre in east London as Johnson's deputy mayor of planning, for which permission was granted.
Lister's conduct in government was also the subject of controversy in the Royal Mint Court case. Although the claims have been denied, it was reported that Lister arranged the sale of Royal Mint Court for the new Chinese embassy, while holding down a £15,000-a-year non-executive directorship on the board of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. He was also paid by both parties in the transaction: the consultancy advising the Chinese government and buying the land; and Delancey, the property company founded and run by Ritblat, who had the freehold.
During his time at Homes England, Lister accepted donations totalling nearly half a million pounds from EcoWorld, a Malaysian property development firm, between 2016 and 2019. Although legal, Lister did not declare the amounts he received from EcoWorld. After the news of this possible conflict of interest came to light, Clive Betts, chair of the UK parliament's Housing, Communities and Local Government Select Committee, stated that it is "very wrong that someone in charge of allocating resources to build housing, including affordable housing, has this arrangement with a developer".
In May 2021, the nature of Lister's relations with Ritblat was revealed in The Sunday Times, which extracted an apology from the former senior Boris Johnson aide for having presided over the granting over a generous taxpayer-backed loan of £187m in 2019 to one of Ritblat's developer companies. This state aid, then the largest amount of money ever awarded by Homes England, was granted after an unexpected appearance by Lister at the body's investment committee. Lister had failed to declare that he was being paid by Delancey at the time and instead opened the meeting by claiming that he had "previously undertaken advisory work for Delancey", which led the committee to conclude that "this did not constitute a conflict of interest." In his register of interests, Lister had declared that he advised a firm called Dream Ltd, a formulation that has not been used before or since and is a reference to Delancey Real Estate Asset Management, according to The Sunday Times report. In a statement to the newspaper, Lister conceded that he should have "fully" recused himself at the meeting, but said that he had never lobbied government in relation to the Delancey group.
