Elections Bill

Baroness Noakes Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Tuesday 15th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, we have now come to the seventh group of amendments, where there are two amendments, Amendment 30C, in the name of my noble friend Lord Collins, and Amendment 31, in my name. Both amendments are probing amendments to Clause 21, which concerns the registration of parties and considers the declaration of assets and liabilities to be provided on application for registration.

One thing that the clause does is introduce the requirement that new political party registrations will have to be accompanied by a declaration that the new party does not have assets over £500 on registration. If it does have assets of over £500, it will be required to produce a record of those assets and liabilities. The amendment looks at the figure of £500 and suggests that it should be changed to £450. The purpose is simply to probe the reasoning behind the figure of £500 and to ask for some information about how that figure was arrived at, whether there was a precedent, and so on.

One thing that I am aware at in looking at the figure of £500 is that the Electoral Commission’s 2018 report, Digital Campaigning: Increasing Transparency for Voters, which I am sure we will debate later on when we get to the digital campaigning part of the Bill, recommended that all new parties should submit a declaration of assets and liabilities over £500 on registration. I wondered whether perhaps that was where the figure came from; it would be useful to understand. Obviously, those recommendations were intended to increase the transparency of digital campaigns and help prevent foreign funding of elections and referendum campaigns. So this is really to probe government thinking: did it come from this group and will be looked at and discussed when we get to the digital campaigning part of the Bill? It would be helpful at this stage to know that.

My Amendment 31 is, again, a probing amendment, looking at the proposals amending Section 28(8) of PPERA about the length of time that the copy of the record of assets and liabilities provided by the party should be kept available for public inspection. The Bill says that this should be for

“such period as the Commission think fit”.

My amendment suggests replacing that with 20 years, as we felt that that seemed like a reasonable amount of time and gave more clarity and detail as to how long a record would be kept available for public inspection. Again, I would be interested to hear from the Minister how that wording came to be decided on and what the criteria are that the Electoral Commission will use to determine a fit amount of time. I do not know whether there is a precedent anywhere else in legislation that has guidance for a fit amount of time. Will the Government be providing guidance on that issue? Are we out of the ball park with 20 years, or are we in the right place? Are there any other areas of electoral law—or similar law, if not specifically electoral law—that the commission would use as some kind of comparison when looking at decisions on that?

I read the Explanatory Notes to see whether there is anything further on this, but there did not seem to be any more information than what is already in the Bill. It would be helpful to get a better understanding of the Government’s thinking on these points, how they intend to take that forward, how they will work with the Electoral Commission and what kind of guidance there might be.

[Baroness Noakes (Con)]

My Lords, I have one further question to add to the questions that have been put to the Minister. New subsection (3C), which will be introduced by Clause 21, refers to calculation of assets and liabilities. Noble Lords will be aware that, as an accountant, I get interested in how assets and liabilities are measured. I understand the concept of net assets, which is assets minus liabilities, and the concepts of gross assets and gross liabilities. What I do not understand is the concept in new subsection (3C)(c) of assets plus liabilities. Under this, if a party had assets of £255 and liabilities of £250—that is, they had net assets of £5—adding the assets and liabilities together would give a figure of over £500, which would bring it within the scope of the new subsection, which, frankly, I do not understand.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I will comment on Amendment 31, which is about record-keeping. I return to the point I made a few minutes ago: it is about not just keeping the records but access to the records that have been kept. There are plenty of “publicly available” records that are not actually publicly available in real life. Election expenses are a case in point: GDPR has added an extra layer of complexity because they often contain personal details, bank details, addresses et cetera that ought not to be transmitted to other persons. Clearly, these records might well come within the same purview. I do not seek a detailed reply from the noble Baroness as that would be quite unfair, but I hope that, as we proceed, the Government will be able to illustrate that they have considered carefully issues of record-keeping, and, indeed, how the transparency that goes with record-keeping will be maintained in the current and projected circumstances.