Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Baroness Williams of Crosby and Baroness Mallalieu

Tuesday 28th January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Mallalieu]

My Lords, I support Motion C1 in the name of the noble and right reverend Lord. Of all the matters raised in relation to the Bill, this is the one which many of the charities and campaigning organisations which gave evidence before the Harries commission raised as the most important for them. It was the one about which, above all, they felt most strongly and they most earnestly wanted to see it changed. For campaigning organisations this is the single most important amendment, whether they are charities or not.

As they see it, this is a bureaucratic nightmare. It is a burden which we are seeking to impose and which they really have no way of defining accurately. How are they to separate regulated and unregulated staff time? The Minister has said that he does not want timesheets kept and that all that he is suggesting is an honest assessment. But what is the difference between an honest assessment, a rough calculation and an edited guess or, quite frankly, thinking of a figure? Where is the dividing line to be drawn and how can we land the Electoral Commission with the job of trying to do that? We are about to produce something which is wholly unenforceable and which the Electoral Commission itself believes should not apply for the 2015 election, after which there will be a proper review and a look at the whole question of staff costs, for both political parties and campaigning organisations. I strongly support our resistance to attempts to land people with a load of rubbish.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby (LD)]

My Lords, I, too, regret the fact that the Government felt unable to accept the exclusion of staffing costs from the Bill because I believe it to be a very important part of what charities are all about. I recognise that my noble and learned friend has done his very best to try to shorten the gap between us. However, I have a particular question for him because many charities are sustained by the work of elderly volunteers. I think all of us who go to charity shops are conscious that much of the work being done is done by them. Not only is the work done by them; their lives are substantially enriched by their involvement and commitment to a particular charity, which may well be a relatively local one.

If a volunteer of that kind or a part-time worker has expenses which they can then ask the charity to meet—for example, for meals, transport and so forth—I am not clear whether this amendment, or indeed the Bill, will catch it. I raise that point because I honestly do not know the answer and because the issue here is not just one of bureaucracy. There is also that of the very real contribution which working for charities and campaigning groups makes to the happiness and good life of many of our fellow citizens.

Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Debate between Baroness Williams of Crosby and Baroness Mallalieu

Monday 16th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Mallalieu]

The noble Lord is correct on the face of it but, in reality, when one looks at some of the forms of campaigning that have taken place in recent years, it is very difficult to discern a difference between the two. The two organisations to which I referred earlier are a case in point. If the charity guidance—CC9—and the appendix to which the noble Lord referred were enforced rigorously, and the Charity Commission had the means to do that, perhaps I would take a different view. However, given that the Charity Commission cannot possibly have a handle on 130,000 charities during an election period, it seems to me important that there should be one rule that applies to all.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby (LD)]

My Lords, my name is also added to this amendment. I should like to say a few words not as a lawyer but as a politician. In my rather long political life, I have fought at least 11 general elections and two by-elections, and have lost some and won some. It is worth commenting as a politician in this very good debate, which has been rather dominated by lawyers, if noble Lords will forgive my saying so.

I think that a very simple message is coming out of this discussion. I thank the Government for permitting a consultation period. I quite agree that it is not as long as it should be, but it is worth recognising that this is a very useful innovation in this House, and one that I think will be helpful to us as we work our way through increasingly complex legislation, given that that is the nature of so much legislation nowadays.

Unfortunately, the Bill is largely concerned with amending the 2000 Act, which means that it is incredibly complicated. It keeps referring back to earlier legislation when it might have been better to make a clean break and have a completely new Bill. That is by the way and we have what we have, but I think it is one of the reasons why two issues have emerged very clearly in this debate—I speak as I see. First, virtually every amendment—amendment after amendment—has sought to exempt various bodies from the controls on the amount of expenditure that is incurred. Virtually every one of the many amendments that we have discussed has sought to eliminate or take out something or other. They have all been negative amendments and have attempted to detract from the Bill’s impact on charities. That is not a desirable way of looking at a Bill. What it adds up to is that this is a Bill which has overwhelmingly caused such concern, worry and anxiety that it cannot stand as it is without huge amendment, or possibly a complete rewriting of Part 2. I favour the second.

The other thing that emerges very clearly from this is that the Ministers—I greatly respect their patience and their attempts to deal with the issues—have turned effectively into a sort of CAB. Everybody who gets up says, “Does this apply to me, or to this, or to the other thing?”. That is not a very happy way of demonstrating how clear and transparent the Bill is. It is a very happy way of demonstrating that it is neither clear nor transparent. This again means that there has to be a major look at how to reconstruct this part of the Bill.

I add one other thing. I say this in some criticism of the commission, which has been so widely praised, quite rightly, in this House. The commission has not taken sufficient cognisance of—I refer back to the brief speech made by my noble friend Lord Greaves—the impact of certain kinds of expenditure on campaigning, not least major expenditure on campaigning, on the whole issue of the cleanliness and transparency of politics itself.

We have blissfully walked past substantial evidence to show that, without some form of serious regulation of charities, but also of NGOs, there is a tendency for politics to become increasingly corrupted by the flow of money. The noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, for whose intelligence I have the greatest respect, unwisely referred to the likelihood of some monster coming out of the jungle who would be a billionaire. There are many monsters who are billionaires coming out of the jungle. I know that because I taught the subject of elective politics for 10 years at Harvard.

The United States has effectively been taken over at the federal level by more and more major expenditure. For example, expenditure on congressional elections in real terms has gone up two and a half times since 1998. In the latest election cycle, in 2012, no less than $3.5 billion was spent on electing Congressmen and Senators to their elective seats. To take another example; it costs today, on the latest explanation we have, $1.5 million to elect a Congressman. Congressional districts are of course larger than parliamentary constituencies—let us say three or four times larger. However, when you compare the £12,000, which is still the British limit that can be spent within a constituency once an election has been declared, with $1.5 million, even if you take real values and all the rest of it into account, you are looking at a vast increase in the expenditure on how you can get legislation through Congress. A great deal of it is quite directly and precisely related to politics in its most raw sense, including the money that comes out of the so-called 501(c)4 regulations of the Internal Revenue Service—the tax system—which now allows specifically non-profit third parties to put money into election support and political payments. Let us not forget that the legislation picks out non-profit, picks out non-party and picks out bodies with claims that they are pushing a charitable end, or in some cases a public service end. The outcome is quite simply that this particular element in public expenditure in the United States has risen from $9 million two years ago in 2010 to $457 million in 2012. That is an increase of the order of something like 45 times. Why? The regulations that applied to restriction on public expenditure of this kind by non-profit organisations were effectively allowed to lapse with the result of the so-called Citizens United Supreme Court decision of 2010, whereby corporations and unions were both allowed to come into that structure and give whatever they liked with no limit for political campaigns.

What I see in the United States at the federal level is effectively the breakdown of democracy. It is not surprising that more than half of Senators are millionaires or richer because, effectively, the ordinary man and woman have been driven out of politics at a federal level and it is too expensive for them to stand because the money that they have to raise to stand any chance of getting elected is now so extreme. I will not go on but the figures are terrifying. The estimated spending for the next presidential election in 2016 is around $6 billion at the federal level only. What one is seeing is a great democracy gradually turning into a plutocracy, and that is extremely dangerous.