Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Greaves

Thursday 30th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, this amendment addresses another issue of serious concern regarding the potential for abuse in this system. My noble friend Lord Greaves will deal with other aspects of abuse in other amendments in this group, but Amendment 124E deals with the ban that I believe is required on paying people to collect petition signatures to try to trigger these referendums. I am concerned about this potential for abuse because big money interests may be able to use and abuse the petition and referendum systems in order to gain undue influence in an unfair way and subvert other democratic safeguards.

I have seen the way in which this happens from time to time in the United States, where what they call “initiatives” are rather more common than perhaps they are in this country where we would call them referendums. I have seen examples, which I have been given by lobbying organisations, where a big company has decided that it wants to build something and make a lot of money from doing so, but it understands that the relevant local authority might consider, even if there is a desirable benefit to the community, that it is not a priority for that community to build such a project. Rather than try to persuade the local authority that that is what it should do, the company hires people to go around canvassing door to door and in shopping centres and persuading them to sign petitions. I know from my own experience of campaigning over many years that sometimes it is not hard to get a lot of people to sign something if you are quite a persuasive person. These lobbying companies hire persuasive canvassers to go door to door in areas with a lot of people, persuading them to sign sufficient petitions to get an initiative.

When the initiative then has to be agreed to because there is seen to be public demand for it, and not to agree to that public demand would be seen to be a problem for the local authority, then the moneyed interests hire the lobbying company to run direct mail campaigns and adverts in the local paper, persuading people that this is what should be voted for. When the initiative is successful, those interests benefit significantly in a commercial sense from something that has not really been proven in a democratic way to be the desire of local people, but where money has paid for the collection of petition signatures and has been very decisive in determining the outcome of the ballot. That is not at all the intention of the Government with this sort of process, but it could open up the democratic system to that sort of abuse. For those reasons, I beg to move.

[Lord Greaves]

I will speak to Amendments 129B and 129C, which are in this group. They refer to Clause 54, which refers to regulations about voting in, and the conduct of, referendums. Clause 54(6) states clearly:

“Regulations under this section may not include provision … about the limitation of expenditure in connection with a referendum … for the questioning of the result of a referendum by a court or tribunal”,

or,

“creating criminal offences”.

The question here is: does that mean that established and understood election law, in these areas and in others, will not apply in the case of a local referendum? Will normal election law not apply? What redress does anyone have if it is believed that someone is rigging the referendum if there is a considerable degree of personation taking place—despite the complacency that there still is in many quarters, quite a bit of old-fashioned personation goes on at polling stations in some parts of the country—or the rigging of postal votes, which takes place on a frequent basis in some parts of the country and in any case is perfectly easy to do? If the system is that there is no criminal or other redress against this happening, the odds are that where some people think that the question behind the referendum is very important that this sort of thing will continue.

If there are freestanding referendums, that may simply be a matter for the referendum. However, it is quite clear that, for reasons of cost, where referendums are taking place councils will do their best to make sure that they do so at the same time as elections—probably on the first Thursday in May, whenever the local elections are taking place or European elections in June and so on. Under those circumstances, if I read the provisions of Clause 54 correctly, rules will apply to the election campaigns but some of them will not apply to the referendum campaigns taking place alongside them. Given what we all believe will happen— that in some cases referendums will be organised to assist election campaigning—the distinction between the two may not be all that obvious.

If I were campaigning in a local election and there was a referendum going on at the same time, I might well include reference to the referendum and what I thought people should do—both for and against it—in my election literature. Indeed, this happened on a large scale among all the parties during the AV campaign, but less so with the Labour Party because it could not make up its mind whether it was in favour or against. It happened on a large scale with the Conservative Party and to some extent among the Liberal Democrats. Leaflets were put out saying, “Vote for Joe Bloggs and, by the way, vote”—yes or no—“in the referendum campaign”. Or it was the other way around: leaflets went out which were 90 per cent “vote no” in the referendum campaign, and also “Vote for your local Conservative candidate”. I compliment their skill in doing that; it won them a lot of seats.

It is going to happen, certainly at local level. So what about rules like election law, such as the need for imprints on leaflets? Will that apply to referendum material? What about the rules about payment of canvassers? My noble friend Lord Rennard referred to the possible payment of canvassers for collecting petition signatures, but what about paying canvassers to go around and persuade people to vote one way or the other in a referendum, which is illegal in elections? What about offences relating to what you can and cannot do at the counting of the votes? What about offences relating to intimidation of voters? Particularly where there are joint elections, common sense suggests that there should be common rules. The provision in Clause 54 suggests that there should not. I would be grateful if the Minister could explain what it means and whether it needs some amendment before the Bill completes its passage through this House.

[Lord Collins of Highbury]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, made a point in moving the amendment about the payment to individuals collecting signatures. I would be slightly concerned that he, as an able organiser in the Liberal Democrats, may fall foul of such an amendment if he was paying employees of the party to undertake political activity that may include support for a referendum. I would hate to think that he may end up in jail as a consequence, so perhaps he could clarify the position.

Localism Bill

Debate between Lord Rennard and Lord Greaves

Tuesday 28th June 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rennard]

My Lords, I should declare an interest as a recent vice-president of the Local Government Association. Perhaps I should also say that I am a member of your Lordships’ Select Committee on the Constitution. Therefore, I wish to consider this evening some issues of principle about when referendums are appropriate.

On 12 October last year, we debated the Select Committee’s report on the principle of referendums. I said that,

“the Select Committee was right to see significant drawbacks to the widespread use of referendums”.—[Official Report, 12/10/10; col. 428.]

The House expressed many reservations about holding referendums in a representative democracy.

Many noble Lords who spoke in that debate quoted powerful evidence given to the Select Committee about the problems of referendums. They included: people potentially voting on issues different from those on the ballot paper, or voting for or against a Government rather than on a specific issue; problems with getting sufficient turnout for any result to be legitimate; problems with ensuring that both sides of an argument had sufficient resources to make their case; and problems with undue influence being exerted by dominant media groups or party machines.

The case against widespread use of referendums was made very strongly. My noble friend Lord McNally said that he had not found a committee report that had been so much respected by officials and Ministers. He said:

“This is not a report that has been put on the shelf and forgotten”.

My noble friend drew attention to the fact that in his official response to the report, Mr Mark Harper, on behalf of the Government, agreed that,

“referendums should be exceptional events”.—[Official Report, 12/10/10; col. 471.]

These were seen as being required only for major constitutional changes such as to abolish the monarchy, to leave the European Union, or for any of the nations of the UK to secede and so on.

The question must now be asked whether we should have similar concerns about local referendums. Should they become common or should they be rare? On what sort of issues should they be held, and how easily could they be triggered given all these potential problems? There seems at the very least to be a possibility of an allegation of double standards being made if national government are saying that their policy programme should be subject to a referendum only on major constitutional issues, but that all issues decided by locally elected representatives should potentially be subject to referendums, with all the problems that we know about of conducting referendums fairly.

No national Government have ever suggested, for example, that their powers of taxation be subject to a referendum. Many national controversies have been debated in this House, the other place and across the country without the suggestion that national government should resolve the issue by putting it to a referendum.

Since that debate last October we have also had experience of a national referendum. Many of those on the no side in that referendum campaign argued that a reason for voting no was simply the cost of holding the referendum, even though these costs were minimised by holding it at the same time as many other elections. Those who argued this case on the no side must now argue why local referendums should be conducted at the expense of council tax payers in addition to the cost of electing local councillors.

If such local referendums are to be held, then we should be much clearer about when they are appropriate than is outlined so far in this Bill. There must be substantial proven public demand for them locally. They should not simply be a device that either a local council or the Secretary of State can use to avoid the sort of considered judgment that should be taken by elected representatives and be subject to examination at election times.

There may be problems with some council administrations being unrepresentative of the areas that they serve. Some councils are effectively one-party states. The answer is to make those councils more representative—not to make each of their decisions potentially subject to a referendum.

[Lord Greaves]

My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend for turning up in time so I did not have to deliver his speech, which he did far better than I would have done. I just want to add one or two things and speak to the specific amendments which my noble friend and I have put forward.

The noble Lord, Lord True, and the noble Earl, Lord Cathcart, spoke about how opposition parties and opposition councillors might well use referendums to promote their own interests. In my own local political career I can think of major issues where I would have had, in the words of the noble Lord, Lord True, a great deal of fun. We would have made useful political points but it would have cost people a lot of money and it would not have been the right way to do it.

What concerns me more than what opposition parties and opposition councillors might do is the way in which parties in control, or mayors or anyone else with the ability, might use referendums to manipulate the political and electoral process by launching referendums on populist issues to entrench their own local power. I am not suggesting that all such local leaders would ever do that but, without naming names, I can think of one or two around the country who might regard this as manna from heaven. You organise a referendum on a good populist issue or a bad populist issue to coincide with the year of your re-election and have it on the same day as your re-election to turn the referendum campaign into your election campaign and—Bob’s your uncle—you are probably back. As I understand the Bill, there will be no limits on referendum expenses so it would blow a huge hole in the rules for local election expenses.

People organising referendums—whether they are organising a petition for it or whether they are persons in power trying to use it for populist purposes—may be goodies. They may be doing it for benign purposes but they might not: they might be malign extremists movements or commercially motivated and commercially biased or politicians seeking re-election, as I just said. Whatever it is, there is a severe risk that they undermine the processes of representative democracy, which rely a great deal on proper procedures, democratic deliberation, debate and compromise and the role of the council as a mediator in the community—which I think the noble Lord, Lord McKenzie, was talking about last week.

You cannot compromise in a referendum. Everything is black and white; everything is yes or no. It polarises the community and, while it might be a lot of fun for people taking part in it, it simplifies what are often quite complex issues and runs the risk of undermining the whole process of liberal democracy in the local community. We are generally sceptical about the value of Chapter 1 of Part 4 of the Bill and if it is to remain, we believe it needs a much stricter tying-up so that the number of referendums which can take place are relatively few and are on appropriate subjects.