The former transport minister Stephen Ladyman has been using his parliamentary office to lobby officials for contracts for a private company.

Documents obtained under freedom of information laws show that the Labour MP touted for the business on behalf of ITIS Holdings, a transport company that pays him £1,000 a month.

Ladyman used his House of Commons address and e-mail when requesting meetings with officials on behalf of ITIS, which is chaired by a former Labour donor.

One of the letters, seeking Olympic work from London’s transport commissioner, begins: “You may remember me from my time as minister of state for transport.”

He also sent an e-mail to an official at the Highways Agency saying he was not permitted to lobby because it was less than a year since he had left the government. Despite this, the e-mail urges the agency to do business with ITIS.

Ladyman is one of about 25 former Labour ministers who have accepted jobs in the private sector since 2006, but he is the first to admit using his ministerial contacts to arrange meetings in Whitehall for clients.

This weekend Paul Flynn MP, a Labour member of the Commons’ public administration committee which is investigating lobbying, said: “I would like to see a bar on ministers taking jobs in the areas in which they had responsibilities as ministers.”

Ladyman, a vice-chairman of the Labour party, started working for ITIS in November 2007, five months after losing his ministerial post. The company, which collects and sells traffic data, is chaired by Sir Trevor Chinn, a donor to Tony Blair’s office in the 1990s.

Until earlier this year it had a big contract with the Department of Transport, granted before Ladyman became minister in 2005. A £1m extension was approved during his time at the department. The company says Ladyman had no role in the decision.

In recent months Ladyman has been fixing meetings with a number of officials. His letter to Peter Hendy, the commissioner at Transport for London, is headed “ Dr Stephen J Ladyman, Member of Parliament for South Thanet” and makes use of his Commons address and e-mail.

He suggests that ITIS could be hired to provide traffic data for the 2012 Olympics and other projects.

Ladyman has not broken any rules. He was allowed to take the job providing he did not lobby government officials within a year of leaving office. When he was asked last week whether other companies who did not employ MPs to lobby might consider themselves at a disadvantage, he replied: “It’s their choice. They can hire MPs.”

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