European Union Referendum Bill

Lord Hamilton of Epsom Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2015 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom]

2: Schedule 1, line 16, leave out “either”

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Hamilton of Epsom (Con)]

My Lords, in moving this amendment I will speak also to Amendment 3. I will withdraw Amendment 2 at the end of these proceedings. As my noble friend reminded us, the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, in a previous amendment, tried to prevent one side sabotaging the referendum by not applying for designation. The big problem with the noble Lord’s amendment was that this made it possible to end up with the designation of the “remain” campaign and not the “leave” campaign, which would have made things extremely uneven. Those of us who have come to know and love the noble Lord’s amendments are not too surprised by that.

The Government have gone to great lengths to try to address this problem. As my noble friend said a minute ago, this has been a very difficult balancing act indeed. Key to her amendment is new subsection (2A). There is no problem with new paragraph (a),

“no permitted participant makes an application to be designated under section 109 as representing those campaigning for that outcome”,

but there is a problem with new paragraph (b), which is why my original amendment advocated that it should be withdrawn. Since then, I have had conversations with my noble friend’s office and suggested that it might be better to put in a designation of frivolous and vexatious application. That would be a test of whether the application for designation was genuine.