Party Funding Reform

Lord Bew Excerpts

Thursday 3rd November 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Bew (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, for his initiative in raising again this very important issue of party funding in modern Britain. I speak as chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. Our report of 2011 has been referred to a number of times, as well as my various letters to Prime Ministers—plural, now—and the leader of the Opposition on this subject. As I have said in this House before, the replies that I received from the Conservative Party have not exactly raised my hopes of dramatic reform in the near future. It is a matter of justice to say that today I received a letter from the Labour Party, and I can assure your Lordships that it did not raise my hopes either. There was really no difference in helpfulness in that hapless correspondence with my office.

During the passage of the Trade Union Bill, the 2011 report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life was discussed. I said then that we were aware of problems with that report. I genuinely believe that its basic approach, its insistence on consensus and cross-party agreement and its attempt to provide the basis for that was completely right. Although the Conservative and Labour members of our committee both dissented, I think they were sympathetic to the broad approach. They both had disagreements on points to which I will return. But I was also well aware that, five years later, some of the statistical material in our report was now out of date.

I promised on the Floor of this House that the Committee on Standards in Public Life would commission new research, and we have so done. The work we commissioned from the distinguished academic Dr Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, who has worked in this field for a long time and advised the committee on a number of occasions in the past, is published in your Lordships’ briefing pack for this debate. I will not refer to that work, which brings the figures up to date—although it touches on the point raised, for example, by the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, on whether there really is an arms race going on in electoral expenditure. That report has been published and in that respect, I have kept my promise to the House. I add that today we are publishing a second report, based on YouGov polling which we commissioned earlier, by Dee Goddard of the University of Kent. For simplicity, I will call it the Goddard report.

That report, Public Attitudes to Party Funding in Britain, has been published this afternoon by the committee and is available on our website. Because we have limited time, I will obviously not go through every point but it is an important addition to the already important work published by Dr Pinto-Duschinsky. The Goddard report shows that the issue of party funding is considered of greater importance than it was the last time YouGov did this polling in 2011. A substantial majority of respondents, 93%, believe that large party donations are motivated by hopes for influence or special favours—the most obvious example being peerages—from a given political party, while 79% of those asked believed that this was a common motivation for donors. Equally, on the other side of the argument, I totally accept that all our previous polling shows that 80% of the British people do not want to see state funding for parties. One immediately sees the complexity and inherent difficulty of this issue.

Ninety per cent of respondents in the new report believe that MPs “very often” or sometimes decide what to do based on what their donors want, rather than on what they really believe. Even 48% of those who said that they had high trust in their MPs believe that sometimes the interests of donors played a role in political behaviour. The public are clear in their belief that this behaviour is unacceptable: indeed, they are probably more concerned than they were over the role of large donations in British politics. That said, because nothing is served by presenting an oversimplified picture of this debate, when they were asked about a cap on donations 42%—a largish block—said that they did not know whether it was a good idea or what the level should be. Again, that indicates the difficulty and complexity of public attitudes. But it is the role of my committee to at least bring attention to the most up-to-date information that we can to further debate.

In September, the Institute for Government produced a report using data based on more recent polling—our polling was done in April and May. The report was headlined:

“Trust in government is growing”.

That surprised me as over the years I have read endless reports showing that it was dropping. The report showed that more people now believe that the Government are doing their best and have proper priorities than believed it in 2014. The figure is up by 8%. Equally, the number of those who believe that MPs are self-interested persons concerned only with their re-election is down by 8%. At the moment, there is a slight upwards spike—a better direction than the normal pattern of gloomy figures about trust in politics. I have never believed that one should take these figures too seriously because trustworthiness is a different thing, but the public have these concerns and we cannot afford to ignore them, while not taking these matters absolutely literally. There is a slight spike upwards and trends are more positive, but the Institute for Government is quite right to say in its headline that further work is needed on this point.

Expectations have clearly been raised by the change in government. There is no doubt that they have been affected by the Prime Minister’s speeches about standards in public life, and trust is an issue she has directly addressed. We are in a honeymoon period. We have temporarily reversed the downward trend, which is a good thing. If we choose to do absolutely nothing in these controversial areas of public standards—not just party financing, but lobbying and a range of other difficult issues, including revolving doors and so on—we will create a mood of disappointment, and things will plummet again. On party funding, it is clear that work could be carried out to promote small donations. It is entirely right to draw attention to these better figures, but I counsel against any complacency. Things cannot be left exactly as they are, even though I concede the inherent complexity of these issues of public funding.