Succession to the Crown Act 2013
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts(10 years, 7 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, it is for exactly those reasons that the Opposition very much welcomed the Bill. If I understand it, it is only Australia for which we now wait. We just hope that before the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge get to Australia, it may have done the necessary. Although their first born is a son, were they to have a brace that come further, the order of succession may still be important for those subsequent children. Can the noble and learned Lord perhaps use his good endeavours to see this speedily enacted?
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, it is fair to say that all the state premiers in Australia have indicated their support for this measure, and that the Commonwealth Government of Australia stand ready to put in place the necessary legislation once each of the states has enacted its legislation.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
Since I was asked a question, I will say two things. One is that we regret that the wider amendment, which would have taken senior civil servants in, was not also supported. The other is that we look forward to being in government and to turning on this provision, but also to turning off an awful lot of what the current Government are doing.
Baroness Mallalieu (Lab)
My Lords, I rise briefly to support the amendment of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. This amendment is plainly a compromise. It does not frustrate the intention of the Government to impose strict constituency limits. That is accepted in the amendment. It responds to the concerns of Ministers both here and in the other place that not all activity had been regulated; now it is. It meets exactly the objection of the Commons. It now includes campaigning activities of all kinds that are clearly targeted at a particularly constituency or constituencies to influence voters.
Above all, the amendment has the merit of clarity for the campaigners themselves, is more practical and is more readily enforceable. I employ, if not the exact words then the spirit, of the wise advice of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, at an earlier stage, that we should not reject an improvement in pursuit of perfection. There can be no perfection in this Bill because it has been conducted at such speed. However, this is a simple improvement that I hope that this House will insist on.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, I will first echo the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, that it took just 24 hours to reject the advice of this House and of the voluntary sector. I understand that, anticipating another victory today, they are going to do the same tomorrow. They do not seem to take your Lordships’ House too seriously. It also means, of course, that we have not had the opportunity to hear from the Electoral Commission about the new position—although we have heard from the voluntary sector, which remains deeply concerned about the government position on this.
Just yesterday the Government had another blitz on red tape, boasting how they were removing unnecessary shackles from a number of bodies. Last week, the Government published their Deregulation Bill, which will get its Second Reading in the other place on Monday. Therefore, on the one hand all this red tape is being lifted off organisations, and yet on the other we have here something that will tie up charities, churches, women’s groups, young people’s movements and green campaigners in completely unnecessary red tape and complicated accounting. It is not that simple.
Lord Martin of Springburn (CB)
My Lords, let me say briefly that I have the highest regard for the charities in the United Kingdom, but I also have a deep concern about how general elections and constituency elections are fought. My worry is about the single-issue organisations that can be created. Some charities go back 100 or 150 years, but a single-issue organisation could be created this evening with the aim of undermining a candidate in a constituency.
As was mentioned last time, there might be a legitimate argument about saving a hospital. However, I can point to the fact that, in one of the English constituencies, a government Minister was defeated by a candidate who was fighting on a “Save the hospital” campaign. I have no argument against that candidate, who did the legitimate thing by standing, getting enough assenters for a nomination form and nailing his colours to the mast in saying, “I am the candidate fighting against the hospital closure”.
That is one thing, but if you get a single-issue organisation that starts up a year before a general election —bear in mind that we know the date of that election—then that is something unique. Such organisations can say, “Right, we’ll get a campaign started within a constituency”, and they can spend more money than any individual candidate. A noble Lord says that that is not true, but they can. They could spend perhaps £16,000. When I stood for re-election as Mr Speaker, my memory is that I could spend £12,000, but they could spend more.
Okay, we live in a democracy, but if a single-issue organisation is on the go, we are entitled to ask that it give an account of how it spends its money and where it gets its money from—that is also important. If the organisation is campaigning on, say, a hospital issue, it is allowed to canvass, to go on the doorsteps and to arrange press conferences, rallies and all the rest of it. When Parliament is dissolved, it might say, “We have a good case for putting up a candidate”. If in those circumstances it goes from being a single-issue organisation to putting up a candidate, it could have spent far more than any single candidate.
We are talking about what is, often, power without responsibility. I cling to the argument about hospitals. If a Conservative candidate says, “I want to save the hospital”, the question that will be posed to that candidate is, “Well, what other hospital in the area will you close down?”, because the budget will not support every hospital in the area. A single-issue organisation has the power but not the responsibility. Okay, I agree that we live in a democracy, but it is not rocket science to record how many phone calls were made or how many canvassers were put out, particularly in these days of electronic systems.
I give to charities like anyone else, but once some of them have your name they soon know how to get it on the record and make sure that you get a circular every month—it can be “Dear Michael” or “Dear Lord Martin” or whatever suits them. I worry about how we might distort a parliamentary election, and I think that what the Government are putting up is a safer bet.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, the problem with including staff costs is the issue of workability. As we have heard from the NCVO, ACEVO and the people who run these charities, what is in the Bill at the moment is simply not workable. As I said earlier, the Bill asks these voluntary organisations to divvy up their staff costs, including national insurance and pension contributions, not only by which part of the country they live in but by what chunk of their work has gone on campaigning on an issue that subsequently attains high political saliency. This is not even about keeping records, given that the organisation may have to go back and look at something.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Martin of Springburn
My Lords, I come in briefly, having listened to the arguments surrounding this amendment. The noble Baroness is quite right that we cannot get perfection, but I wish that we could put on record and give due consideration to the men and women who, when a general election or municipal elections come, put their names forward as parliamentary candidates. I had the good fortune to be in a constituency where, although I hated the term “safe Labour seat” and cringed whenever anyone said it because the seat had to be worked at, I had significant admiration for those candidates who came into that constituency and said that they were flying the flag for their party—Conservatives, Liberals or the SNP. Remember that many of us get to our feet and talk about the new democracies in Africa and those that used to be behind the iron curtain, but one thing that we have to do as parliamentarians is to teach people how to be parliamentary candidates.
That brings me on to these campaign groups and it is why I asked the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, whether they might be registered charities. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said that they might be, if I picked him up correctly. Let me look at the registered charities which embark on campaigns. I know that the situation is different now when a general election is called, because we have got ourselves this five-year election term and people see that we can go right to the wire on a given date, five years from the previous election. In the old days, we used to sit in the tea room in the House of Commons wondering when the Prime Minister was going to go to the country, which meant that the campaign groups could not put the kettle on and say that it would be on a certain date—even those who were closest did not know that. Now that we have this five-year situation, perhaps I might send a message out to people in charities that they should use their heads. If they want to campaign, they have four years and three months, I think, in which to campaign. They should let the general election take its course with the parliamentary candidates because there is a danger here.
Let us take hospital closures, which the noble Lord mentioned. We all hate to see hospital closures, but we know that certain people have sinister reasons for being involved in a campaign, which is to embarrass a certain parliamentary candidate. I have heard the term “putting up score-cards” used during this debate. Some of these campaigns put up score-cards and say, “This is a good candidate, who has campaigned against the closure of a given hospital”. What if it was a Minister in that constituency who was holding office and had another portfolio? That Minister would not be allowed to say, “Don’t close that hospital”, yet some of these campaigners choose not to see that and say, “This is the good guy who is prepared to campaign, while your sitting Member of Parliament has been silent”. We know full well that the reason he or she has been silent may be that they are holding the office of Secretary of State. They could be holding the office of Prime Minister. However, what they have been doing in the background may have been excellent in fighting for the local community and its hospital.
I say to the charities that they really have to watch what they are doing. Every time I give to a charity, I am asked whether I am a taxpayer. If I am, the Inland Revenue will give money to that charity, so a high proportion of what charities are receiving involves the public purse and they should be careful about what they are doing. Also, it might be argued that a campaign body in an area that has no charitable status may call on other groups that have charitable status to support it.
I do not know if I am articulating my point properly, but we must give serious thought to the fact that decent men and women get into these constituencies during the general election and fight in good faith. It is wrong for some of these campaign groups to get involved when the democratic process, such as a general election, is on.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, first, I endorse the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, about the work of what by way of shorthand we call the Harries commission. The noble and right reverend Lord and his colleagues have done both the charity sector and this House an enormous service.
As we have emphasised, we have two problems about the Bill’s brand-new constituency limits, which obviously apply to the wider issues covered by the Bill, which might in theory have an effect in one or more constituencies. The major problem has already been articulated: it is not their intention or purpose, in the words of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, but their workability. Charities and campaigners simply do not organise or do their accounts or even think in constituency terms. They focus on the proposed path of the HS2, the flight paths around Heathrow, the ground under where fracking will take place, the location of badger sets or the location of a polluting factory. That is the focus for their work.
For them, therefore, a requirement to record and account for their staff time and expenditure on a whole new geographical basis—indeed, on boundaries which are probably unknown to their accounts department—will be highly problematic. It will add enormous bureaucracy when, as we have said before, the Government are elsewhere trying to reduce red tape. Accounting for expenditure on the basis that it might have an effect on a constituency would require those charities and other groups to develop a whole new financial accounting system, a demand which surely cannot be achieved even by the new and welcome date of September.
Our second concern is also one that has already been mentioned. It is the worry of the Electoral Commission about whether the new constituency limits are enforceable in the timescale of an election. There is nothing worse than having a rule or a law that is unenforceable, because it undermines the rest of the law. The Electoral Commission considers that Amendment 11 would at least reduce its enforceability worries, although it still fears that it would often be difficult to get the information and evidence for any breach of constituency-level spending and deal with it before polling day. Amendment 11, which, as we have heard, limits the new reporting requirements to telephone calls, literature to households and physical distribution in a defined area, seems to us eminently sensible. That sort of spending is preplanned and easy to measure. As the Electoral Commission says in supporting the amendment,
“We see benefits in defining the scope of activity covered by the constituency controls more narrowly than in Part 2 of the Bill generally”.
Given the widespread support across the House for the amendment, I think that the Government would be well advised either to heed the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and accept the amendment or, at the very least, to undertake not to implement their new constituency rules until after the 2015 election. That would give charities time to think about whether it is possible to do their accounting in that way, and it would give the Electoral Commission the opportunity to sort out those demands on enforceability. I think that the former course is better—to accept the amendment. We certainly support it.
Lord Tyler
My Lords, my noble friend Lady Thomas of Winchester said, with typical modesty, that she had only a tiny knowledge, but she has more knowledge than most of us present in the House put together on the subject of Henry VIII clauses. I entirely endorse what she said. In fact, I do not think this is a Henry VIII clause because of its very limited impact. I think it is more, in terms of longevity, like an Edward VI clause, as Henry VIII ruled for quite a long time whereas Edward VI ruled for a relatively short time. It is more likely that that is the more appropriate historical analogy. As my noble friend just said, the power is only about consequential provisions; it includes the affirmative procedure; it is effectively sun-setted, because it is limited to the general election; and it is well precedented.
My noble friend Lord Cormack said just now that these were his final words on the Bill. He presumably assumes that the other place tomorrow will accept all our amendments or produce amendments in lieu that are so acceptable all over your Lordships’ House that we do not return to the Bill again. Let me be as optimistic as he is, just for a minute, and assume that that is the case. I therefore want to place on record my gratitude and congratulations to noble friends all around the House who have done some hugely important work on what I think is now a much better Bill and a necessary Bill. I am not sure that everybody in the House agrees with that, but I certainly said at Second Reading that I thought it was necessary and it certainly has improved.
I really think that we owe a very considerable debt to the Wallace duet. Ministers in the other place should perhaps take lessons from the way in which they have responded to very important proposed improvements to this Bill, which leaves this place in a much better state than when it arrived and that is very much to their credit. I am grateful to them for the way in which they consulted many Members of your Lordships’ House.
I think the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, would agree that the engagement of a large number of other people outwith the Westminster bubble—outside Parliament—in this process was actually a plus for your Lordships’ House. We must recognise that they were stirred by concerns and anxieties that were very real. I wish it would happen on many other occasions with many other legislative proposals. We may need to build on that in future. Perhaps it may be that those organisations will take more notice in future of the way in which your Lordships’ House scrutinises legislation, and that must be to the good reputation of Parliament as a whole.
I am glad that I have had the opportunity to contribute at all stages of this Bill and I welcome the way it is now leaving this House. That is due not only to the assiduous way in which many Members of the House contributed to these debates but to the engagement of a large number of others outside the House. That is a good result.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, we have some concerns about this power, but if we are given the reassurance that the Electoral Commission will be consulted and involved, that will reduce those concerns. I think the noble Baroness, Lady Thomas, has also added her imprimatur to that. I am sure that the Government will listen to the sage advice that they get from the Electoral Commission, should this be necessary.
I am much more optimistic than the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, so I think this will be our last outing on this Bill. I am sure that the good offices of the noble Lords opposite will be able to ensure that all is accepted down the other end tomorrow and they will not send it back as ping-pong. That is my assumption. Having already learnt, from the noble Lord, Lord Horam, on Report, the words “harrying” and being “harried”—referring to the noble and right reverend Lord—I am not sure what being “wallaced” is, but I think it must mean being heard with sympathetic ears. In this case, of course, it was four sympathetic ears and not just two.
We have complained about the timing of this and the shortage of time. Our complaints are of nothing compared to what it must mean to the Bill team. We are about to finish with this, but they are now going to have to scuttle down and do the whole thing again. Therefore, not only for their efforts but for the time constraints we put on them, we should give them a big thank you.
I thank my colleagues, some of whom are here. My noble and learned friend Lord Morris and my noble friends Lady Lister, Lady Pitkeathley and Lady Mallalieu are just some of those who have contributed. I also make a small thank you to a newish member of our own team, Byron Orme. This was the first Bill which he saw through this House so perhaps we can also thank everyone who, by their umpteen amendments, have helped him learn how to do that. He has been superb for us.
I thank the third sector, which I do not think went over the top. I saw an enormous amount of practicality—certainly when we from this side of the House said, “Look, that amendment just isn’t on”, they would say, “All right”, and come back with some different words, which showed practicality and an involvement in the political process at its best. I also put my thanks to them for the briefing which they gave to us all, whether we agreed with it or not.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, I join the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, in thanking the Government for the sensible and welcome amendments that they have tabled. We have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Horam. I wonder if when he used the word “harried” he meant someone who had been harried by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, but I will leave that to one side.
However, we feel that more changes are needed to the Bill, which we have opposed from the start, for the very cogent reason spelt out by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack: it inhibits the expression of legitimate opinion. Amendment 34 goes to the heart of that. The noble Lord, Lord Horam, spoke about constituencies, which I think is a different issue, but we might be talking about something like the bedroom tax, which the National Housing Federation campaigned against, worried about the rents coming to it. Anyone who followed the Welfare Bill will know all the detail of that, so I will not go through it. Unless we can get rid of staff costs—which I hope we will within the next hour—had the bedroom tax been in the past 12 months, it is very unlikely that the National Housing Federation, which is not a charity, would have been able to campaign in the way that it is telling us its members wanted. That was not in the past 12 months but something like that could have been.
This is legitimate campaigning. Although we have heard statements from Ministers that it was never the intention of the Government that that type of activity would be within the scope of the Bill, I think all of us feel that despite good—or bad—intentions, that is not a sufficient safeguard and clarity should be provided in the Bill along the lines spelt out in Amendment 34.
Baroness Howarth of Breckland (CB)
My Lords, with due respect to the House, as I have not spoken on this, a number of the noble Lords who are proposing the amendment are suggesting that they will not take it forward but that there will be other debates. There are amendments later which are extremely important and vital to the sector if it is to carry out its work. I would be grateful if the House could move on.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, that being said, I will speak quickly and shortly to say that, while we absolutely understand the desire to stop the bureaucracy being placed on charities, we do not want that for other bits of the third sector either. This is why we want a much more fundamental change which takes them out too. They also use volunteers and have all these problems. We do not think the rest of the voluntary sector should be caught by something which other campaigners will not be. We are, obviously, interested in the Government’s response, but if the issue is simply about dual regulation then there may be a way for the Electoral Commission to devolve its responsibilities in this area to the Charity Commission. However, if it could not answer its phone to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay, last night, I am not sure I would devolve much to it at the moment.
There is a difference: there is an area of activity which is completely legitimate for charities but which will not be covered by the Charity Commission, which only polices charitable law. Even at the moment, under PPERA, there are a whole lot of things which charities are covered by but which are not policed by the Charity Commission, so extra work would be going to them. As the noble Lord, Lord Horam, said, this clause covers work which is completely within their charitable aims and, therefore, eligible under charitable law. To take out one part of the voluntary sector and leave the other in is something we cannot understand. The charities themselves did not ask for this when they gave evidence—oral and written—to the commission chaired by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. The Electoral Commission is against it, as are the NCVO and the Charity Commission. There may be a good reason for this: the overwhelming majority of charities that have contacted me are not in favour of it.
As I think the last speaker said, we are very interested in the important issue of staff costs. That is what the charities really want taking out, so I hope we can move quickly to it and the House can have a decision.
Lord Cormack
My Lords, an amendment that can produce a joint letter from the National Secular Society and the Christian Institute clearly deserves careful consideration. When they take into account that the Electoral Commission also believes that there is good sense in this proposal, I hope that your Lordships will feel likewise. I hope that we will not have to exercise ourselves by going into the Lobbies. I hope that my noble and learned friend will be able to indicate at least a significant degree of sympathy with this and, if he cannot accept these precise words, that he will undertake to come back at Third Reading next week with something similar.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, we also strongly support the amendment. It is not the provision’s intention that we have problems with but its workability. It will add an enormous bureaucratic burden. When people campaign against the proposed path of HS2, flight paths around Heathrow or fracking and so on, that is not divided up by constituency. It is strange that a Government who are cutting red tape elsewhere, and who on Monday said that they could not possibly ask special advisers to list their meetings with lobbyists, seem to want this for really small organisations. Amendment 52, which limits the requirement to telephone calls and literature aimed at households, is immensely sensible. I hope that the Government will do one of two things: either accept the amendment or put off their new rules until after the next election.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, we have just had a discussion on constituency limits, and it was also covered extensively in Committee. The House has agreed to a government amendment to remove the post-Dissolution limit to make the provision less complex, yet there remains some concern about it. From what was said in a previous debate, I think that my noble friends Lord Cormack and Lord Tyler believe that there should be some limit on constituency spending. My noble friend Lord Tyler argued for a lower limit but now wants lots of expenditure to be incurred without any limit at all. That is a concern that we have.
It is important to put this in context. Constituency spending limits do not replace the existing controls under the Representation of the People Act 1983. Those long-standing rules stipulate that third parties campaigning for or against a particular candidate may spend only up to £500 in doing so. Other than raising that amount to £700, and requiring records to be kept of such expenditure, this Bill does not affect those provisions.
In contrast to the RPA rules, Clause 28 introduces a new limit on how much a third party that is promoting the electoral success of parties, or candidates who support particular positions, can spend in individual constituencies. As has already been explained, the limit is £9,750. The reason for this amount—which might, on the surface, appear somewhat odd—is that it is equivalent to 0.05% of the maximum campaign expenditure limit applied to political parties. This limit will apply for the duration of the regulated period for a UK parliamentary election.
As has already been rehearsed, the need for constituency limits is profound. It is not right that candidates and parties should effectively be bowled out of the field purely because well funded campaigners are able to outspend them. Elections are the principal domain of political parties and candidates, and those who are not campaigning for their own electoral success should still be able to participate: that is the essence of our democracy. However, in these circumstances, we believe that the voices of such campaigners do not diminish the voices of the political parties and candidates and that constituency limits will ensure that.
The Bill makes clear that a third party’s expenditure would be wholly attributed to a constituency only if that expenditure had “no significant effect” in any other constituency. That means expenditure in a local area could, of course, be attributed to several constituencies if the effect was felt in them all. Expenditure with a wider regional, or even national, reach would be attributed proportionately to all the relevant constituencies.
My noble friend Lord Tyler has proposed an amendment to dampen the effect of these constituency limits. The amendment proposes that only certain costs —in other words, only expenditure related to certain activities—should count towards constituency limits. Specifically, the amendment says that only costs associated with election materials should be counted. That would mean the costs related to leaflets, mailshots and adverts, all of which must also have been either specifically addressed to or delivered to households in a constituency, and unsolicited telephone calls to such households.
I recognise the issue which my noble friend is trying to address, but I believe there are drawbacks. For instance, significant activities such as rallies and events would not be regulated at a constituency level if his amendment passed. I gave some of my colleagues an example of Scottish Liberal Democrat pre-election rallies in Edinburgh East. Anyone who knows Scotland will know that Liberal Democrats would not be spending money in that constituency; no doubt Edinburgh East Liberal Democrats will now write to me and say, “Do not let us down”. That was a national campaign, but an event in my own former constituency could not, by any stretch of the imagination, relate to any other—not even Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross.
In addition, material otherwise distributed or displayed would also not count towards the constituency limit. A third party could therefore freely distribute leaflets by hand in a town centre, or, indeed, in shopping areas in different parts of a constituency, in the knowledge that, because they are not being delivered to voters’ homes, the associated costs need not be accounted for in that constituency’s limit.
We are concerned that these are key gaps which would allow a third party to target an area by holding large partisan events, or flood an area by handing out election material in the street or in shopping precincts. Allowing only certain activities to count towards constituency limits would undermine the entire principle of constituency limits, on which my noble friend spoke so eloquently earlier. For that reason, I urge my noble friend to think again and to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Harries of Pentregarth
My Lords, Amendment 52A concerns constituency spending limits. It proposes that the spending limit for constituencies, instead of being 0.05%, is 0.1013%. I think your Lordships are well aware that campaigning groups and charities have found the regulation regarding constituencies exceedingly burdensome and the Electoral Commission has found them unenforceable. We take very seriously all that the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, has said about ensuring that big money does not come in. Nevertheless, we think that the constituency limits are too low. Raising them by this percentage, which reflects the wider percentage of caps, would give that greater degree of freedom which the charities and campaigning groups would like. I beg to move.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, we have Amendment 62A in this group. In order that the notes in reply can be thrown away, I give notice that I will not speak to it. Essentially, the issues were covered in the earlier group. Nevertheless, we retain our concerns about constituency limits and would very much like to have voted on the previous amendment, but there we are. However, we support the other amendment.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, has tabled an amendment which would raise the constituency limits from being the equivalent of 0.05% of the maximum campaign expenditure limit applied to political parties to 0.1013%. This would amount to almost £20,000—specifically, £19,753.50. As the noble Baroness indicated, we have already debated the issues on constituency limits. I have explained the necessity of constituency limits being in place. Without these limits in place, a third party could otherwise be able to focus the entirety of its spending power on a small part of the United Kingdom, outspending even candidates and parties in that location. That point was forcefully made by my noble friends Lord Cormack and Lord Tyler. It is important that those limits are set at an appropriate level and it is our view that the noble Lord’s amendment would not be appropriate.
I will not repeat the earlier points. We wish to promote accountability and transparency. Constituency limits relate to campaigning for or against a particular party and instances where a campaign is intended, or may reasonably be regarded as intended, to support groups of candidates who might hold particular views or support particular policies. Where such campaigning is subject to a national limit, it is also right that it is subject to a proposed constituency limit but we believe that that must be at a proportionate level. The comments we heard in earlier debates suggest that the limit we have set is too generous. Indeed, even my noble friend Lord Tyler might think it. However, we think that the limit we have set is proportionate, especially as we have removed the distinction between spending throughout the regulated period and spending during the period between the dissolution and election day. The limits are intended to remove undue influence, particularly by those campaigners who can afford to spend significant amounts of money. I do not believe that the noble and right reverend Lord’s proposal would be proportionate. It could allow substantial sums of money—sums, as we have heard, such as £12,000, which is the candidate’s limit. To have a third-party sum that is almost half as much again does not appear to be proportionate. I therefore urge the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, government Amendment 117 would exclude personal expenses from being considered for the purposes of candidates’ expenses limits at local elections in England and Wales. I do not think that this issue has yet been referred to in any of our deliberations.
The Government have brought forward the amendment to bring greater consistency to the treatment of personal expenses across the different types of election. It will also ensure that the Access to Elected Office for Disabled People Fund can successfully continue operating following the expiry of existing secondary legislation.
The access to elected office fund was set up by the Government to award grants to disabled people who are, or go on to become, candidates at elections. The fund’s grants are intended to help candidates overcome barriers to elected office that might arise as a result of their disability. Currently, such awards from the fund would not count towards candidates’ spending limits at certain elections, as they would be considered personal expenses. Noble Lords will no doubt be aware that personal expenses are exempted from candidates’ limits at certain elections, such as UK general elections, police and crime commissioner elections and Greater London Authority elections, among others.
However, there is currently no such exemption at local government elections. Given the generally low expenses limits that apply at those elections, recipients of the fund are likely to find themselves in the unusual and punitive position of having their entire expenses limit taken up by fund awards. It is a distinct unfairness that disabled candidates should have to account for costs associated with their disability when campaigning in elections. The Government therefore brought forward secondary legislation last year so that fund awards would be excluded from candidates’ spending limits at all elections. That secondary legislation will cease to have effect in June this year. The Government therefore consider that the Bill presents a key opportunity to make such an exclusion permanent, while also rationalising the position of personal expenses across various elections.
Rather than merely exclude disability expenses financed by fund payments from candidates’ limits, as the order does, this amendment instead extends the personal expenses exemption to local elections, including parish and community council elections, in England and Wales. It will cover any disability-related expenses incurred by a candidate personally, regardless of whether they are financed by the fund. This is a sensible amendment. It seems unfair to require that disability costs should count towards candidates’ spending limits at local elections when they are already excluded from certain other elections.
Amendment 127 is a related amendment that will allow the new clause inserted by Amendment 117 to be commenced by order. I beg to move.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, I simply give the amendment a warm welcome. We previously discussed this with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, probably in the Moses Room last year, but we had not seen this clever device to add the provision. We should congratulate the Government on finding a nice wheeze for this.
Lord Tyler
My Lords, this will be my shortest contribution through the whole length of this Bill, as I hope the night shift will appreciate. I want to make just one point: I am not sure whether the solution suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, is right; I am absolutely convinced that there is a problem. I instance that by saying that, as somebody who has been involved in this area for years, I have never had advice or guidance on the problems that we have heard about so often in recent weeks from anybody in the Charity Commission. The first time that I ever heard from the Charity Commission was at 6.30 last night. There is a clear need for comprehensive, careful and co-ordinated advice from the two organisations. It has not been there in the past. They have not fulfilled their responsibilities to Parliament, to which they are responsible, over many years, and it is about time that they did. Throughout today’s discussion, it has been apparent that this lack of co-ordinated information from the two organisations has been one of the major problems that many organisations have had to face, as well as parliamentarians.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, I am glad that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, made that point about the Charity Commission, because no matter how good the commitment, we want to see this co-ordinated guidance. Having this requirement in the Bill would mean that it was not just a promise but an actuality.
In addition to making sure that it happens, the provision would be a signal to the charities, given that they will be caught by new restrictions under the Bill that they have not dealt with before, that the House has taken seriously the need for them to be absolutely clear and for there to be co-ordinated guidance on that. There is no downside to having it in the Bill, so I hope that the noble and learned Lord has one yes that he can pull out of his bag at this stage.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, my noble friend Lord Hodgson tabled a similar amendment in Committee and brings forward this amendment to require the Electoral Commission to produce guidance for third parties and for that guidance to be co-ordinated with the Charity Commission, particularly to consider the impact of Part 2. As has been said, the issue was discussed at length in Committee, and it is clear to the Government that there is a lack of understanding among third parties and charities as to exactly what are their responsibilities under existing PPERA provisions—the point made by my noble friend Lord Tyler. That the Bill amends those provisions reinforces the need for clarity. The Government made clear in Committee that the issue of guidance and whether a duty should be imposed on the Electoral Commission would be revisited at Report.
Those are not just honeyed words, because since our debates in Committee, the Government have discussed with the Electoral Commission the importance of its producing clear guidance. It is essential that such guidance take into account the impact on charities in particular. Although charities do not campaign in support of political parties at elections and only two have ever registered as third parties to date, there is still an obvious need to ensure that they fully understand the workings of the new regime—that has been made very apparent during our many debates today—and whether they might be held to account by the new provisions as a result of their activities.
As the independent regulator, it is of course for the commission to provide this guidance, but the Government agree that the views of the charities regulator, the Charity Commission, must also be taken into account. Indeed, this involves not just the Charity Commission but its equivalent in Scotland, OSCR, and the Charity Commission for Northern Ireland. Suitable guidance, particularly aimed at charities, can come only if it is jointly produced.
I am pleased to note what the Electoral Commission stated in its briefing to Parliament. If your Lordships will allow me, I shall repeat the words already cited by my noble friend Lord Horam, because they are important. That is why this is substance, not just words. The commission’s precise words are:
“We are committed to working with the UK’s three charity regulators to ensure that charities have clear and reliable guidance about how to comply with the rules. The Electoral Commission and Charity Commission for England and Wales will produce a joint introductory guide for charities that need to understand if their activities are covered by non-party campaigning rules ... Our guidance will explain key areas of the rules such as deciding what counts as regulated spending, how to manage regulated spending, and how the rules cover co-ordinated campaigning in coalitions”.
The Government welcome that clear commitment. At the big risk of quoting again from the e-mail from the Charity Commission, sent at 18.08 yesterday evening, in that e-mail, under the heading, “Co-ordinated guidance for charities that need to understand if they are covered by the rules”, Mr Rowley states:
“The Charity Commission and the Electoral Commission have committed to producing co-ordinated guidance along with a joint introductory guide for charities ahead of the regulated period for the 2015 General Election should charities not be exempted. We are sensitive to the particular help that some charities may need to comply with both electoral and charity law. In the past we have worked closely with the Electoral Commission to ensure their advice for charities on complying with electoral law and our guidance on charities and political campaigning in an election period is aligned and have continued to work closely together throughout the passage of this Bill”.
The Government will continue in our discussions with the Electoral Commission. We will follow them up, and I am sure that our brief debate this evening will have further reinforced to the Electoral Commission the need for it to provide clarity to campaigners. It is the Government’s view that the Electoral Commission must produce guidance in consultation or co-ordination with the Charity Commission and the other charity regulators in the United Kingdom, particularly with regard to how charities might be required to comply with the regime.
I can see why noble Lords say that there is nothing to be lost by having the provision in the Bill, but when a clear and unequivocal commitment has been made by the Electoral Commission, and by the Charity Commission in the quote I have just read, as my noble friend Lord Horam said, it is unnecessary to put this in the Bill. In the light of these commitments, which I think go further than honeyed words, I ask my noble friend to withdraw his amendment.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts(10 years, 8 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Campbell-Savours (Lab)
My Lords, I want to speak for less than a minute; I spoke at some length on this matter in Committee. The Bill is deceiving the public. The public expect the matter of the registration of lobbyists to be dealt with in this legislation. However, Parliament is now considering a Bill which excludes the vast majority of people in the industry. I object and I hope that the amendment of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, is accepted by the House.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, I also support Amendments 1 and 11. I hope that I will not also have to support the amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Norton, as we hope that we will have made the changes that will make supporting it unnecessary. Amendment 1 also stands in the name of my noble friend Lady Royall and myself. It is already clear that establishing a register only of consultant firms would add nothing to the existing voluntary register. It would omit hundreds of employers—the in-house, public bodies, charities and, perhaps most importantly, trade associations—as well as more than 1,000 individuals who work in this industry.
We have heard the Government boast about being part of the Open Government Partnership, and Ministers say that the public should be able to see who is lobbying Ministers. However, as we know, the Bill will not do that. It will only tell us the companies for which, for example, Bell Pottinger has had direct contact with a Minister over the past quarter. It will not name the individual lobbyists concerned, nor will it identify the company on whose behalf that meeting took place. So if a lobbying company met a Minister, for example, on behalf of a defence company, we still would not know that. In the hypothetical Bell Pottinger case, it has, according to Marketing Week, some 900 clients; so we would only know that Bell Pottinger was meeting somebody on behalf of one of those 900 clients but not which one it was. If the Minister, instead of meeting a consultant, met the actual defence company itself, or its trade association, that would not appear on the register at all, because the lobbyists would be direct employees.
This is very different from the United States where, we understand, Mr Cameron’s election guru, Jim Messina, has just taken up a job with the American Gaming Association, which is about to lobby on online gambling. That will all be declared, but in the UK, there will be no record of such lobbying by organisations such as the Association of British Bookmakers, despite the public interest in knowing who is lobbying the Government, in this case, on gambling.
According to today’s Daily Mail, the Chancellor took the boss of one of the world’s biggest makers of betting machines on his trip to Beijing. That is something that the company would not have to declare because it would be doing that lobbying direct. It is interesting that the Rank Organisation discloses far more than the Bill actually asks. It has decided to set out the spending that it makes in its government and regulatory affairs work—for example, £115,000 to Luther Pendragon, Ernst & Young and FTI and another £88,000 in membership fees to three trade organisations: the Bingo Association, National Casino, and the Remote Gambling Association. However, none of those would be required under the Bill. So, congratulations to Rank but not to the Government.
Similarly, we would know nothing about meetings between the big six energy companies and HMT or DECC officials because they use their direct staff for that. Or consider the anti-electronic-cigarette lobby, largely funded, I understand, by the pharmaceutical industry, which produces nicotine replacement therapy and ideally would like e-cigarettes off the market. Johnson & Johnson, GSK and Novartis have teams dedicated to that lobbying work, and none of that would be known under the current provisions.
I am afraid that the Bill is rather a damp squib and, unless we amend it, it will exclude virtually all business lobbying, whether done by the companies themselves or by their trade bodies. Worse, even where one of the big agencies such as Weber Shandwick or Bell Pottinger register, we will still not have a list of their staff so that if one of their lobbyists met a Minister, we would be no more the wiser about who that lobbyists’ clients actually were.
In the debate on Part 2, the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who is not currently in her place, warned us of the danger to our democracy of American-style lobbyists, and indeed her autobiography, which I recommend, draws on her wide experience of that side of the Atlantic. She talks of the powers of lobbyists there and the extraordinary influence of organisations such as the American Association of Retired Persons, the National Rifle Association and the American Israel Political Action Committee. As she and your Lordships’ House must know, though, none of those or their UK equivalents would have to be registered under the Bill—nor the British Insurance Brokers’ Association; the Building Society Association; Philip Morris; FOREST; the nuclear industry; One Hub or None, which is in favour of Heathrow’s expansion; the CBI; the TUC; or the drinks industry, despite 130-odd meetings with civil servants to resist minimum unit pricing.
What is the point of the Bill, particularly this clause, if it does nothing to shed light on what goes on behind closed doors in Whitehall? For the sake of democracy and good governance, we need to see who is lobbying whom and about what. The register should cover the act of lobbying—the status, I think the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth, said—not the type of lobbyist, otherwise this is open to abuse. If an issue becomes very sensitive, you can simply have the lobbyists who have been working for an agency become directly in-house and put on the payroll of a particular company at that time, and then none of their activity will have to be registered. Or a small lobbyist could simply work part-time for 10 clients and be paid directly by them, and then we would know nothing about them.
A list of lobbying firms is not enough. That is not what was foreseen in the coalition agreement, it is not what the lobbyists themselves want and it is not what Unlock Democracy or Spinwatch want. The charities and trade unions have told us that they are very content for their public affairs professionals to be registered and to disclose their lobbying meetings. We strongly support Amendment 1 regarding the production of a proper, comprehensive and statutory register of all professions lobbying the Government. Democracy demands nothing less.
The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Wallace of Tankerness) (LD)
My Lords, the amendment moved by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, and supported by the opposition Front Bench would amend Clause 1 such that the register applied to professional, rather than consultant, lobbyists. The noble and learned Lord said that if the amendment was carried then it would need some consequential amendments. I respectfully suggest that it would need more than just consequential amendments because there is no definition of “professional lobbyists” in what he is offering to the House, of which I will say more in a moment.
From the discussions which I understand took place in Committee on this issue and on amendments previously tabled by the Opposition, it appears that they would capture—as the noble and learned Lord and the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, made clear that they would wish them to—so-called in-house lobbyists in addition to consultants and, with Amendment 11, also employees. However, as I have said, there is no definition given of professional lobbying to accompany the amendment and its effect would therefore be that the provisions of this Part would be undermined such that a functioning register could not be established. I do not believe that that could simply be resolved by a number of consequential amendments.
We have discussed at length, in various debates on the Bill, the importance of clear definitions. Until now, the Opposition have struggled somewhat to define what they mean by “professional lobbying”, and now seem to have abandoned such a definition altogether. It is vital that we understand exactly who is intended to be captured by the amendments—whether this includes, for example, charities and all the paid employees of charities. Does it include church groups? Does it include the vicar who makes representations on behalf of his parishioners, because he is in paid employment? The noble Baroness shakes her head, but the problem is that without any definition we simply do not know who is intended to be covered by what she proposes.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
We have said throughout that the definition used by the professional organisations—which would absolutely answer every point, as I am sure the noble and learned Lord must have read—is one that we are very content with.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, it is fair enough to say that, but it is not what the House is being asked to vote on today. It is being asked to vote on something which is devoid of any definition.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
There are two issues. The first is that there are some enormously large employers and we do not know whether they are lobbying over a particular application for planning permission, for a new medicine or for something else. The second is that unless they meet a Minister or a Permanent Secretary under the silly bit of this Bill, we will know nothing; whether they meet senior civil servants, Bill teams or policymakers in the Civil Service, that will not be covered at all.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, we shall come on to the second point made by the noble Baroness. I think it is the subject matter of the next group of amendments. We would not know any more just by listing the names of in-house employees who engaged in lobbying. You would still not know from doing that—and that is what this amendment seeks to do—whether that person was actually lobbying with regard to planning permission or not. That is why it is important that the parallel provisions which the Government are doing in quarterly returns as to which people Ministers and Permanent Secretaries are meeting is an important part of the whole picture. We shall deal in a moment with the points made by the noble Baroness because I think that she is missing out that crucial part.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, Amendment 13 stands in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Royall. I shall also speak to Amendments 14 and 23. This Bill should be about raising standards within the lobbying industry, not least to provide reassurance for the public about the behaviour of lobbyists. While we therefore welcome the Government’s amendments, which build on the arguments that we made in Committee—because they at least recognise the existence of a code of conduct—it is extremely regrettable that the Government have not gone one step further and made it a requirement for registered lobbyists to undertake to abide by a code of conduct. Without something which makes a code of conduct obligatory, there will be absolutely no qualification as to who can get on to the register. Yet once someone is on a register, they will put it on the bottom of their headed notepaper and it will look as though there is some sort of approval for being on that register. That, of course, will not be the case.
I raised this question in Committee and as a result, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, kindly wrote and clarified to me that even if someone was convicted under the Bribery Act, that would not prohibit them registering as a consultant lobbyist. As the noble Lord wrote in the letter, the register is not an accreditation system and anyone on it will not be considered to be “approved”. In other words, regrettably, this does nothing about raising standards or changing behaviour and nothing about giving assurance to the public that the lobbying of their elected Government is legitimate and above board.
Without any such a requirement to comply with a code, it will also be impossible to remove even the worst offenders from the register—the “slightly dodgy” lobbyists which were described by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, in the earlier debate. Our amendment to the Government’s Amendment 12 makes the voluntary adherence to a code a requirement.
Our lesser amendment, Amendment 23, would permit the registrar at some time in the future to publish a code of conduct. This might simply be a best practice code, an indication of expected behaviour or an indication against which any allegation to a professional body might be judged. However, it would keep in play the idea that the register should be about behaviour and not simply a list of lobbying companies. I beg to move.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, I do not think the noble Lord can reasonably expect a blanket application. There may be reasons—I do not know what they might be—that are not malign as to why a particular group has not signed up. We already know that a majority of lobbying firms sign up to and adhere to the respective codes of conduct, but we believe that making it a statutory requirement would lead to unnecessary pressure and that what we are proposing has struck the right balance.
I have a lot of sympathy for the point the noble Lord is making but it would not be appropriate to make a sweeping general obligation on all future Ministers when you cannot foresee particular circumstances that would occur at any time or place. I believe we have struck the right balance. I urge the House to support the Government’s amendments and I urge the noble Baroness not to press the amendment in her name.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for what I think is his support for the approach we are taking on this.
Of course, Amendment 23 would be only permissive. It does not require the registrar to publish a code of conduct; it simply permits the registrar, should at some time in the future he or she feel the need to, to be able to do so. I am slightly surprised that the Government cannot even allow a registrar at some time in the future to be able to publish a code of conduct. They seem to be turning their back on any interest in raising standards.
The Minister spoke about the Bribery Act. Of course, the issue is that nobody will be able to be removed from this register for any criminal offence. We could have people convicted all sorts of tax evasion—anything—still on the register. I and others think that this would be very misleading as it will appear that they are on a statutory register and therefore have some stamp of approval.
As to the question of who would not sign up to it, I am sure that your Lordships’ House is well aware that the Association of Professional Political Consultants is supporting our amendment. It very much feels that it will be only the bad boy who does not bother signing up and that this really undermines the code of conduct.
I am not going to test the opinion of the House on this amendment. But in withdrawing it, I will say two things. First, it was very sad to read in the paper yesterday that the UN special rapporteur called this Bill,
“a stain on British democracy”.
Secondly, my fear is that, as per the warning of the Prime Minister, the next scandal waiting to happen will be from a consultant lobbyist, it will be behaviour that would have been caught by this code and it will be this Government who said they did not want to make signing up to a code mandatory. With those words, I withdraw the amendment.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
I was going to bring this up in our stand part debate, because it is important. With the permission of the Committee, I will do so now. On Monday an impression was given—I am sure misleadingly—by the noble and learned Lord, which he has just now repeated. He said that,
“organisations … will incur controlled expenditure … only where their activities, ‘can reasonably be regarded as intended to promote or procure electoral success’, of ‘parties’ or ‘candidates’”.—[Official Report, 16/12/13; col. 1042.]
He keeps using that phrase, which is accurate, and in the Bill. However, that is only part of the definition. The House needs to recognise the point that my noble friend made on Monday. It is not simply about promoting but also, of course, about reducing the chances of electoral success. I think that the examples given were of the campaign against the war in Iraq or against the bedroom tax.
I will make just one other point. The law goes on to state:
“In determining whether expenditure can reasonably be regarded as intended to promote or procure electoral success … it is immaterial that it can reasonably be regarded as intended to achieve any other purpose as well”.
That, therefore, could be activity that is aimed at some other purpose, but which may damage a party, and so it would be covered. I am sure that the Minister did not want in any way to give a misleading impression, but by continuing to concentrate only on activity to promote a party rather than to harm it by discussing a policy—a policy that could suddenly become it—that is wider than his words perhaps suggest.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I hear what the noble Baroness says. I am sure, as she recognises, that it is difficult to be criticised for quoting directly from the Bill. However, she makes the point that there could be detriment to a party. It is quite proper, too, that if a third-party organisation was to campaign to try to defeat the Labour Party’s chances in a range of constituencies and its activities could be quite reasonably seen as aiming to thwart the Labour Party in a campaign, it is important that there is transparency—that people know where the money comes from and what is behind the campaign to do down a particular party. On Monday we had a debate on principal purpose which the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, introduced. Of course there can be other purposes. It may be that in trying to do down the Labour Party that group hopes to raise funds and increase its membership. However, that does not detract from the fact that there is an electoral purpose, which is what we seek to catch. I see the noble Baroness shaking her head, but it is important to remind the House that the definition we are talking about is one that her party put into legislation in the 2000 Act. It is slightly ironic that I am having to defend that definition, when her own party put it into the original 2000 Act.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
That Act covered publications, which are quite clearly and easily defined as this. The worry about this clause is that it includes rallies that might happen. They are not aimed at harming the Labour Party. On Iraq, they were aimed at stopping the war. The effect was to affect a political party. Therefore again, the Minister is suggesting that the activity has to be aimed at electoral outcome rather than at a particular policy. Every group that has spoken this morning about this as a result of reading his words on Monday, says that his words are narrower than what its lawyers tell them is suggested by the wording of the Bill.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, it is not a subjective test—we made that very clear. The Labour Party did not put a subjective test into its legislation in 2000. It is an objective test. Therefore, to say that it is solely about what a particular third-party organisation aims to do is not a fair representation of what it says. It is about what can reasonably be regarded. That is an objective test, and we rehearsed all the arguments for and against an objective or subjective test. Therefore it is not unreasonable to remind the Committee about what is here in the Act, which is a definition that the Government introduced by amendment in the other place because people clearly expressed that they wanted us to use the tried and tested definition that was used in the elections of 2005 and 2010. However, I accept that there has been a perception of the possibility of a chilling effect. I think I said that on Monday, and I accept that representations have been made to me and to my noble friends.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett
My Lords, I wish briefly to draw attention to what the Joint Committee on Human Rights said about this. I am a member of that committee and I apologise because I have a meeting this afternoon and will not be here for much of the rest of our debates. The committee acknowledged that the Government were right to review the maximum spending limits; I imagine that they need to be reviewed every so often, not least because of inflation, which the amendment addresses.
The committee’s report makes the point about the lower limits now being,
“applied to a wider list of controlled activities (such as media events, rallies, canvassing)”,
and that,
“the Government admits that it is difficult to assess how much is currently spent on these additional activities by third parties and therefore it is difficult to assess the impact of the measure. The Government’s inability to provide this assessment is of concern, and adds to the overall uncertainty and lack of understanding regarding the Bill”.
Is the Minister able to provide some assessment of what this will mean and allay the concerns that have been raised? In the absence of that and of decent evidence, which is generally lacking around the Bill, I strongly support the commission’s amendment.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, it will probably come as no surprise that the Labour Party supports reducing the cost of politics, not simply because that is right nor just because of the warnings sounded by the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who is not in her place, on Monday and this morning, but perhaps because Labour is outspent by the Conservatives. The current situation is bad for democracy, not simply for ourselves, and the major reason is because money and politics rarely mix. We want all groups, candidates and parties to be able to put their views to the electorate without needing to raise large sums or without having to be rich enough to fund a campaign themselves.
Although we are slightly unsure about the wording of the Bill, we think we have much in common with the intention behind the Government’s changes, in that we support transparency and lowering costs. However, we are concerned, for the reasons that we have just heard, about what they have sought to do and the figures that they have chosen. Neither the noble Lord, Lord Horam, nor the rest of us know where the figures come from. The Electoral Commission quite rightly says that it is for the Government to propose and for Parliament to decide on the appropriate limits, in order to balance that freedom of expression against controls of undue influence. The commission listed some of the factors we ought to think about, such as inflation and the wider range of activities. However, we find it difficult to see how the Government have thought about those matters in the way that my noble friend Lady Lister suggested because we have seen nothing of the assumptions that they have made about the costs associated with policy research, press, meetings, debates and staff, which will now be covered by the Bill—and over a 12-month period.
In the earlier debate the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, compared what a third party might be able to spend against what a candidate might spend; of course we are talking about a 12-month period, not when the candidates are affected in the short campaign. So, as others have done, we ask: what are the factors that led to these figures? Were they grabbed out of the ether, rather like the 500 seats in the Commons that the Government, as the House will remember, were set on last time? Did these figures just come out of a roulette wheel without rhyme or reason, or is there something that we could look at to test the Government’s assumptions that these are the rights figures? Without that, it is very hard to see the logic behind them.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, again we are grateful to the noble and leaned Lord, Lord Hardie, for introducing this part of the Bill and the consideration of the overall spending limits. As no doubt the Committee is aware, third parties are subject to limits on the amount of controlled expenditure that they may incur during the regulated period of a United Kingdom parliamentary general election. The initial figures set out in PPERA 2000 set the limit at £988,500 for the whole of the United Kingdom and this Bill, as has been heard, seeks to amend that limit to £390,000. The limit in either case is of course the aggregate of individual limits of each part of the United Kingdom. That means that expenditure is allocated in accordance with where its effect is most significantly felt. If a body has its head office in Scotland, for example, but undertakes and targets its campaign work only in England, then that spending will be allocated to the English limit and not the Scottish one.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, has tabled amendments so that the spending limit for third parties remains as it is in PPERA 2000, and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, has proposed limits that would take the spending limit to £1,406,000 across the United Kingdom as a whole. This substantial increase, as I understand it, is to reflect inflation since the original limit was set 13 years ago. There has been considerable discussion, not just in this House but also in the other place, about third-party campaigners and the potential to incur significant amounts of expenditure in campaigns. This was spoken about very eloquently by my noble friend Lady Williams. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, indicated that her party has no desire to see the cost of politics increase, nor, indeed, do we want to see a disproportionate effect on elections by those who have lots of money to throw around.
There is also the potential, given that limits are imposed on political parties—let us remember that, if we look at this in its full context, there are limits on political parties—that we would undermine that regime if their supporters could still demonstrate their backing by diverting funding to a formally or informally aligned party. Allowing very large sums to be spent to the benefit of parties that are candidates in this way risks, I believe, undermining the basic rules that have evolved over the years in terms of restriction of political spending in elections. The nature of third parties means that controls on their spending are necessary. I do not believe that we have really debated limits, but I do not think that anyone has challenged the principle that there should be some control on substantial spending.
There is some evidence of third-party expenditure increasing. In 2010, eight third-party organisations spent more than £100,000, although, as I think my noble friend Lord Horam correctly pointed out, most who were registered—and only 30 were registered—spent considerably less than that. Indeed, some who were registered spent nothing at all. Although there were eight who spent more than £100,000 in 2010, in 2005 only two groups did so. I believe, and we have said all these things many times, that it is about trying to strike the right balance to ensure transparency. We believe that the figure in the Bill is a reasonable limit for national third-party campaigning. Most campaigns in the last election did not spend anywhere near either the total amount that was available then or the amount that is proposed in this Bill.
It has been argued that these previous campaigns did not require third parties to account for a much wider range of activities, but it is worth reflecting on the fact that the Green Party, a political party, spent £330,000 on its national campaign in the 2010 general election. That campaign activity included incurring expenses on advertising, unsolicited materials, manifestos, market research, transport, media events and rallies—all activities that third parties should also account for. No one can doubt that the Green Party had a very strong voice in that campaign and indeed succeeded in getting its first ever Member elected to the House of Commons. It was a voice within a national debate. In fact, only four out of well over 100 registered political parties spent more than £390,000 in 2010: the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the UK Independence Party.
We are setting a limit which, as I said, only four political parties exceeded in 2010, and a party that was recognised as having played a full part, albeit without standing in every constituency, in a national election in all its activities spent less than £390,000. We do not believe that third parties should be dominating the electoral landscape—by “third parties” I do not mean political parties but such as we have discussed in this debate, as of course I think third parties have an important role to play in the party-political scene—and creating campaigning inequality among political parties. We believe that the spending limits are appropriate and proportionate.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, drew attention to the differential that exists in Schedule 10 to the 2000 Act, and I accept that this Bill is looking at the UK limits. It will also recognise that while you might have a campaign to be undertaken on a pan-UK basis, it is not quite the same as if you were focusing solely on Scotland for a Scottish election and so I think that there is some scope for a differential.
We believe that, having reduced the limit to a sum that has not inhibited, or would not have caught, the Green Party at the last election or indeed the vast majority of third parties that were registered and campaigned, this is not an unreasonable balance to be struck. I invite the noble and learned Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, we gave notice of our intention to oppose the Question in order to say some of the things that have now been covered, so the Committee will be pleased to learn that I shall not repeat them. One of them is the lack of rationale given for the figures for the threshold and, indeed, for the spending limit. I congratulate the Minister, who has managed to give a whole answer without explaining why the figures were chosen. Given the questions that he was asked, it is a clever move. It remains the case that the Electoral Commission, which after all is the Government’s independent adviser, has called on them to raise the thresholds and put up the spending limits, because everything is going to be covered. Some organisations have been mentioned already, but the BMA, NCVO, RSPB, Oxfam, the Royal College of Nursing and ACEVO, which have to work with this, all say that they do not know why the changes to the thresholds and the spending limits are there, or how the new figures were chosen. That remains our worry about this clause.
I want to add one point, but I do not want to repeat the exchange that the noble and learned Lord and I had on the first group of amendments today. He again used the phrase that the provisions will cover only those things that are done in a way to “influence” an election. But as we know, the law says that it is immaterial whether something can be regarded as intended to achieve any other purpose as well, and therefore things that can be done not with the intention of influencing an election could well be covered. The definition of electoral material goes on to include, for example, a definition of a “candidate”, which,
“includes a future candidate, whether identifiable or not”.
There is no need to mention parties or candidates by name for an activity to be deemed to be controlled expenditure. That, I think, is one of the issues that remains with us even after the debates today. I think the Government still feel that the NGOs are exaggerating the potential damage. However, the NGOs will continue to worry about what is covered by both sets of limits in this clause, and by the lack of a rationale for the new figures.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for raising these issues once again. The Government accept that the figures for the spending threshold for registration set out in the Bill need to be revisited, and I suspect that the outcome of that will reflect the concerns that have been expressed. However, I do not think I can honestly say that there is a scientific means of arriving at a figure, any more than I suspect the Labour Government used a scientific method to reach their figures for spending limits and thresholds in 2000. I repeat that the balance we seek is one that will secure greater transparency but not lead to unnecessary regulation, particularly taking into account the concerns that have been expressed by a number of smaller organisations. I hope that when we come back with our amendment, it will meet the test of not imposing undue burdens but providing for fair transparency.
I shall not rehearse again all the arguments that were made in the debate immediately prior to this on the total spending limit, but we must have regard to the fact of what one political party is able to do, and bear in mind that the fifth report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life thought that the existing limits were quite generous. Of course, no science will ever get this absolutely right, but the figure will nevertheless still allow the healthy involvement of a number of campaigning organisations.
The possible difference between us is that the noble Baroness takes the view that a subjective test should apply, whereas we are sticking by the objective test. That is a perfectly legitimate difference of view for us to have, but I believe that the objective test is more rational. It is reasonable and is the one that informed the legislation currently on the statute book. In respect of some of the concerns that the noble Baroness has expressed, organisations which are properly campaigning on issues and trying to persuade Governments to change policy or reinforce policies they already have would not be seen, on an objective test, as trying to secure an electoral advantage.
I hope that that reassurance will be passed on because it is important that those organisations continue to play their very proper role in trying to persuade Governments, Oppositions or whoever about particular policy issues. There is certainly no desire on the past of this Government to try in any way to inhibit that. With those remarks, which I hope were reassuring, I ask the Committee to agree that the clause should stand part of the Bill.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, we have talked about taking money out of politics. If I heard the noble Lord, Lord Horam, correctly, he received a donation from the noble Lord, Lord Ashcroft, of £6,000. It is Labour Party policy that donations should be limited to £5,000, so perhaps the most important thing that we could do to get money out of politics—not under the Bill—would be for him and other members of his party to sign up to a maximum donation of £5,000.
Whatever the intention of constituency limits, we have heard that they are unworkable for campaigning organisations and certainly unenforceable by the Electoral Commission. As the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, said, political parties do not have these rules for national campaigning, let alone for a whole 12-month period. They do not have to account for staff costs nor try to parcel up their national spending by ward or constituency boundaries. However, political parties at least have a very good reason to organise by constituency; campaigning organisations do not. They campaign against wind farms, for a new zebra crossing, against payday lenders, or in favour of badgers. As we know, badgers move, as does HS2, which will run through hills and dales, counties and boroughs. Such campaigning does not fall into neat little constituency boundaries, which of course the Government anyway want to change for every election under their new law.
The new limit is £9,750 per constituency spread over a full year. That must cover costs of staff, hire of halls, adverts for meetings, posters and publicity. It will cause difficulty for small organisations which run a campaign limited to a geographical area but also for national campaigns with a federated structure. The boundaries for national and even local organisations rarely follow the constituency boundaries that we in politics know well.
Those organisations will need to estimate whether their campaigning costs relate to activity in particular constituencies and ensure that their planned spending will then stay within the new limit for each activity in each constituency. That will be problematic. First, they will have to find what the constituencies are. Many of them will not know—they are not political anoraks and they do not know the boundaries of those constituencies. They will then have to see which bit of spending lies where. It will be different for local organisations, but it will also be, as has been mentioned, virtually unenforceable within the time limit of this election by the Electoral Commission, particularly where breaches occur in the last few weeks of a campaign. It will require real-time monitoring; it will require the commission to respond to allegations across 650 constituencies during a whole 12-month period—that is, starting in May. I defy anyone who, like me, has run an organisation to be up and able to do by then something of that nature.
As has been said, this clause is incomprehensible, unworkable and unnecessary. The Conservatives, of course, have form on Clause 28. I suggest that they get rid of this one so that they do not have the same trouble as they did with the last one.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, it was clear from many of our previous debates that the issue of constituency limits had attracted considerable discussion, not to say controversy. The fundamental point here, which was very well made by my noble friends Lord Tyler and Lord Horam, is that it would be wrong if a third party could choose to direct its entire national spending limit at only one small part of the UK, thereby focusing the full force of the considerable spending available to it on that very small part. It would be disproportionate if that was one constituency. That point was articulated. It would be a travesty of the democratic process if so much was focused on one constituency.
To prevent such occurrences, the Bill introduces what I admit is a new provision whereby third parties will be permitted to spend only a certain proportion of their controlled expenditure in individual constituencies. Clause 28(6) limits per constituency spending to 0.05% of the maximum campaign expenditure limits applied to political parties. This amounts to £9,750. The limit applies for the duration of the regulated period for a UK parliamentary general election.
It is proposed that a third party’s expenditure would be wholly attributed to a constituency provided that the expenditure had “no significant effect” in any other constituency. It is of course possible that expenditure in a local area may be attributed to a number of constituencies—for example, in Lewisham, where I think that it would be relatively straightforward to see three constituencies.
I accept that if someone was handing out leaflets in Princes Street in Edinburgh, it would be very difficult to say that that was focused on a constituency—which I think used to be Edinburgh Central, but these boundary changes happen so often—and was not having an effect elsewhere. If anyone was handing out leaflets in the constituency which I formerly had the privilege of representing, in Kirkwall or in Lerwick, it would be almost impossible to suggest that it was intended to have an effect on any other constituency, as it would be focused in the one place. The concerns that have been expressed about how you identify boundaries will often be easier to determine with regard to specific case examples.
In response to a point that the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, raised on a number of occasions, I should stress that the limits on constituency spending do not remove or replace the important existing controls of the Representation of the People Act 1983. These rules are long-standing and stipulate that third parties campaigning for a candidate or candidates in a particular constituency—which includes negative campaigning against others—may spend only up to £500. Clause 34 would raise this amount to £700. While introducing a limited requirement to keep a record of such expenditure, the Bill does not otherwise affect the provisions of the Representation of the People Act. Third parties campaigning in local campaigns would be well advised to heed the strictures of the Act. First and foremost, if a particular organisation or group intends to go into a single constituency to promote a particular candidate, or to attack a particular candidate, it would be well advised to have regard to the provisions of the Representation of the People Act.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I accept that clarification and apologise if I misrepresented the noble and learned Lord. As I think my noble friend Lord Horam indicated, the current political parties expenditure rules are not always the easiest to enforce. Very often the best enforcers are the opposition—because, as those of us who have had active experience of political campaigns know, if there is any hint that somewhere or other there has been jiggery-pokery or money spent that should not have been, the candidates on the receiving end will be very quick to alert the regulatory authorities to what has gone on.
The same applies to the question that was raised, quite fairly, about how expenditure could be attributed to a constituency. We believe that it would be in line with the current guidance that attributes spending between different parts of the United Kingdom. Where spending in constituency A has a minor effect in constituency B, the entire spending amount should be allocated to the constituency that it was aimed at. For example, if a third party advertised in a local paper in constituency A that just happened to be distributed in a small part of constituency B, the entire amount should be allocated to constituency A.
That was really brought home to me when the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, asked, “How would we allocate the timing of the activities of a battle bus?”. I say this with no criticism whatever, but those who have not been involved in party election campaigning do not understand the difficulties that are sometimes experienced by those who have to act as election agents in allocating and working out expenditure returns for those who are involved in it. The noble Baroness wishes to intervene but I am just going to give an example. In 1979, my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood, then David Steel, the leader of the Liberal Party, probably introduced the battle bus to British politics. Immediately after that election in May 1979, I was adopted as the Liberal European candidate for the south of Scotland, which included the constituency of Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles. I had as my election agent the agent for Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles, who had been David Steel’s election agent in the general election that immediately preceded it. He went by the wonderful name of Riddle Dumble, and, as my election agent, he told me, “I’ve got this nightmare of trying to do David’s election expenses return; I have to sit down and allocate the amount of time that his battle bus was in the constituency, and what part of it represented constituency campaigning and what was part of the national campaign”. This is not something that is new.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
We are professionals in a party. It is our job to run elections. That is the whole point that we are making. It is core to us; it is what we are trained for. I ran European elections. We know about it; we train our agents; we have the systems and have our computers set up for that; and we know ward boundaries and constituency boundaries. Here we are talking about different organisations that are here to help people with a drink problem, people in poverty and people who are going to be affected by the bedroom tax. They do not get trained in the way that we do.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I hear what the noble Baroness says, but if we are dealing with a situation where an organisation is trying to intervene in a constituency for the purpose of promoting the electoral advantage of one particular party, one particular candidate or a series of candidates in an area, then it is not unreasonable that there might be some responsibilities that go with that, particularly with the kind of substantial volume of money that we are talking about being spent in one or a number of focused geographical areas. No one is asking them to account for the work that they are doing in trying to tackle mental health issues or alcohol problem issues—that does not arise. They are caught by this only if the amount that they are spending in one particular constituency or group of constituencies is caught by these provisions, in which case there might just be a responsibility that goes with that. The point that I am making is that there is nothing new about that in terms of its enforceability. It is something that people, not least the Electoral Commission, have been grappling with for some time.
My noble friend Lord Tyler tabled a series of amendments that he hoped would add clarity to the provision. The word “clarity” is something that the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, and the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, would certainly echo. My noble friend quoted the Electoral Commission with regard to his Amendment 170A, which would mean that election materials—leaflets, mailshots, adverts and so on that were specifically addressed to or delivered to households in a constituency, and unsolicited telephone calls to households—counted towards constituency limits. The main issue that I have with this amendment is that there could be key activities, such as rallies or events that were deliberately focused on an area, which would not be regulated, and it would not restrict material from otherwise being distributed or displayed. As I said, leaflets being handed out in the middle of George Square in Glasgow are different from leaflets being handed out in the marketplace of Thurso, for example, in the Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross constituency, which could not be said to be influencing any other constituency. However, I hear what numerous contributors have said in this debate about simplification, and there is an obligation on us to look at the provisions, without giving any commitment, to see if there is the possibility of looking generally at the question of simplification.
My noble friend also tabled Amendments 170B and 170D, altering constituency limits so that the figure was £10,000 for the whole of the regulated period and £5,000 for the post-Dissolution period. He has already pointed out that RPA kicks in for the post-Dissolution period. As for the proposal that there should be an opportunity for the Secretary of State to amend the constituency limits by order, there is already provision in Clause 30 for the Secretary State to amend constituency limits by order on the recommendation of the Electoral Commission. I hope that that covers his concerns, but no doubt if he thinks that they do not meet what he was proposing, he will indicate that to me.
His final amendment was one that I thought had much to commend it in terms of, as he said, trying to encourage political engagement. Amendment 170G would allow the constituency limit to be exceeded to a maximum of £15,000, or £10,000 in the post-Dissolution period, if a third party’s controlled expenditure was being funded by donations of less than £250 from donors within a parliamentary constituency. It would also allow a third party to spend up to 50% more than the national limit that would otherwise apply.
Because amounts below £500 are not currently considered to be donations under PPERA, the amendment would require a third party to carry out permissibility checks and record all donations, however small. This would be a fundamental change to the PPERA donation rules and would be likely to involve unmanageable compliance. Given the concerns that have been expressed about compliance and regulatory burdens, that factor would have to be borne in mind. It would increase the burden and would also risk having the opposite effect to what was intended. A large third party organisation with members and donors across the country may be able to identify sufficient donors in each constituency to give itself a disproportionate advantage, whereas a small organisation funded by very small donations would not be able to benefit in the same way.
I referred earlier to the Representation of the People Act. We are also concerned that linking expenditure to local donations in constituencies in this way could quite easily risk confusion with and undermine RPA rules or third party candidate campaigns, and I know that my noble friend would not wish to have such confusion between the two regimes. I hope that noble Lords agree that there is a need for constituency limits and that these can be properly enforced. I urge my noble friend to withdraw his amendment.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, the last example given by the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, is a really powerful one and it adds to the criticisms, which I endorse, of the catch-all provisions that have been added to the existing rules, which worked in the past but have become unworkable because of the increased range of activities, the addition of staff, travel and other costs, the reduction of thresholds, and the cut in the spending cap. This is what makes what was a quite innocuous concept now very difficult.
We endorse the criticisms but go further and suggest in Amendment 182A, which is in my name and that of my noble friend Lady Royall, that the combined effect of all of that is so serious and could so jeopardise joint working that it is time to review whether such an anti-avoidance dollop of restrictions, red tape and responsibility for another organisation’s spending is actually worth the candle.
Of course, had we had pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill and known about this in advance, we might have ironed it out before, but we did not, so we are left with a situation in which restrictions on coalition spending—or, at least, subjecting it to joint limits and reporting—seem aimed at anti-avoidance only in the belief that 10 groups will get together and campaign and they will all spend £100 less than the limit. Again, we have had no evidence of this. It seems to be a solution in search of a problem.
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which supports our amendment, has pointed to the increased significance of the rules because they will now apply to such a wide range of activities, and with new constituency limits. It thinks that this will threaten legitimate coalition campaigning, especially locally. For example, the RSPB works locally with other groups on infrastructure projects that affect the natural environment, such as an M4 relief road, when public reports or press events may be used. This may well be caught because one party may be in favour of a road and another party against it. Even if that is not the purpose of its work, the RSPB risks being caught if its particular objective chimes with—or is at variance with—one party, even though the RSPB’s objectives are based on the interests of birds rather than politics. It is particularly worried about how its spending would count against every member of the coalition’s spend and each member’s £9,750 limit would in a sense be double- or treble-counted if each group had to declare it as if it was its own. As the RSPB says, the combined effect of all the different rules is likely to limit what it can do.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews, also looking at the confusion surrounding coalition spending, was worried that simply having its logo on something, with therefore a bit of cost involved, would mean that that would have to be apportioned to a coalition, which could present problems and reduce its ability to support a campaign. The Libel Reform Campaign, which is made up of Sense About Science, English PEN and the Index on Censorship, believes that if it was pooling all those expenditures over a year, all those three organisations would hit their limit even if the combined limit was still below what is permissible.
NAVCA highlights that £5,000 is a lot of money for one small charity alone to spend. However, as my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley said, working in partnership can be much more effective for charities and what they want to achieve for the groups they support. Yet because all the funding is put together, the thresholds create a burden. This could discourage small charities from working in partnership to gain a voice, because they would fear everything that went with that.
It has been mentioned that the Electoral Commission itself, which traditionally saw the old coalition rules as a good anti-avoidance tool, now acknowledges that there are strong concerns about the impact, particularly on small local campaigns. If a local campaigner which is spending only a few pounds enters into a coalition with another which is spending more than the registration threshold, it may then be required to register. One campaigning group would have to take the other party’s spend as part of its own, and then comply with all the rules.
Of course, the amendment proposed by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, might appear attractive. It allows a bigger organisation to take responsibility for some of the spending of a smaller organisation. The problem is that a smaller organisation may have decided to spend only £1,000 on something over a year, but then something happens—it gets another member of staff, or the car breaks down and it has to hire a bus—and its expenditure suddenly goes up over that year. It will be the bigger organisation, the responsible body, which will suddenly have to answer for a new range of expenditure that has not been agreed in advance. I am afraid that for small voluntary organisations that is often how spending takes place. They do not spend with a budget in advance, as the Government do. Spending is often as and when.
Problems remain, despite the attempts to answer this. As has been said, the Electoral Commission itself has failed to come up with a response, only promising us its ideas by Report. This highlights the fact that not only was this not subject to pre-legislative scrutiny but the Government did not even consult the Electoral Commission before they brought in the Bill. It is a little worrying that neither the Government nor the Electoral Commission have found a way to answer these very serious questions. For that reason, we suggest removing the old requirements on all participants to be responsible for the actions of the other. We ask the Government to find a better way of tackling any attempts by various bodies to circumvent the very proper objectives of PPERA.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, from almost every meeting I took part in with charities or representatives of NGOs, I was certainly aware that the issue of what we described as coalition or co-ordinated planning was of considerable importance to them. That said, it is worth reflecting that the Bill does not actually make any changes, apart from the technical changes to take into account the other activities. The basic architecture on expenditure by organisations going towards a coalition plan was set down in the 2000 Act. I am not quite sure whether there was pre-legislative scrutiny before that particular architecture fell into place. However, it is not the case that the law was put forward in Part 2, as was said by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. That law is already there in PPERA.
What has happened has perhaps been fortuitous. The Bill has brought activity and greater focus, which have targeted minds on what is actually there. I accept that there is more activity now, as I am sure would be said by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter. Yet in fact, as the law stands at the moment, if 10 groups each contribute £1,000 to the activities or to the election materials covered under the present Act, they would each be required to register. This is therefore an important issue. The noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, made this point about the concern of smaller organisations in a number of his contributions. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, that we should remember to put this in the context of what the controlled expenditure is. If we are talking about the valuable and important work that is done in our prisons in terms of rehabilitation, it does not readily strike me how that would be the kind of expenditure envisaged, albeit that the groups concerned might be engaged with other bodies which fall within the ambit of the Bill and of what would lead to controlled expenditure. However, it is important that we recognise that this issue has now been identified, and I think that we all agree that we should seek to address it.
The rules on coalitions are necessary. In its evidence to the Commission on Civil Society, the Electoral Commission said:
“In our view, rules that limit what different campaigners can spend on co-ordinated campaigning are a vital element of the controls on election spending. Without them, individuals or organisations seeking to spend more than the limits on campaigning at elections could do so by setting up multiple organisations working together, with each organisation able to spend the full amount”.
As I have said, the existing provisions have been in place for both the 2005 and 2010 general elections. They seemed to work well and they remain unchanged by the Bill.
There has been some confusion about the operation of the rules, so perhaps I should take this opportunity to clarify them. Section 94(6) of PPERA stipulates that where two or more third parties work together as a group or coalition in pursuance of a common plan, the whole of the expenditure they incur as part of that coalition must count against each third party’s individual spending limit. As my noble friend Lady Tyler pointed out, that is a key anti-avoidance provision. If total spending by a group of third parties acting as part of a common plan was not counted in full against each individual third party’s limits, it would allow third parties to form many coalitions on single issues in order to evade their spending limits.
However, the amendment put forward by my noble friend Lord Tyler perhaps does not have the effect that, I am sure from what he said in moving it, he intended, because it would appear simply to reinforce what is already provided for in PPERA. I am sure that my noble friend seeks a different outcome, which is perhaps the cessation of third parties accounting for aggregated coalition expenditure. Nevertheless, his amendment has raised an issue which I see as current and, as will be clear when I come to respond to the specific amendment proposed by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, the Government want to look carefully at what more can be done to deal with these concerns. My noble friend mentioned a round-table conference—when we broke for lunch, I think that dates and times were being arranged for that.
The amendment proposed by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, would create a category of what he described as “minor” third parties which are exempted from having to account for any coalition expenditure provided their individual contribution is below the registration threshold. The third party must not have incurred expenditure in any other circumstances, and a “nominated” third party must be willing to absorb the “minor” third party’s spend and report it as its own to the Electoral Commission.
I accept that that is a constructive approach to addressing the problem that has been identified. Already, if a coalition campaign is organised by a lead third-party organisation which alone incurs, or decides when to authorise, regulated spending for the campaign, only the lead organisation is required to register with the Electoral Commission. The lead campaigner may receive contributions or donations from other organisations towards the campaign. These will be considered as donations. Where other organisations provide services or materials to the lead campaigner, these will be regarded as both in-kind donations and “notional” spending on behalf of the lead organisation. I reiterate: it is only where there is no lead organisation, and several third parties co-ordinate their campaigning while making their own decisions on when to incur regulated expenditure, that they will be covered by the rules on coalition campaigning.
I hope that in indicating what the present position is on when donations are made I have gone some way to reassuring the noble and right reverend Lord, but we recognise the concerns of small organisations which may wish to join a larger coalition to campaign on an issue. We will continue to look carefully at what more can be done. I hope that, when we meet, the benefit of a break might have enabled us to find a way to address an issue which, as I said at the outset, already exists even under the law as it stands.
In the same vein, the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, specifically asked what the position would be with regard to charities. If charities were exempted, they would not incur the controlled expenditure so it would not be counted towards spending on a common plan. As I indicated in my response to the amendment moved on Monday by my noble friend Lord Phillips of Sudbury, though, while there is certainly an issue there to be addressed and we want to consider it, the Government’s position has not been to exempt charities. If we were to go down that path, the kind of issue that she has raised is one of those that would have to be considered.
Lord Deben (Con)
My Lords, I am hoping to be seduced. There is a kernel to this that is more important than the detailed argument we have just heard. The kernel is that it might be more sensible to have a shorter period in which this whole thing operates. If I may say so to my noble friend, it is not a sensible argument to say, “It’s awfully inconvenient to do this because all sorts of other things might have to be reorganised”. I hope that the Minister will take seriously the following argument. We now have a system whereby we know when the next election and the election after that will be. If you think about it in those terms, you realise that no one is going to get anything much under way at this point just before Christmas. The real period will in any case be that from 1 January onwards. That is what is going to happen.
Given that there is so much unhappiness about this bit of the Bill and that so many people are concerned—I have checked my Twitter feed and seen how many people remain unconvinced by what the Government and the Minister are saying—it might be sensible to think about making a clear change, and saying to people, “Look, we have listened and we can see that there is still a concern about the weight upon organisations, and therefore we will at least think about the possibility of integrating into the Bill a shorter period”. That would of course mean that my noble friend’s concerns would have to be looked at. After all, this is the Committee stage. One of the things that you do in Committee is raise matters that do not actually fit at the time but might lead one to wonder whether there might be a little bit of a shift.
I was hoping perhaps not to be seduced but, in a gerundive sense, to be put in a state to be seduced. In other words, it would be helpful for the Minister to say that he will look at this and see if there is a possibility of giving confidence to people that their fears would be at least more limited.
The only other thing that I will say is that I am concerned about the immediate effect, because all the arguments about referenda and other things fitting at the same time create a very complex web. That is the second reason why I have difficulty with the views of my noble friend Lord Tyler, with whom I often agree—even though I am not supposed to. There is this difficult web in any case, and therefore it is not unreasonable to take apart the pieces and knit them together in a different manner.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, I am not going to repeat the points that have been made, which in part arise from two issues. One is that there are so many bits in the Bill that change the way in which a number of organisations are going to have to work that a lot of them are concerned. The changes are also bureaucratic—and none of us likes that.
We have to place the other issue on the shoulders of the Government, I am afraid, because they brought the Bill in so late. We must remember that the Bill was introduced the day before the Commons rose for the Summer Recess, had its Second Reading on the day the Commons returned, and so on. That added to the feeling among organisations that there was such haste with the Bill that their views were not being heard. I fear that some of the questions that have been asked are still not getting answered
From the point of view of the organisations, how on earth are those that are affected going to get all their bureaucracy up and running before the regulated period? It starts in 23 weeks and two days’ time. In fact, it really starts at the beginning of April, because virtually every organisation’s financial year runs from 1 April to 31 March. Therefore, all their systems have to be up and running by then. That is adding to the concerns.
I remain worried that we are not going to see a number of workable proposals. We talked earlier about the ones relating to coalitions in Part 2 coming in good time. I know that the Minister was unable on Monday to promise that we would see the new government amendments on 7 January. It was for the sake of this House that we should have them, but of course it is the affected groups that will also need to see those amendments in order to even begin to work out how to respond in good time.
The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who is not in her place, said that Part 2 had to be reconstructed from the ground up. We know that that is what she wants and what the outside groups want. Failing that, perhaps the noble and learned Lord could explain what changes the Government will make to ensure that organisations can prepare for the regulated period well ahead of the due date.
Baroness Tyler of Enfield
My Lords, I support Amendment 174. As my noble friend Lord Hodgson said, it relates to our earlier discussion about coalitions of organisations working and campaigning together. As my noble and learned friend the Minister said when summing up that debate, it is important to get the balance right between not creating loopholes in the rules, or rules that can turn into avoidance measures and things like that. But we must balance that with not just allowing but recognising in many cases that it is a good thing for small and medium-sized charities, in particular, to work together in their important campaigning. That should not be made overly burdensome or difficult for them. The amendment proposed by my noble friend Lord Hodgson is a sensible way of allowing coalitions to nominate a lead charity to deal with the reporting requirements, and I look forward to hearing what my noble and learned friend the Minister has to say about this in his summing up.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
On this side we very much support getting rid of red tape for small organisations. I think that it is tomorrow that the Joint Committee on the Government’s draft Deregulation Bill will produce its report, so it will be slightly ironic if there is that on the one hand and, on the other, we are regulating these small groups. I look forward to what may be the time when the Minister gives us a “yes” today.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, Amendment 170N would insert a new clause that would remove the requirement for recognised third parties to provide a spending return after the election if they had not incurred controlled expenditure above the registration threshold. Instead, a recognised third party would be required to submit a declaration that they had not spent in excess of the registration threshold.
Amendment 173, spoken to by my noble friend Lord Hodgson, would amend Clause 32 so that a recognised third party would not have to submit a nil report where it had not received a reportable or substantial donation. Amendment 174 would amend Clause 32 so that a recognised third party would be able to appoint a responsible person who had been a responsible person for another recognised third party.
I will give some background before addressing specific amendments. To improve transparency and to ensure that people can see who is funding a third party before the poll takes place, third parties will be required to report any large donations in advance of the poll. This will align the reporting requirements of third parties more closely with those of political parties, and will take two forms.
First, recognised third parties will be required to provide quarterly reports of donations for each reporting period that falls within the regulated period for a UK parliamentary general election. Secondly, between the dissolution of Parliament and polling day, recognised third parties will be required to provide weekly reports of any large donations.
I am not sure if I heard correctly whether the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, suggested that the quarterly and weekly reports also applied to spending. To clarify, the quarterly and weekly reports prior to the election apply only to donations—of more than £7,500—and the spending return will continue to be a requirement after the election.
Both the quarterly and weekly donation reports would be submitted to the Electoral Commission, which would publish the information. The quarterly reports must be accompanied by a signed declaration from the responsible person of the recognised third party, stating that all reportable donations accepted were from permissible donors. The Bill introduces measures that are necessary to achieve this increased transparency. The Bill proposes that third parties provide information about large donations in advance of the election, in quarterly and weekly donation reports.
At present, recognised third parties have to provide details of their campaign income and expenditure to the Electoral Commission after a UK parliamentary general election, and after the poll for certain other elections. To improve transparency by providing a clearer understanding of the finance of those involved in elections and to align the reporting requirements of third parties more closely with those of political parties, a statement of accounts would form part of the return third parties already provide to the Electoral Commission.
To ensure that this additional obligation is proportionate, individuals are excluded from this requirement. The Government believe that not to exclude individuals would result in an unwarranted intrusion into their personal financial matters, although they will still be required to provide details of their campaign income and expenditure, as is currently the case. Third parties, such as companies, charities and trade unions, which are required to prepare a statement of accounts under another legislative framework would be able to submit these accounts as part of their return to the Electoral Commission. I hope that this is an example of proportionality.
Turning to the amendments, I hope that noble Lords support the principle of providing information on reportable donations during the election period. However, the Government acknowledge that the correct balance has to be struck between increased transparency and overly burdensome requirements. With this in mind, the suggestions of the Electoral Commission in relation to nil reporting have provided a very useful starting point. The Government want to consider these matters very carefully and to revisit them on Report, to ensure that adequate and proportionate reporting requirements are included in the Bill.
Amendment 174, spoken to by my noble friend Lord Hodgson, concerns the role of the responsible person. When a recognised third party seeks registration with the Electoral Commission, they must nominate a responsible person who ensures compliance with the provisions of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000.
It is for the recognised third party or coalition to nominate a responsible person who they feel is best placed to ensure compliance with legislation. That could be a person who is already a responsible person for another third party. There are therefore no restrictions placed on who the recognised third party can nominate as a responsible person, except where an individual registers as a third party, where they will automatically become the responsible person.
In relation to Amendment 170N, the Electoral Commission made a similar suggestion in its June 2013 regulatory review. The Government see merit in the suggestion, which underpins our aim that smaller bodies should not be subject to overly burdensome reporting requirements. As a result, the Government will want to consider this issue carefully and revisit it on Report.
We have heard the—understandable—strictures from my noble friend Lord Deben. In that spirit, I ask the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, to withdraw his amendment.
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Baroness Pitkeathley
My Lords, I declare my interest as patron of several charities, but particularly as vice-president of Carers UK, a campaigning charity.
I have always had a lot of bafflement about the Bill. I am baffled as to why it was introduced in the first place by a Government who have always set such store by the big society, who have repeatedly assured charities of the vital place that they occupy in public service provision and, moreover, who have set such store by putting the consumer voice at the heart of policy-making.
I am baffled, too, by how the Government have spent the pause period. It was intended to enable them to listen and think again as the result of the extraordinarily negative reaction to the Bill, especially Part 2. Clearly, the Government have neither listened nor thought again. I remind them of what consultation means: it means not only listening, but acting as a result of what you have heard. It is clear from what others have said that we still have not had enough reaction from the Government. We now hear that the Government’s reaction and the actions that they propose will not be given in time for this Committee stage and perhaps not until very near Report. The provisions of the Bill, I am afraid, remain excessively broad in scope. There is too much discretion for the Electoral Commission and far too much uncertainty remains. That, as we have heard from other noble Lords, will trip up charities and stifle their voices. Why the rush for this Bill? It is clearly not yet fit for purpose.
The commission on the other hand—I pay tribute to the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and his commission—has used the pause very effectively indeed. The result of its work is before your Lordships in the form of the excellent report and package of proposals that have been put together, which we shall debate not only in this section but elsewhere in the Bill.
So far as controlled expenditure is concerned, I will only say that it is vital that there is clarity—indeed, not just clarity but certainty—about whether and when which activities will count towards controlled expenditure. The group of amendments, particularly those of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and his colleagues, will go some way to addressing that issue, and I urge the Government to accept them.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)
My Lords, I also join in wishing the absent noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, a speedy return—not that we do not feel safe in the hands of this noble and learned Lord, Lord Wallace, but it would be nice to see them both running around again. I also declare my interest as a patron of the Blenheim Trust and trustee of the Webb Memorial Trust.
I echo the concerns expressed by a number of noble Lords about the Bill and support the thrust of their amendments, which aim to make this bad Bill a little less bad. I also want to argue that Clause 26 should not stand part of the Bill. As has been said, the Government paused, but not for long enough and, more seriously, they then did nothing. There was no consultation—which as we have just heard is about more than just listening—because whatever they heard they made no changes. Even today, after all that, we have only the promise of a review about whether the Bill is fit for purpose after we have had an election with it, and the promise of a revision of the thresholds, but without the all-important figures before us. The Government’s inaction is in stark contrast to the NCVO and the Harries commission, as my noble friend Lady Pitkeathley just said.
The NCVO heard from 140 of its members and engaged with MPs, civil society and lawyers, and, as we have heard, took evidence. It talked, it thought, it listened and responded. The Government, by contrast, refused a proper committee to take evidence but then failed to use the time to produce their own amendments. They have failed to ask for written evidence and they have failed to produce a report of what they heard.
They have still failed to believe the warnings of chill, uncertainty and criminal sanctions—warnings and concerns that the Women’s Institute, Crisis and Sense About Science have repeated just this morning despite, or perhaps because of, the meetings that they have had with Ministers. The Government have failed to listen to the Royal College of Nursing, which says that the Bill will restrict the activities of organisations that seek legitimately to influence public policy in the run-up to an election. Indeed, the nurses say that if they are curtailed from raising concerns, this may pose a risk to standards of care in the NHS. Not only did the Government not heed these warnings, they have sought to dismiss them by asking others, not themselves, to change their view of the Bill. It is really no good the Minister today, or indeed Mr Brake, telling these groups that they need not worry if their own lawyers and the Electoral Commission tell them that they may well be in scope.
Lord Greaves
I have listened with great interest to the noble Baroness, but it seems that all she is doing is repeating her Second Reading speech. What we have heard about so far, and what we have down for Committee, is a whole series of amendments probing particular parts of the Bill and putting forward very constructive and, in many cases, sensible proposals to improve it. Why is the noble Baroness still making a Second Reading speech, and why has the Labour Party not put down a single constructive amendment for discussion in Committee?
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
We have a clause stand part debate and the point is to argue that this increase in scope does not belong in the Bill. That is the purpose of this, and the clause stand part debate is in our name. It is absolutely because we do not accept the enormous expansion that this clause brings in. We had expected, at this stage, because of the pause, that the Government would give an indication, even if not through amendments, of their response to the dissatisfaction at Second Reading. Our surprise is that we meet today, five weeks later, and there is not a single indication that the worries raised either by the two reports from the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, or at Second Reading, find themselves in any way reflected, given that no government amendments have been tabled for today.
Lord Tyler
Is the noble Baroness’s position that she wishes to leave PPERA 2000 just as it is, unamended? That is not the position of the commission of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, or indeed of any of the organisations that I have met. It therefore seems extraordinary that she is prepared to leave that status quo in place.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
I do not think that any one clause quite does that, but it is interesting if that is the noble Lord’s interpretation. Assuming that we take the Government’s intention as genuine—we can perhaps agree that this should just be about transparency—our view is that the extension of the scope has the unintended consequence of extending it from purely publications to an enormous range of other activities and things such as staff costs, transport and hire of halls. That fundamentally alters the position, which is what we are questioning. Is the effect of the Bill the same as the intent—transparency—or is the effect the chilling one that every charity and community group is telling us about? It feels like watching the Army march, with one young soldier out of line and his mother saying, “My son is marching properly but everyone else is out of step”. It seems that everyone who is commenting on the Bill has worries about the effect—except, of course, the Minister.
It was interesting and very noticeable that Lib Dem Members stood up when I used the words Sheffield Hallam. Can the Minister confirm my interpretation—it would also be interesting to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler—on whether, had the Bill been an Act in 2010, so looking backwards rather than forwards, the NUS-Lib Dem antics over tuition fees would have been permissible? My reading is that they would not have been, that the NUS would have been caught had it spent too much. I have the feeling—and the NUS shares the figures on this—that, including events, press campaign tools, photographs, travel and related staff costs, the photos of those various Lib Dem candidates pledging not to increase tuition fees would have been caught by these rules, therefore requiring the NUS to register and account for all its costs. The interesting question is whether that would be the case.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
I wonder what the noble Baroness is thinking. Activity by candidates, which is caught by other parts of the PPERA, is completely different from non-party expenditure, which is what we are debating in Part 2 of the Bill. I want to give the noble Baroness the opportunity to tell me what I may be missing, but activity by candidates seeking election is clearly political.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
The NUS and other student groups have raised an interesting question about work done in the year before an election. Can the noble and learned Lord assure the student groups—and it is the Bangor student union that has been writing to noble Lords—that they can continue to campaign? The fact that student groups are concerned is another example of the uncertainty about this issue. It is not just charities: other groups would also need to be concerned that expenditure on a campaign like tuition fees—or the Stop the War coalition, which we knew rather a lot about—early on before a general election could fall within this. If a political party adopted what another group had been campaigning on and that became a big issue at an election—I recall that the Iraq war was such an issue—then the work done maybe 12 months before the election would be caught by this provision. If we understand it correctly—and this is why a stand part debate is absolutely right for this bit—this clause would have the effect of expanding the scope of the Bill to bring into account the cost, in that 12 months, of activities like rallies, marches, hire of transport, stewarding and all those sorts of things.
The other point I want to raise on this clause is the administrative burden brought in by the addition of these types of activities; they are separate from publications, which are relatively easy to account for. It is interesting that another part of the Government is doing a lot about getting rid of red tape at the moment. Last month, this House agreed a statutory instrument allowing small companies to no longer do full accounts if they do not exceed two of either: gross assets of over one-third of a million pounds, a turnover of over two-thirds of a million pounds or an average of 10 employees. That will not apply to charities, which are excluded, but it will exempt other small groups from having to do full accounts. However, those exact same groups, having been relieved by BIS from all that red tape, will, because of the extended activities related to the items included in this clause, have to go through an enormous, complicated, bureaucratic form-filling process.
This is not about taking the big money out of politics. These groups are not about getting elected. They are about giving a voice to the unrepresented and the unheard. They are a key part of our democracy and perhaps that is what the Government do not like. They have not responded to the concerns of these groups. The Electoral Commission—the Government’s own adviser—says:
“Because the Bill brings some kinds of activity into the regime for the first time, we have said to the Government that the wording that defines controlled spending needs close consideration and scrutiny … to assess the cumulative impact … on campaigners, taking into account … the scope of controlled spending … lower thresholds”,
which we will come to, “lower spending limits”, which we will come to,
“new limits on spending in constituencies”,
which we will come to, and, “concerns about administrative burdens”. We will come on to these points, but they all flow from this clause, which extends the scope. The Electoral Commission urged the Government to think very carefully about the wording. As we have heard from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, those concerns remain or he would not have moved his amendment.
I am sorry that some noble Lords seem to think that this is a Second Reading issue. To me, this is a part of Committee, a way of saying to the Government that if what they intend is transparency and this Bill fails to produce it but instead produces unintended consequences of fear, of people not campaigning when they want to, surely this is the point for us to say to the Government that the wording of this clause is not good enough. The Government should both explain why they have failed to find a solution to the concerns that were raised at Second Reading and give a reason to the House why this clause should stand part of the Bill.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
That reflects some of the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lord Tyler, to which the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, lent his support. We are grappling with real issues here as to the clarity or otherwise of when people will cross a line. I accept that there are some cases which are quite clearly on one side of the line and others that are nearer the margins. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said that some people had been advised by the Electoral Commission that what they were proposing to do would be regulated. I would say to them, “Take the advice of the Electoral Commission. If it says you should be regulated, then register”. There is nothing stopping people campaigning. In fact, they might campaign with a lot more confidence if they know that they are doing the right thing because they have taken the advice of the Electoral Commission.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
I dread going on to other clauses, because I am going to get told off, but this is rather important. Registration is a threat to many of these organisations. They do not have the staff to fill in the forms. Charities are worried that by being registered with the Electoral Commission rather than the Charity Commission, it will look as if they are political because of the word. The bureaucracy of it frightens them. Some organisations will be responsible for 15 or 20 local groups. They will get caught by coalition funding. The Minister says, “Let them register”. The problem is, that in itself is a threat. Maybe he has misunderstood the threat of registration to these organisations.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, I do not think that I have, because I indicated that one of the concerns we have is the potential chilling effect. I am trying to make it clear that the threat is not that they cannot campaign at all. I regret sometimes the language used. It may be inadvertent, but the problem is that if we as politicians dealing with the Bill say that people will not be allowed to campaign on certain issues, it will be picked up outside and people will believe that they might not be allowed to campaign on certain issues. I hear what the noble Baroness says about the threat. I do not believe that registration is necessarily a threat. It is part of trying to secure transparency, as my noble friend Lord Tyler said. It is trying to secure the right balance, because the more transparency you have, the more likely it is that you will have more regulation. We are doing an important task as a Committee, which is to put up issues to make sure that we try to achieve the right balance.
In relation to other amendments, my noble friend Lord Greaves sought to exempt activities relating to research, press conferences, meetings and the lobbying of government and other legislative bodies. Again, the same explanation applies. The day-to-day activities of third parties, including working with legislative bodies across the United Kingdom, is not, and under the Bill would not be, subject to regulation under PPERA. Only activities which a reasonable person would regard as intended to promote or procure electoral success are captured.
Amendment 159D is about the same issue: issues being debated in another legislature. In the European election, the European Parliament cannot determine whether Britain continues its membership of the European Union, but it is not impossible—it does not need too much imagination—to think that it might be what third parties might be campaigning on in the forthcoming European elections. If that is what they are campaigning on to promote one party over another, it is not unreasonable, if they meet the thresholds, to require them to register.
The noble Lord, Lord Walton, talked about the all-party groups and the important work that was done in relation to muscular dystrophy. I understood him to ask whether the charities that support those groups with staff will be covered. It is difficult to see how the work of all-party groups—he knows this, as he showed in his remarks—could be caught or how the groups could be promoting electoral success in the reports they produce. However, the difference might be if one of the charitable bodies that had been supporting the all-party group were to turn around and say, “We helped produce this report. Member X and Member Y are really good people and people should go out and support them”. I am not suggesting for one minute that they would do that, as charity law might make it very difficult for them, but that would be trying to procure an election result and so on. Simply supporting an all-party group doing the very valuable work that the all-party groups do could not be seen as promoting a particular—
Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts(10 years, 9 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Tyler
My Lords, it is late at night to have to introduce a new element into the debate, but the natural conclusion is that the Charity Commission should withdraw completely from this role of policing what should and should not happen in terms of public policy and elections. But CC9 is there and the Charity Commission is now developing more advice on this point. Either we trust the commission to do the job or we do not. I fear that what my noble friend Lord Hodgson has just said does not increase my trust.
In those circumstances, we are still faced with a genuine dilemma. As the noble Lord, Lord Low of Dalston, said, as things stand at the moment many charities, large and small, feel that they are going to be subjected to two quite separate sets of regulations in this regard and they feel that is unfair. That seems to be a very critical issue, and I hope that in due course this House will be able to address it.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, I apologise to the noble Lord, Lord Low. It was not that he was slow on his feet; I was just a bit too fast on mine.
I return to the work of Beatrice Webb as she battled against the causes and impact of poverty. She was not running a charity, so she would have been caught by the myriad new requirements that this Bill sets out. She could then have set up a charity. I have set up a large number myself. It is not very difficult. Then she could have campaigned in the same way with no restrictions on the amount of money spent, on the market research done, on meetings, on press work or on the number of staff employed. She could even have concentrated her arguments in a number of key constituencies so long as she did not talk about voting this way or that way.
We have to think about whether we want the Stop the War coalition, pro-HS2, anti-HS2, pro-fracking, anti-fracking, pro-runways, anti-runways, pro-free schools, anti-free schools and other hard-working, well motivated groups to feel the need to register as charities so that they can campaign freely—free not just from double-regulation but from any regulation, because they would be caught only by existing electoral and charity law and not by the new restrictions imposed by this Bill.
I can see the advantages of that. Alcohol Concern, which I established 30 years ago, is a charity which campaigns against the current Government’s policies—not against the governing party—because the Government will not bring in minimum unit pricing or reduce drink-drive levels. This is completely within our charitable objectives. We could even campaign as a charity and put all our money in certain constituencies. As long as we do not say that this means voting this way or that way, it would be completely in line with our charitable objectives.
The Federation of Licensed Victuallers Associations, which is not a charity, would be very worried about the effect of lower drink-drive limits on its trade, but it would not be able to campaign against changing the drink-drive limit without being caught by the necessities of the Bill. That is similar to the discussion we heard earlier about hunting and the Countryside Alliance and the League Against Cruel Sports. While both are campaigning on a policy issue, one would be subject to all the regulations and the other would not because it is a charity—as long as it keeps to charity law.
The Electoral Commission has pointed out that exempting charities from the PPERA would mean there would be no restrictions on what they could spend in the run-up to the election, provided that they act within their charitable objectives, but that all organisations would be subject to the new Bill and the tighter restrictions on campaigning. The Electoral Commission thinks this could undermine confidence in PPERA while creating an incentive for campaigners to campaign via charitable channels.
In answer to the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, I can think of a number of organisations that I have been involved with which use the most appropriate vehicle, shall we say, at different times. That is the reason, as we know, that the Electoral Commission does not support exempting charities. Interestingly, we have not heard from the Charity Commission.
The supporters of the amendment say that charities should not need dual regulation. I have received only two letters from charities even vaguely in favour of this amendment—one has already been referred to: the Directory of Social Change—not because they want special treatment but because they are against duplicated regulation. They were not against being covered by the Bill but felt that they should not be regulated by a separate organisation. In other words, regulation could be by the Charity Commission; the argument is not for special treatment but against duplicate registration.
That is one of the arguments put forward in favour of the amendment, but there would be still other organisations covered by it. We heard earlier from a noble Baroness, who is not in her place, who is very involved with the BMA. It is regulated as a trade union, so it would be dual-regulated because it would continue to be regulated by the certification officer and also by the Electoral Commission. If it is simply about having dual regulation, surely we must deal with the plethora of people who would be doubly regulated.
The Directory of Social Change, despite not wanting to have two regulators, supports this amendment and also shares the concerns about the negative effects on broader civic engagement and the right to campaign. If I have read its letter correctly, I think its call would be for other parts of the Bill to be amended. The only other charity that has written specifically on this is the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which would support Amendment 160, but only as a fallback, because it is seriously concerned about the implications for wider civil society beyond charities. It supports the NCVO and others who want the Bill amended, as we do.
Charities are not calling for this, although they are undoubtedly calling for change. We will clearly be interested in what the Minister says on this. In the mean time, I shall ask Peers on the Liberal Democrat Benches whose amendment this is why they appear so little concerned with the other groups. The noble Lord, Lord Phillips, said that there is no evidence that charities did anything wrong in the previous election, and there is no evidence of these other groups being a problem. The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who is not in her place at the moment, made it very clear that she does not like a whole chunk, if not most, of Part 2. If other noble Lords on those Benches really dislike like this Bill and all its bureaucracy so much, would it not be better for them to use their considerable muscle and voting strength in this House to amend the Bill for all civil society groups, rather than leaving just some of them exposed to the nasty bits of red tape, bureaucracy, demoralisation and complications that were mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Phillips? Their voting strength in this House would be able to get rid of them for all groups. If this part of the Bill is bad for charities, it is bad for similar groups that do not happen to be charities, and we should see them all as one.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
My Lords, I thank everybody who has taken part in this debate. It has swayed to and fro in the best traditions and everybody has made useful points. I have not the time to cover all the offerings, and your Lordships would not want me to at 10.23 pm. However, one or two things I must just say.
The first is to take up the point my noble friend made at the end of his speech, concerning the role of the Charity Commission. My noble friend Lord Hodgson spoke very forcibly about the disparity between the theory of charity law and the actuality of oversight. I accept that, and there is no shadow of doubt in my mind but that if my amendment is accepted on Report, it must and can only be on the basis that the Charity Commission will do a more thorough job than it currently does. I fully accept that, but I am hopeful that that is something which would be very much in the Government’s mind, because if we take a third of a million charities out of the regulatory oversight of the Electoral Commission, we can make major savings, part of which can be deployed in beefing up the Charity Commission’s efforts.
Having said that—forgive me if I bang home the point that I have lived in this sector, so to speak, for 40 years—in my experience there is astonishingly little abuse of charity law. There is an astonishingly high level of public trust as well, and there is a deep revulsion in the sector of trying to play games with it, let alone corrupting it. I emphasise, however, that that does not take away from the point I started by making: there needs to be better enforcement.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, gave an example whereby, I think she said, you could have a biased charity that concentrated its efforts in certain constituencies in order to achieve a certain outcome. That would not be allowed under charity law. It is not that daft. It looks at the whole picture and the substance of what a charity does and if a charity pretended not to be engaged in partisan pursuits but actually was—by, for example, putting its effort only into constituencies where the candidate that it wanted to win was holding a view that it was pushing—that would be wrong and illegal. I am not saying that it would always be picked up by the Charity Commission, but people are on the qui vive these days. I think noble Lords will agree that complaints to the Charity Commission are made regularly and without inhibition.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
The point is not to support the candidate in order to get that candidate elected but to put pressure, usually, on a Minister to have those views heard, be it about drink-driving or something else. That is why, believe me, we do not do this stuff without the Charity Commission okaying it, because it is not to influence how people vote but to use the fact that the Minister is in that particular constituency to go there. It is not to get people to vote, so it is acceptable.
Lord Phillips of Sudbury
I am sorry if I misunderstood. Perhaps we can talk about this outside the Chamber, because this is not the place or the time to go into it in any more detail. All I am saying, and I will assert it without equivocation, is that the law is clear. I say that it is clear, but the law is there and it is well used and old and practical. The Charity Commission needs more resources but the amount of abuse is minuscule in relation to the size of the sector and I remain utterly opposed to lumbering this sector, of all sectors, with double regulation.
The non-charitable NGO sector includes some wonderful organisations but also some very shady ones. There are, I am afraid, a number of non-charitable NGOs that are used for violent political purposes. Money is poured into them, either for commercial or extreme political purposes, and there is nothing to stop them, as things stand. We have quite different categories to deal with and that is why it is entirely right, sensible and practical to have separate categories in terms of regulation. To lumber the charity sector with double regulation should be the last of our intentions. That is my fundamental point and on that note I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Succession to the Crown Bill
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town Excerpts(11 years, 6 months ago)
Lords ChamberRead Full debate Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts
Lord Jopling
My Lords, I am afraid that I have not been able to play a part in the earlier consideration of this Bill. However, I looked at proposed new subsection (2) of my noble friend Lord True’s amendment, which says:
“A person is disqualified from succeeding to the Crown as an heir to the body of a Royal Marriage if they are not the offspring of both parties to that Marriage”.
That takes me back 20 years when, in another place down the Corridor, I had cause to study the embryology Bill, which was going through the Commons at that time. A constituency case came to me of a couple who had found that they could not have a child; the lady had no uterus, but she ovulated. They therefore found a surrogate mother and had the egg from the wife, which was fertilised by the husband, implanted in the surrogate mother. In this case, the surrogate mother gave birth to twins. My constituents brought the twins back to have them registered, and the registrar of births, deaths and marriages said, “Sorry, although you may be the genetic parents of these children, you are going to have to adopt them”. They said, “Don’t be so stupid—we are the genetic parents. Why should we have to adopt our own children?”. This was an anomaly that I took up and caused that Bill to be changed with the help of my right honourable friend Kenneth Clarke, who was the Home Secretary at the time. The change meant that in a case such as that, if an application were made to the High Court, a judge could deem that parents of children who were the genetic offspring of those parents were full parents by an order of the judge in the High Court. That, as far as I understand it, is still the law.
My question to the Minister, thinking of my noble friend’s amendment, is: what would happen in a case like that, where the offspring of both parents are created in circumstances such as the ones I just described? Would it be necessary for the royal parents to apply to the High Court? Surrogacy is becoming much more common and it is not impossible that this could happen in the future. In this sort of circumstance, when the child of a royal marriage was created in this way, would it be necessary to apply to the High Court for that child to be deemed, in the words of the amendment, the “offspring of both parties”? It is rather important that this should be clarified now because it could give rise to considerable difficulties in the future.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, this is an interesting discussion but, as the House will know, the Bill has three purposes, all of which are about changing the succession to the Crown. One is to allow women to inherit if they are the eldest; the second is to allow people not to have to forgo their place in respect of the Throne if they were to marry a Catholic; and the third is to allow people to maintain their position should they marry, in certain circumstances, without the monarch’s permission. Those are the three changes to the laws of succession. It seems to us that nothing in the Bill alters the current position that only a natural-born child of a husband and wife can succeed to the Throne. Interesting though these questions are, we would not seek to have them included in this Bill and therefore do not support these amendments.
The Advocate-General for Scotland (Lord Wallace of Tankerness)
My Lords, I thank my noble friends Lord True and Lord Elton for bringing forward these amendments. As my noble friend Lord True said, he brought forward a very similar amendment in Committee and it is important that he has given us an opportunity to debate these issues again. Following on from the Committee stage, I assure my noble friend and the House that I have given this matter thought. It is an important matter. When the phrase “heirs of the body” was incorporated into the Act of Settlement no one could conceivably—possibly—have anticipated the kind of advances that we have seen in the past 50 years, which raise these kind of issues, particularly with regard to human fertilisation and embryology.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said, the laws governing succession to the Crown require that the descendant be the natural-born child of a husband and wife. As I indicated in Committee and, indeed, as I said to my noble friend Lord True in the letter from which he quoted:
“Although the Adoption Act 1976 and the Family Law Reform Act 1987 refer only to the succession of titles being left unchanged by their reforms, the Lord Chancellor stated at Second Reading of the Bill that became the 1987 Act that there was no intention to alter the rules on the descent of the Crown”.—[Official Report, 28/2/13; col. 1217.]
My noble friend Lord Elton raised the important point about Section 48(7) of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 2008 concerning England, Wales and Northern Ireland, which has the effect that nothing in the sections concerning parenthood in cases of artificial reproduction,
“affects the succession to any dignity or title … or renders any person capable of succeeding to or transmitting a right to succeed to any such dignity or title”.
Although I acknowledge that the Crown is not expressly mentioned, it is the Government’s view—we have given this considerable thought, and the phrase “the lesser must include the greater” has already been used—that if titles are not affected by this then, a fortiori, neither is the Crown. Therefore, we do not believe that there is a need for this amendment.
The Government also consider it unnecessary to define marriage as is set out in subsection (1) of the proposed new clause under this amendment, as only a natural-born child of a husband and wife can succeed to the Throne. We believe that that is clear as a matter of common law, as I think my noble friend Lord True acknowledged. I do not think that my noble friend referred to this in moving his amendment, but my noble friend Lord Trefgarne did pick up on proposed new subsection (3), on which I was going to reflect, because I think my noble friend Lord True said that the last thing that he wanted to do was engender controversy. I fear that this could become quite a controversial matter if Parliament is asked to pass a resolution on whether proposed new subsections (1) and (2) would apply, but it may be that he was not particularly pressing that leg of his amendment.
Lord Trefgarne
My Lords, I, too, broadly support the principle behind the amendment, but I ask my noble and learned friend about a related matter which I raised in Committee but did not get a full and clear answer. Is it in order and open to the sovereign to confer on his or her eldest daughter the princessdom, if I may call it that, of Wales? We know that the princedom of Wales is in the gift of the sovereign—my noble and learned friend explained that at the previous stage, but he was not clear whether it could go through the female line if that was the wish and view of the sovereign of the day. I hope that he can help me with that.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, as we said in Committee, the Duchy is about property, business, title and, indeed, money. Although we agree that those are, as my noble friend said, important issues and we would undoubtedly welcome the end of the inequality—the mistreatment, we might say, of women—as regards the Duchy, they do not concern the Crown succession and therefore, along with the noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick, we feel that they are not appropriate for the Bill.
I also repeat the comment that I made in Committee in response to the comment made by the noble Lord, Lord Lexden, about the experience that that gives to a monarch. I said then that the current monarch has done extraordinarily well without having had that title. Perhaps we can take this moment to hope that she is soon fully recovered.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, I immediately associate myself with those wishes of full recovery to Her Majesty. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, for raising the issue, which gave rise to a very good debate in Committee. I certainly valued the input from those who contributed, as I have today, on what is a very important issue with a great historic heritage. The noble Lord referred to the founding charter of 1337 and offered to pass me a copy. I was not sure whether he was going to pass me a copy in Latin or the translation. My higher in Latin from 40-odd years ago is probably so rusty that the translation would be better.
As I sought to explain in Committee, the Dukedom of Cornwall can pass only to the eldest son and heir of the monarch. I will come back to the points made about the exceptions to that. Therefore, when Her Majesty was Heir Presumptive as Princess Elizabeth, she did not hold the title of Duke of Cornwall, and we believe that the position would be the same now if there were a female heir, because of the terms of the charter. It is important to bear in mind that, because of limitation to the eldest son and heir of the monarch, the title cannot pass to a younger brother. The two exceptions raised by the noble Lord, Lord Berkeley—that of Henry VIII, Prince Henry when his brother, Prince Arthur, died and of Charles I, then Prince Charles, when his elder brother, Prince Henry, I think, died—were interesting. The noble Lord made it clear that exceptional steps were taken. That almost proves the point that it was not an automatic transfer of the dukedom. In the case of Charles I—Prince Charles, as he then was—King James asked the courts to make the alteration.
I also indicated that if the monarch has a son who is the heir apparent and that son dies before the monarch leaving a son of his own, the grandson of the monarch, the grandson will become heir apparent, but will not become Duke of Cornwall because he is not the son of the monarch.
It was recognised by those who contributed to the debate that this Bill is not the vehicle for making some pretty fundamental changes to a charter that has not changed, with two exceptions over the years involving parliamentary or court intervention on a one-off basis—if you can call Henry VIII a one-off. To make fundamental change is not the purpose of this Bill.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Lloyd, asked whether I can give a guarantee that the Government will bring forward legislation. I am afraid I am not in a position to do that. A huge amount of consultation would be required before we were in a position to do that.
As the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said, the purpose of this Bill is important, but very limited. I do not believe that it would be appropriate to use this Bill as a vehicle to change the charter. I take the point made by my noble friend Lord Lexden on the valuable experience which the present Prince of Wales has undoubtedly had with regard to his involvement in the duchy. I shall reiterate something that I said in Committee: although the title cannot pass to a female heir, there is nothing to stop her being actively involved in the running of the duchy or, should the reigning monarch so wish, chairing the Prince’s Council. If that was what the monarch wished, that would be entirely possible and would give that valuable experience to which my noble friend Lord Lexden referred.
My noble friend Lord Trefgarne asked about the creation of the Princess of Wales. As he acknowledged, the title of Prince of Wales is not automatically conferred on the heir apparent on his mother or father becoming sovereign. In the case of the present Prince of Wales, it was bestowed upon him some six years after the accession of our present Queen. The noble Lord, Lord Berkeley, said—my noble friend disagreed with the disparaging way it was put—the Crown is the source of all honour and dignity, and I agree with him. It would be a matter for the sovereign, but if the Crown is the source of all honour and dignity and the sovereign chose to establish a Princess of Wales, it would be a matter for the sovereign. However, I do not think it is very helpful to speculate on what might happen at a future date.
For those reasons, I invite the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.
Lord Burnett
My Lords, I have not spoken before in this debate and I hope that noble Lords will forgive me for being an interloper. However, I am a Catholic and should like to thank the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford as well as my noble friend Lord Marks of Henley-on-Thames for their contributions. Obviously—by implication, anyway—I oppose the amendment.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
My Lords, I join others in thanking the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Guildford for the clarity and fullness of his contribution, which was appreciated around the House.
The noble Lord, Lord Cormack, seemed to imply that allowing Catholic marriage would somehow endanger the Protestant succession. I think he is wrong. As it will remain the case that no Catholic may succeed, or indeed anyone who is not in communion with the Church of England, the noble Lord need not have concerns on that basis. We therefore see no need to support the amendment, which goes further by forbidding any child—not simply the eldest who is likely to inherit—to be brought up as, for example, a Methodist, as the noble Lord, Lord Walton, mentioned.
It is also unclear as to what would happen if the sixth or seventh child was brought up as a Methodist. Are we going to depose the monarch or expect the monarch to abdicate because one of their children was brought up as a Methodist or in the Jewish faith? There are many other questions. Could the monarch decide that they would prefer the Crown to pass to a sibling if they wanted the child to be brought up other than as an Anglican? Some of these questions were better enunciated by the noble Lord, Lord Marks.
We have moved on, even in this House, since 1700. We are looking forward to the birth in the summer of a babe born to an Anglican couple—a babe whose marriage is unlikely to take place for about 20 years. Their babe may, for the sake of argument, be born a few years after, in the year 2037, which will happen to be 700 years after the charter establishing the Duchy of Cornwall. We have heard warnings that we must think to the future, but I think that we can leave it to our heirs and successors in 2037 to decide at that point what is good for the country, the other realms and the Crown. We will not be supporting the amendment.
Lord Elton
I speak only to add weight to the perception that I hope that my noble and learned friend is getting that the whole House supports the amendment, and that he will have a major task in showing us significant downsides to prevent all of us flocking around my noble friend.
Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town
I will live up to what the noble Lord, Lord True, expects and disappoint him. Not everyone was here in Committee, when this was discussed at greater length and there was an amendment to reduce the number—I think to four, or even to zero—so it was not as clear-cut then that the number should be increased. Indeed, the number six is not the full number of people who will necessarily always have to seek permission, because they have to seek permission at the point at which they marry. It could well include far more people. Someone who may not be heir to the Throne within the first six at any one point could be in that position by the time that they want to marry. It applies at the time of their marriage, so more people may well have to seek permission.
As we said when this was discussed at greater length in Committee, with more evidence given than perhaps all noble Lords have had a chance to read, we feel that this is not an exact science. We know that five were probably as many as were ever needed, so we thought that six gave a useful additional margin.
We certainly do not think that it is sensible to involve an unnecessarily large number of people in having to seek permission of the Crown in order to marry when they have no realistic possibility of inheriting the Throne. We do not know on what grounds a monarch would debar someone from a particular marriage if it was not about religion, although one noble Lord suggested that. We do not know what sort of reasons a couple would have to consider when deciding whether to go ahead with the marriage and give up their place in line. It seems to us strange to put a young couple through that when there is no good reason for doing so.
I should add that although this was not in the original Perth agreement, it is part of the agreement that has been discussed with all the other countries, with all the hard work done on everyone’s behalf by New Zealand. It would need an enormous amount of unscrambling to change the number now when it has been discussed at great length. I am sure that it is in no way the intention behind the amendment that it should be wrecking or delaying. However, I fear that changing the number from six would have that effect. I am sure that we would not want to risk the other really important parts of the Bill, the two bits that the whole House strongly supports—the succession to the Crown of the first born, should it be a woman, and the ability of someone in line to the Throne to marry a Catholic—by delay. We support the continuation of the Bill as it stands.
Lord Wallace of Tankerness
My Lords, again, I thank my noble friends Lord Lang, Lord Hamilton and Lord True, who have signed the amendment. My noble friend Lord Lang raised this issue at Second Reading and again in Committee and on each occasion stimulated a very good debate. It is clear that a balance needs to be struck somewhere between mitigating a remote but potentially catastrophic event, on the one hand, and the risk of impinging unnecessarily, as the noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, said, on the lives of those who are more distant from the Throne.
My noble friend Lord Lang said that there were two differences in what was being proposed from what was there before. I think he said that, before, consent under the Royal Marriages Act 1772 related to religion and marriage to a Catholic. In fact, it went much wider than that. As my noble friend Lord True said, it was George III’s concerns about his siblings that prompted it. It was not actually to do with religion because the provision on religion was such that if you married a Catholic, you lost your place in the line of succession. I suspect that you also still had to get consent, being one of the descendants of George II, otherwise your marriage, albeit one that took you out of the line of succession, would have been void. Nothing is changing there. It is not related solely to religion.
My noble friend also said that the other change is that rather than the marriage being void, as is the case under the 1772 legislation, the person and their descendants from that unconsented-to marriage lose their place in the line of succession. Hitherto, failure to get consent did not cause the individual concerned to lose their place in the line of succession, as the examples given by my noble friend indicated, but their children did not have any place in the line of succession because by definition the marriage was void. Therefore, the children could not take up any place in the line of succession. Being the children of a void marriage, they would not be legitimate.
This change has taken place first to reduce the very large number of people who are today the descendants of George II. In response to the noble Lord, Lord Thomas of Swynnerton, I just do not know how many consents Her Majesty has given during the 61 years of her reign. If my memory serves me correctly, I think I said in Committee that no one seems to have any record of consent having been refused. I would not like to suggest that information about how many consents have been given might be available. The fact is that as each generation comes to bear another generation, the number of descendants of King George II increases. Indeed, it may well be that some of them do not know that they are descendants of George II and may be contracting marriages which are void. That is one of the principal reasons why we wish to change this, so that the consequence of failure to get consent or of consent being refused is not that one’s marriage is void, which has considerable consequences for the couple concerned and their family, but rather that the person loses their place in the line of succession.
As the House will be aware, I indicated that we believe that the six steps provide sufficient proximity to the Throne. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, made an important point about consent at marriage: people who at the time of the consent for their marriage were in the first six may subsequently no longer be within the first six in line to the Throne, so the number at any one time who have had to receive consent will almost certainly be greater than six. If one looks at the 240 years of history since the Royal Marriages Act 1772 was passed, the person furthest away from the Throne at the time of marriage who subsequently ascended the Throne was William IV, who was third in line to the Throne, so the position as it stands provides twice as many steps away from the Throne than have ever been necessary in more than 200 years.