Brexit: Further Referendum

Baroness Browning Excerpts

Thursday 17th January 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Browning (Con)]

My Lords, I must declare that I was never a Boy Scout.

Like the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, I have some questions for my noble friend the Minister, not because I wish to express an opinion on whether there will be a referendum as a result of the Brexit negotiations but, since it is being discussed in Parliament and contingency planning is important, because my main concern is about matters that have been raised by the Electoral Commission since the previous referendum. I say that as a former member of the House of Commons committee which oversaw the Electoral Commission and as a former electoral commissioner myself.

In 2016, the Electoral Commission produced two reports. I would like my noble friend the Minister to take note of some of the recommendations that came out of them. If he is not able to answer today on some of the specific issues, I would be happy for him to write to me at a later date, because some of them are rather techie points.

One of the recommendations refers to the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act—a long title for an Act. Its acronym is equally difficult, so I shall refer to it as just “the Act”. It was passed in 2000, but has subsequently been amended by Parliament.

As we have approached any election, it seems that the Act has had to be amended in some way at short notice because somebody has come up with the idea that there is a flaw in it or because matters have moved on. The Electoral Commission made some specific recommendations in its 2016 report following the referendum that we are discussing. The first related to loan controls and stated:

“The absence of loan controls in the … rules is a significant gap in the regulation of referendums. The … Government should bring forward the relevant secondary legislation to introduce loan controls”.


In the last couple of years I have unfortunately had some periods of absence due to ill-health, so if I have missed this, if this has gone through and everything has been ticked and is in place, forgive me—my noble friend will no doubt tell me.

I shall not go through all 13 recommendations in the Electoral Commission report, but just focus on some that it will be important to have in place before another referendum, whenever and of whatever nature. Another is that:

“The Government and Parliament should revisit the permissibility controls on companies … permissibility controls on companies do not fully reflect the recommendations from the Committee on Standards in Public Life, and the implications of the current company permissibility test highlighted by our investigations, the Government and, in due course, Parliament should revisit the issue … to ensure that they meet the underlying policy intention of preventing donations and loans from foreign companies”.


That is another very important point and something that could easily slip through if there is a referendum at short notice in a small timeframe.

All these recommendations are important but, because of time, I shall focus on just some. The report says that:

“The Government and Parliament should take into account the evidence from the EU referendum when considering whether the PPERA referendum spending limits remain appropriate. The Commission does not have a specific statutory role in advising on spending limits at UK-wide referendums held under PPERA. It is nevertheless important that the Government and Parliament take into account the evidence from the EU referendum when considering whether the PPERA referendum spending limits, including the registration threshold, remain appropriate.”


There is obviously more detail in the report as to why the commission thinks that is important. It also states that:

“Joint spending controls should be incorporated into PPERA. To help ensure the integrity and effectiveness of the referendum spending rules, appropriate controls should be incorporated into PPERA to regulate campaigners that engage in joint spending so that they apply for all future referendums.”


Many people will be concerned about pre-poll reporting:

“Pre-poll reporting requirements should be incorporated into PPERA so they apply for all future referendums. To increase transparency during the months before the referendum poll”—


I do not know whether we are talking “months” here, if such a referendum were to take place, but again the Electoral Commission thought that this was an important area. It recommended that, to help encourage campaigners to accept donations only from permissible sources,

“pre-poll reporting requirements should be incorporated into PPERA”.

Given the legislation load that we are dealing with in both Houses at present, some of this would apply to secondary legislation, but quite clearly an amendment is required to the Act itself for many of these recommendations. I am concerned about how the Government would find the time if they were minded to make these changes in order to improve the referendum, whatever referendum, when it comes. There is also a recommendation that:

“The Commission’s current fine limit should be reviewed and increased. To ensure that our sanctioning regime provides a strong deterrent to non-compliance, our sanction limit of £20,000 should be reviewed and increased to a level that would act as a suitable deterrent reflecting the level of fines available to other commensurate statutory regulators and financial regulation regimes”.


This is techie stuff but has come from actual experience of the very referendum that we all discuss and talk about. It is not unusual, I suppose, that one learns as one goes along and that certain flaws come to light. The difficulty would be if those flaws and those recommendations were ignored and we just carried on in the same way, so I say to my noble friend that this is a challenge to the Government in terms of workload and compliance but I hope that they will none the less find time to examine the report and the recommendations of the Electoral Commission again and see how they might incorporate them into their work schedule.