The cabinet minister John Hutton is facing calls this weekend for an inquiry over his wife’s business interests as a lobbyist.

Hutton’s wife – Heather Rogers – was a director of Edelman, a company which lobbied the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) in 2006. At the time Hutton was secretary of state at the DWP.

Edelman was lobbying on behalf of a client company, called Pelcombe. It subsequently secured contracts with the DWP to retrain the unemployed.

Edelman apparently regarded the relationship with Pelcombe, a company with 17 training centres across the country, as sensitive and failed to disclose the firm as a client. This is in breach of the lobbyists’ code of conduct.

In a proposal drawn up by Edelman in July last year, the lobbying firm offered to fix meetings for Pelcombe’s managing director with MPs and DWP officials “for the joint purpose of building relationships and gathering intelligence on current and future policy”. It added: “Targets are to be selected from the existing ‘political contact list’ as appropriate.”

This weekend Pelcombe executives claimed that in meetings Edelman also offered to provide introductions to MPs and officials so that the company could “get a better feel” for contracts and learn “the direction that policy was moving in”.

Pelcombe is understood to have approached Edelman on the advice of Sovereign Capital, its venture capitalist owners, after losing out on a series of DWP contracts early last year.

Since Edelman’s public affairs support, Pelcombe has been successful in several bids, including Jobcentre Plus work and other government contracts. The JobCentre Plus contracts, according to Pelcombe’s website, put the company “into the catchment area for the four Olympic boroughs”, which is valuable because many jobs will be created in the area.

This weekend Chris Grayling, the Conservative work and pensions spokesman, said he would write to the permanent secretary to demand an investigation into Rogers’s relationship with Pelcombe and the department.

“There seems to be a steady process within government of watering down the rules that apply to ministers about their own family interests and the interests of people close to them,” Grayling said. “The ministerial code is quite clear that it is a responsibility of ministers to separate themselves and their work from the financial interests of their families. It is of paramount importance that those rules are properly enforced and that people have confidence that they are being adhered to.”

The Sunday Times was initially told by a source at Edelman that Pelcombe was “Heather’s client” and that she had introduced the firm to the lobbyists.

In an interview, a former Pelcombe executive said that she “knew” Heather Rogers as “Heather Hutton”. She could not remember how she “knew” her or whether Hutton had arranged the meetings held with the DWP.

However, the executive subsequently retracted her statement and said she did not know Rogers, a former civil servant, and had never met her.

Edelman initially said Rogers, who left the firm in the summer, had met Pelcombe, but insisted she had not worked on the account.

Susan Eastoe, Edelman’s deputy chief executive, said: “She does know them . . . she was a director of Edelman public affairs, so along the way you meet the clients. All the directors meet all the clients.”

However, after The Sunday Times contacted representatives for the Huttons, Eastoe got back in touch to say that Rogers had not met Pelcombe.

Rogers joined Edelman as director of its healthcare public affairs practice in January last year after a career with the civil service. She worked as an aide to Tessa Jowell and Alan Milburn, the then health secretary, when she met Hutton.

The couple married in 2004 and bought a house in west London, shortly before she joined Edelman.

Edelman represents a variety of clients including Pfizer, Lloyds TSB, Pepsi and the British Virgin Islands government.

The DWP said: “The decision to award a contract to a specific company is made by a senior civil servant and not a minister. John Hutton, when DWP secretary of state, had no involvement in the process by which Pelcombe was contracted to provide services for Jobcentre Plus.”

In Eastoe’s third and final statement to The Sunday Times, she said: “Heather Rogers never worked on this client. She did not introduce this client to Edelman. At no time did she meet the client.”

Sovereign Capital said any government contracts that Pelcombe had been awarded were not as a result of the work that Edelman did on its behalf.

Rogers did not return calls.

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