Oral Answers to Questions

Alan Brown Excerpts

Thursday 25th January 2018 Commons Chamber

[Michael Gove]

I am very grateful to my hon. Friend. Yes, the Doddington North Moor development will be hugely welcome, not just in ensuring that we have more woodland cover but in providing a valuable habitat for the red squirrel—a native species that I think we all want to see better protected. We will be working with landowners, the Forestry Commission and others to ensure that there is more forest cover in the years ahead.

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

T2. The Royal Bank of Scotland’s decision to close over 60 branches will devastate rural communities, and farming communities are really worried about it. The Prime Minister has completely washed her hands of this, but will the Secretary of State at least meet RBS and make the case for rural communities?

[Michael Gove]

Access to banking and other services is vital for the future of rural communities. I commend the Press and Journal newspaper for the campaign that it has been running, which has been enthusiastically backed by my hon. Friends the Members for West Aberdeenshire and Kincardine (Andrew Bowie), for Banff and Buchan (David Duguid) and for Aberdeen South (Ross Thomson). All those fine Scottish Conservative colleagues have been leading this campaign. The Scottish Government have a responsibility to do more with regard to safeguarding the interests of Scottish farmers, and it has fallen to Scottish Conservative colleagues to be in the lead in the campaign. [Interruption.]

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The hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South, representing the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission, was asked—

[Alan Brown (Kilmarnock and Loudoun) (SNP)]

1. To ask the hon. Member for Houghton and Sunderland South, representing the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission, what recent assessment the commission has made of the effectiveness of the regulation of (a) election expenses and (b) donations to political parties.

[Bridget Phillipson (Houghton and Sunderland South)]

The Electoral Commission reported on political finance regulation at the June 2017 general election in November 2017. It highlighted important areas for the Government and Parliament to improve election law and transparency in political finance. The commission’s recommendations include increasing the maximum penalty that it can impose for a breach of the rules, extending the imprint requirement for campaign materials to include online campaigning, and changing the law to allow for transparency of political donations in Northern Ireland.

[Alan Brown]

After the 2015 general election, the Tory party, the Labour party and the Liberal Democrats were all fined for misreporting election expenses, and the Liberal Democrats continue to play fast and loose with how they allocate expenses between local and national campaigns. Does the hon. Lady agree with the Electoral Commission that the fines are no longer suitable, and that urgent action must be taken to ensure that the penalty matches the crime?

[Bridget Phillipson]

The hon. Gentleman is right to draw attention to the commission’s recommendation to increase the maximum penalty that it can impose on political parties and other campaigners for a breach of the political finance rules. There is a risk that a maximum fine of £20,000 per offence could be seen as the cost of doing business, and the commission’s view is that monetary policy should be more proportionate to the income and expenditure of larger and well-funded campaigners.