Lord Leigh of Hurley
Main Page: Lord Leigh of Hurley (Conservative - Life peer)
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
My Lords, I rise to oppose the proposed amendments to Clause 11. We discussed tangential matters on earlier days, but this focuses on the core issue of transparency. I think that of the 25 unions with political funds in the UK, 10 are not affiliated to the Labour Party and the remaining 15 will fund political campaigning unconnected to the Labour Party. We are not talking here about the donations to a political party, which are of course disclosed very easily, normally being large sums of money, but the amounts which, given that the amendments to Clause 10 will not happen, will be within the political fund. This is about understanding what those payments from within the political fund will be. It is very difficult to know what they are at the moment.
Doing some desk research, one can see the nature of the recipients of the fund but one cannot see the amounts. In the past, of course, these have included campaigns which all of us would approve of, encourage and welcome, such as those mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Hain, against apartheid or the BNP. Currently, as far as I can see, they include campaigns supporting the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, opposing outsourced contracts in the public sector, opposing welfare reform and, in particular, opposing Israel in the sense of supporting BDS—boycott, divestment and sanctions—as well as just general funding of think tanks.
Union members might be happy with all of this, but do they not deserve the right to know the amounts that are being spent on these causes? I take the point from the noble Lord, Lord Collins, that there is the requirement for a ballot, but that ballot is open for, I think, about three weeks. The last one, for Unison, was in May, I think, and despite being open for three weeks, it attracted only 18% support. It is not clear that people are focusing on what is going through the political fund.
Lord Collins of Highbury
I come back to the point that there is a tendency to forget one fundamental principle: unlike the Conservative Party, for which the noble Lord is treasurer, trade unions are fully democratic in terms of their structures. Decisions to spend on particular issues stem from the branch structure or the workplace structure, all the way up to the executive. These decisions to spend on particular things are taken not in isolation but within the constitution and the rulebook. If people query whether they have been made in accordance with that constitution and rulebook, members have a remedy.
Lord Leigh of Hurley
I do not think anyone is suggesting that these are improper payments; the suggestion is that there is a lack of transparency as to what they are. I am not sure I take the point about the Conservative Party being undemocratic, but we will leave that for a moment. The noble Lord invited me to look at the accounts on the Certification Officer’s website, and I have done so. The total political funding is about £24 million. The largest fund is that of Unite, with £7.8 million of income. When one tries to understand the expenditure within that, one sees that it simply states that political fund expenditure was £1.17 million and that expenditure under Section 82 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 was £3.82 million. No further information is supplied, other than the quite interesting information that Unite has in its balance sheet of the political fund £14.8 million. It is much the same for other unions—I have been through quite a few of them.
The point remains that I am sure that many members of unions would like to know and to have reported where their money is spent. Are all union members who are working on Trident submarines happy that union funds are spent supporting CND?
Lord Stoneham of Droxford
The noble Lord is a director of companies. Would he say, in the interests of transparency, that for a company with a turnover of, say, £20 million, he would require to see every invoice over £2,000, or rather, as an accountant, would he seek to improve the categorisation of that expenditure? The Government are demanding that we have every invoice over £2,000 revealed, rather than improve the categorisation.
Lord Leigh of Hurley
With respect, a director of a private company, as I am, is a different phenomenon from a public body, such as a union. Directors of private companies have to account for all expenditure.
Lord Collins of Highbury
Let us pose a question to which the noble Lord may know the answer. He is a treasurer of the Conservative Party. Local associations hold substantial funds, but Conservative Central Office appears not to know just how much they have or how they spend it. Perhaps he could enlighten the House now: how much is held in funds of local associations of the Conservative Party?
Lord Balfe
Perhaps I can help my noble friend by saying that the Conservative Party has a democratic structure where the local bodies have a much higher degree of autonomy than in the Labour Party, in which everything is centralised. I doubt that CCO knows how much money Cambridge Conservatives, of which I have the honour to be president, has, because we are not required to divulge it. All donations have to be declared, but a different structure exists.
Lord Balfe
I am aware of all those sayings, and I see some of the difficulties that noble Lords opposite mention, but when I was secretary of the Royal Arsenal Co-op political fund, we had to submit full accounts to the central board, which detailed far below £2,000 in expenditure, so I really do not see the great difficulty in submitting these returns.
Lord Leigh of Hurley
I take the point that £2,000 is a low threshold, and willingly take on board the discussion over the amount, although £50,000 is far too high. I do not agree with the proposition within the amendments. However, I ask the Minister to consider carefully Clause 11, perhaps at Report, to ensure that all payments from political funds other than to political parties are covered in that clause.