Representation of the People (Variation of Election Expenses and Exclusions) Regulations 2024
(Limited Text - Ministerial Extracts only)
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Baroness Scott of Bybrook
That the draft Regulations laid before the House on 29 January be approved.
Relevant document: 13th Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)
My Lords, if approved and made, these draft regulations will uprate the maximum campaign spending limits at the Greater London Authority and local authority mayoral elections in England to reflect changes to the value of money. This instrument also provides an exclusion for reasonable security expenses from the various election campaign spending limits. Finally, the draft regulations make some technical amendments to remove drafting that is now redundant from the Police and Crime Commissioner Elections Order 2012.
Elections rely upon the ability of political parties, candidates and other campaigners to communicate their views so that voters can make an informed decision at the ballot box. If approved by Parliament, this statutory instrument completes the package of reforms the Government announced in July 2023 to uprate reserved and excepted party and candidate spending limits and donations thresholds. This is a necessary action, as many of these statutory limits, which were set in absolute terms, have not been uprated in recent times. If we do not uprate them in line with inflation, it means that they continue to be lower in real terms, which has real impacts on campaigning.
Furthermore, no one should feel afraid to participate in our democracy. As noble Lords will be aware, in the past eight years we have witnessed the horrific murders of two parliamentarians, Jo Cox and Sir David Amess. The safety of parliamentarians and candidates is important, and in recent years the Government have introduced numerous measures to tackle intimidation in public life. It is of the utmost importance that candidates feel safe to campaign. Therefore, the Government are explicitly exempting reasonable security expenses from contributing to spending limits for political parties, candidates and other campaigners at reserved and excepted UK elections. I am pleased to confirm that this fulfils a recommendation made by the Jo Cox Civility Commission in its recent report No Place in Politics: Tackling Abuse and Intimidation.
I turn to the specifics. The draft regulations will uprate the spending limits for candidates at Greater London Authority elections and local authority mayoral elections. The various spending limits for Greater London Authority elections have remained unchanged since they were set in 2000. Due to this significant gap, the regulations will uprate the spending limits by 81.05%. This means that the limit for a candidate at an election of the Mayor of London will increase from £420,000 to £760,410, the limit for a candidate at an election of a constituency member of the London Assembly will increase from £35,000 to £63,360, and for an individual or party list candidate at the London-wide assembly election the limit will change from £330,000 to £597,460.
The draft regulations will uprate the spending limits for local authority mayoral elections in England by 29.09%. The uprating is done from 2017, to align with the new spending limits for combined authority and combined county authority mayoral elections recently approved by Parliament in the Combined Authorities (Mayoral Elections) Order 2017 (Amendment) Regulations 2024. This is to ensure parity between mayoralties and means that the limits for local authority mayoral elections in England will change from £2,362 and 5.9p per elector to £3,040 and 8p per elector.
Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her introduction to this statutory instrument. I offer my appreciation to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, for his eloquent speech and detailed analysis before the House today.
The Minister will be glad to know that these Benches support the implementation of Regulation 4 of the instrument. It would be wrong for expenses incurred to protect candidates, their families and supporters to be seen as part of the cost of campaigning, and it would set a dangerous precedent if candidates requiring extra security had to forgo elements of their campaign simply to feel safe. I say that as a Member of your Lordships’ House who has unfortunately faced death threats to me and my family in recent months. I totally understand the need for parliamentarians to exercise all security measures in order to do their job and serve.
This instrument stops an obvious injustice in our electoral expense law, but our response to candidates feeling unsafe cannot simply be to tell them to open their pockets and hire security. The Government must make sure that adequate resources are in place to ensure that candidates feel secure without needing to spend their own money.
I turn to another significant part of the instrument relating to the increase to election expenses in Greater London Authority elections and local authority mayoral elections. The noble Lord, Lord Rennard, dissected the issue using percentages and statistics to a profound effect. The point that election expenses have remained the same since the introduction of mayoral elections in the year 2000 has rightly been made loud and clear by noble Lords. Sadly, that figure has failed to be updated in line with inflation. It was used during the last mayoral election, 21 years after it was introduced. I understand that a significant increase is expected, given that the limit has been untouched for 24 years.
I hope that the Minister recognises why we need to ask questions about why we are raising the limit by over 80% less than two months out from the elections. The real reason why we are seeing this rise in the proposed figures is the compound failure by successive Tory Chancellors to get inflation under control. The reality is that we have seen a huge rise in inflation under this Government.
We do not intend to oppose this instrument outright, but I hope the Minister agrees that this rise does not reflect the reality that people are seeing in their day-to-day expenses. I hope she also agrees with me that future Governments should not wait until six weeks before an election to carry out an increase that is 24 years late.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, made an interesting point about election spending across the Atlantic. In 2018, after the midterm elections, I visited Capitol Hill and spoke to a Congressman. As I was congratulating him on winning his election, he said, “Well, I can’t take too many congratulations because I have to start fundraising for my next election”. This increase in the region of £19 million to £36 million is bringing money into our politics like never before. That means a lot of people are spending time fundraising when they should be serving their communities.
I hope the Minister reflects on those points and tells us when the periodic review will be for the next uplift in expenses. Will we have to wait another 24 years for a decision, or will we get told six weeks before the next set of mayoral elections? I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their contributions. They have made a number of points and I will try to respond to all of them. First, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, that I remember Andrew Pennington; I remember the case and I am really sorry. To the noble Lord, Lord Khan, I say that nothing changes, does it? The noble Lord and his family are still getting death threats, which is totally unacceptable in a country as democratic as ours.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, the Minister used the term “strayed into” the issue of donations, as if we were going off the subject. Will she acknowledge that the question of where the money is coming from is just as central to this statutory instrument as what the limit is?
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
It is, but we already have the Elections Act, which looked at donations and the rules behind them. That part of election law is already being dealt with.
Fundraising is a legitimate part of the democratic process; we cannot get away from that. I am sorry, but the Government do not agree with the noble Baroness opposite that we should have political parties funded by government. That is not a policy of this Government, and I am not sure that it is a policy of the parties opposite.
Within our current system, while there are no caps on donations received, there are limits on what can be spent in order to maintain the level playing field—and the level playing field is the same now as it was in 2000. All reportable donations over the relevant thresholds will continue, as always, to be published online. This allows anyone to see who funds a political party and ensures that a transparent and accountable system is in place for those donations, so nothing has changed in that way.
It is important that people have the opportunity to know about their political parties’ policies. We cannot get away from the fact that that takes money. All we are doing is to ensure that the money agreed in 2000 has the same spending power this year as it had then.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, brought up an issue relating to disabled people. I am sorry that I do not have an answer to that, but I will make sure I get one tomorrow. It is an important issue and I thank her for bringing that up.
I think that I have answered the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. This is about necessity within democracy; there has to be money to communicate one’s policies.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
The Minister has used the phrase “level playing field” several times. Does she think that there ought to be something about a financial level playing field in political campaigns if we are to regain the trust of the public? If one party is able to raise such large sums—much larger than the others—then the playing field is tipped heavily in one direction.
Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)
At different times, different parties have raised large sums of money from different places over many years. I look at the party opposite, which has been funded by the unions over the years; I believe that I have seen quite large donations given to the Liberal Democrats too. On party donors, I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, who asked why anybody would want to give money. Some people feel very strongly and passionately about the policies of some parties—I am not talking about just ours—and that is how politics works. The level playing field is the fact that no party can spend more on one candidate in any election than the other party.
Asking why we have waited so long, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, did, is a reasonable question. As intended by Parliament, it is for the Government of the day to review the limits and update them when they consider that to be necessary. The fact that we had low inflation for so many years probably meant that there was no real necessity to change them as quickly as perhaps we should have done. But, as we have heard, inflation has increased in recent years and the Government decided that uprating these sums was now necessary to ensure that we get that communication out to our electorate.
I think that I have answered everything, unless anybody has something that they want to repeat. I will look at Hansard to make sure, but I think the only thing that I need to respond on is the disabled allowance question.
These regulations are essential to ensure that campaigners can continue to communicate their views to voters and, importantly, that candidates and other campaigners can feel confident in procuring the security they need at any UK elections. I hope noble Lords will join me in supporting this instrument.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing this statutory instrument before us. We have shown in this short debate that it was worthy of greater consideration than the 16 minutes which it attracted in a committee in the House of Commons. There are many important issues here and I congratulate her on single-handedly defending the Government’s position in the face of all the opposition parties this evening, which suggests that the arguments are not quite so straightforward as she might suggest.
The principal argument which the Minister made, that this instrument had to be brought forward now with such huge increases in election expenses, was not about election expenses at all. The argument here and in the other place was on the urgency of clarifying election law about security arrangements for candidates and their teams. As an experienced election agent, I would never have allowed security considerations to be part of the election expense return which I was making.
If this was necessary, it could of course be done simply on its own and with all-party agreement, but there is not all-party agreement on such huge increases and on them being made at the last minute. No satisfactory explanation is given as to why they are so large or have been made so suddenly before polling day. On all these issues where the Government are clearly changing the rules in their favour, they are abandoning the principles of the level playing field. A level playing field requires not just the same maximum limit for everyone but equal resources on each side. An army with 100 tanks against an army with one tank is not an even competition, so we do not have a level playing field of the kind which the law provided for in the 1880s and the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act tried to provide for in 2000.
I do not feel the need to test the opinion of the House again, when I feel that its opinion on all these issues was well tested when the noble Lord, Lord Khan, did so a few weeks ago. I note that 90% of the Cross- Bench Peers voted in support of his Motion and against the Government, so as we know the opinion of the House on this issue, I will not test it further. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.