Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill

Lord Bishop of Oxford Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, and my noble friend Lord Tyler have fought this issue pretty well. I will make a short contribution to the debate on this important topic. Amendments 167 and 168 accept that there need to be limits, but seek to change as little as possible. As was pointed out by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, the reason for this is that there is not evidence that the limits so far have caused great difficulties or given rise to many problems. The amendments therefore seek not to reduce the amounts from £10,000 to £5,000 and from £5,000 to £2,000, but merely to restore the purchasing power of those figures. I must say to my noble and learned friend on the Front Bench that I think £2,000 for a single constituency is a very low sum indeed. Hiring a hall and some audio equipment would make a very sizeable dent in that sum.

The Bank of England’s inflation indicator, a wonderful thing to play with of an afternoon, enables you to check purchasing power on any day from 1750 to 2012. The purchasing power of £1 in 1750 is equivalent to £187.76 in 2012, just as an aside. The relevant figures are from 2000 to 2012. The purchasing power of £1 in 2000 was equivalent to £1.42 in 2012. In other words, inflation has averaged 2.9% per annum, and therefore the purchasing power of £1 is now only 70p. On that basis, applying that across the piece, you come out with a figure of £14,200 from £10,000, or £7,100 from £5,000. I have merely rounded it to the nearest £1,000.

The reason for my contribution to this debate is that I think we want as few changes as possible. This matter was debated at great length during the PPERA proceedings, and all we seek to do is restore the status quo ante in terms of purchasing power. I hope that the Government will look with favour on this contribution to the debate on an important topic.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth (CB)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 167A and 167B. The Government have indicated quite clearly that they will raise the registration threshold, so the question at issue is what the sum should be. We have had various alternatives put before us already today. The recommendation of the commission that I have the privilege of chairing is £20,000 for England and £10,000 for the other three nations.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, reminded us of the Neill committee’s recommendation in 1998 that the limit should be £25,000 and that that should be the figure also for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. He posed a very sharp question: why should the registration thresholds be lower for those nations? Although our commission eventually plumped for the figure of £10,000 for those three nations, we were very tempted to put it higher, particularly because of all the difficulties in Northern Ireland, the key role that charities are playing there and their great desire not to be identified with any particular political party at this time of emergence from conflict to democracy. There is therefore a very strong case for Northern Ireland’s registration threshold to be higher.

The reasons for the raising the thresholds are obvious. The Electoral Commission says that they should be raised to at least the present PPERA levels. The argument for raising them higher than that is, first, the increased range of activities—even if you take out staff time, as we hope the Government will, there is still an increased range of activities which will cost more money. The second is inflation. Perhaps most important of all is the stated aim of the Government to give smaller charities in particular more freedom of manoeuvre without the fear that they might overstep the line.

In our report, we summed up what all smaller charities were saying. They had said that,

“they limited or stopped altogether some campaigning activity in order to ensure they did not get close to the registration threshold. For many organisations, the perceived issue of reputational risk associated with registering as a third party was important in addition to the administrative burden. The reputational risk was a particular concern to some NGOs”.

This was the case with Oxfam. Evidence gathered for the report stated that:

“Oxfam deliberately chose to ensure their spending was capped under £10,000 so they didn’t have to register, because for charities, they see it as a real brand reputational risk, they have to register as a third party because we are meant to be really apolitical NGOs. But yes they do have large budgets but have chosen not to spend them on election campaigns”.

That question of reputational risk for charities in particular is an important consideration.

So much of this legislation, and the lowering of the thresholds in particular that we are talking about now, represents an attempt to escape the influence of the super-PACs in this country. It is as though a huge net has been thrown in order to catch some great fish which might swim across the Atlantic, but the only effect of which is to trap smaller fish quite legitimately swimming freely in the waters of democracy. I hope that the Government will raise the threshold very high indeed in order that their stated aim might be achieved; that is, that smaller charities can get on with their legitimate business of campaigning on policies without fear of being caught.

On Monday, the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, referred to his 15 years working with the Countryside Alliance. He said that,

“we were punctilious about not promoting or procuring the electoral advantage of a party or candidate”.

I am sure that they were. He continued:

“We were punctilious about these matters”.—[Official Report, 16/12/13; col. 1097.]

In fact, we understand that the Countryside Alliance had specific legal advice that its activities would be subject to PPERA regulations if it spent enough on materials to breach the registration threshold. It did not register, but that is only because it did not spend enough on printed materials. As the case study in the second commission report shows, it would clearly have needed to register under the Bill because of the new activities subject to registration. Its activities were not just to become transparent through regulation but would have been restricted because of the lower spending cap and the very low constituency limits.

In our report we set out the particular case of the Countryside Alliance and the difficulties that it would find itself in as a result of the Bill, and I wonder whether the Minister was aware of that legal advice at the time. The Government have given lots of reassurances to charities that they are not in the business of promoting or procuring the electoral advantages of a particular party, but that reassurance does not work because the sting is in not that sentence but the qualifications. A charity campaigning on policy can suddenly find that inadvertently, even if it has not mentioned a political party, and even if its primary purpose is something else altogether, it is coming up to the line where it might be caught by this regulation. It is this in particular that the commission wishes to draw to the attention of the Minister as we debate this amendment on thresholds; they need to be as high as possible in order to allow the maximum freedom that should properly be allowed in a democratic society.

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

I ask the noble and right reverend Lord to give us his view about the last part of the amendment spoken to by my noble friend Lord Tyler. All the way through this, we are trying to find a balance between the very legitimate arguments put forward by charities, not least by the noble and right reverend Lord himself, and the real danger—I am sorry to have to say this again—of there being very heavy expenditure within one or a few constituencies that might, almost inevitably, alter the outcome of an election, despite the fact that it was not the intention to elect a particular candidate. At a certain point the level of material, campaigning and so on begins to reach such a high volume that it is very hard to make that distinction; indeed, it is an unreal distinction in those cases.

Secondly, it is crucial that we hear from the noble and right reverend Lord on the issue of bunching together different kinds of campaigns in a particular constituency. Does he recognise that it is not difficult to find all kinds of ways around our incredibly complicated registration and election regulations? It is therefore true that those small fish can grow to be quite big fish, and there is a temptation to follow the examples elsewhere. Not only does that give an illegitimate basis on which to hold the election but, perhaps equally important, it discourages people of moderate income from standing for Parliament because of the very large figures that they are supposed to meet. Will he address that part of the issue before he completes his presentation?

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth]

I have listened with great attention to what the noble Baroness has said, as I did on Monday when she suggested that the commission had not taken that point seriously enough. I was going to address it when we came to talk about constituency limits because there are a whole range of issues related to them. I notice also what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said about constituency limits, and I take very seriously what he has said: there is clearly a major issue there that has to be addressed. There are other issues connected with constituency limits that also need to be taken into account, though, not least all the complications of trying to ascertain which constituency it might be attributed to. I take seriously what noble Lords have said but, if I may, I will address it when we come to address the amendments on constituency limits.

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[Lord Hardie]

My Lords, Amendment 169B also stands in my name.

The issues here are similar to those raised in the previous group of amendments, except that they apply to the total control of expenditure that may be incurred by a recognised third party in the various constituent countries of the United Kingdom. The current limits are contained in paragraph 3(2) of Schedule 10 to the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act Act 2000. Clause 27(2)(a) proposes to alter these limits by substituting them for,

“2% of the maximum campaign expenditure limit in that part of the United Kingdom”.

The effect of that provision is that the relevant figures for the countries are: £319,000 for England, reduced from £793,000; £35,000 for Scotland, reduced from £108,000; £24,000 for Wales, reduced from £80,000; and £10,080 for Northern Ireland, reduced from £27,000. My concerns about these reductions are similar to those about the reductions in registration limits.

I will not repeat the figures, but I will ask the noble and learned Lord the Advocate-General to justify the changes in this particular paragraph. The activities subject to control have been extended, yet it is proposed to reduce the total permissible expenditure. Moreover, the period covered is 12 months before an election. At Second Reading I drew attention to the following anomaly: in the context of Scotland, I doubted whether a campaign group could fund a national rally about an issue of importance to it, within a budget of £35,000. Even if it could, such a rally would exhaust its budget, leaving it unable to campaign effectively in any other way.

The unrealistic level of expenditure is highlighted when one has regard to the provisions in paragraph 5 of Schedule 10 to the 2000 Act about elections to the Scottish Parliament. The relevant figure for controlled expenditure is £75,800 and the relevant period is four months prior to the election. At the risk of showing my lack of the mathematical expertise that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, has, I say that a simple arithmetical approach of multiplying that figure by three would produce an equivalent annual figure of £227,400. But that, I acknowledge, is oversimplistic, as the greater part of any allowance will be expended in the last few months prior to an election. Accordingly, although probably still higher than the current annual figure of £108,000, the equivalent extrapolated figure would be approximate to it. If the proposed figure of £35,000, represented by the 2% introduced by Clause 27(2), is implemented, the discrepancy between the allowance for UK elections and elections to the Scottish Parliament is vast. Such a discrepancy for the same country in the same schedule to the 2000 Act demands an explanation and justification. In his reply will the noble and learned Lord the Advocate-General provide the House with the required explanation and justification for this disparity?

The deletion of this subsection will restore the status quo as far as limits are concerned, although the burden on that expenditure will be greater if the definition of controlled expenditure is expanded as proposed. I invite your Lordships to conclude that the effect of Amendment 169 would be to restore some public confidence in the democratic process and to avoid the absurdity and likely confusion that will arise from such disparate figures in Scotland, where campaign groups will be subject to different regimes within the same geographical boundaries.

Amendment 169B was tabled in case the previous amendment was not accepted, and the Government remained determined to reduce the overall figures and could justify such a policy. This amendment is a proposed compromise. By increasing the percentage from 2% to 5% the figure for England is more approximate to the current figure, and might even be slightly higher; but the decreases for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are less dramatic. The equivalent figure in Scotland would be £87,500. I beg to move.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 169A. I would like to ask the Minister what the rationale was behind such a drastic reduction in the spending limits. For England it was a 60% reduction; for the other nations it was 70%. This is a vast reduction, for which no reason was given. The commission which I have the privilege of chairing simply wishes to revert to the original PPERA figures plus inflation. Those are written in the amendment, and would mean £1,125,000 for the year for England; the comparable figures for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales would be £155,000, £86,000 and £40,000. We are simply recommending the original PPERA figures plus inflation.

I will give one example of a big spending campaign which is concerned about the cap. In the 2010 general election, Hope not Hate registered £319,231 of spending in England with the Electoral Commission. It is a national grass-roots organisation that seeks to challenge and expose openly racist political parties, candidates and policies. It works on the assumption that there is a risk that far-right racist policies might be campaigned on vigorously at election time, and it wishes to oppose that with racially tolerant policies. For example, in an area like Barking and Dagenham in 2010 where it mobilised people, its spending included printing of leaflets and Hope not Hate newspapers, staff time to write campaign literature, media coverage costs, communicating the campaign to supporters, and its battle bus bill. Of course, an organisation such as this, quite properly, needs to register and needs to be totally transparent in what it does, but the spending limits proposed in the Bill would severely reduce what that organisation would be able to do. It spent in 2010 £319,231, which is above the limit in the Bill. There is clearly a strong case for reverting not only to PPERA but to PPERA plus inflation on the cap.

[Lord Tyler]

I wonder if I may ask the noble and right reverend Lord a question. He and his commission have justifiably encouraged us to see the package—how different elements of the Bill stick together. I draw his attention to the fact that his amendment, combined with other amendments to remove all constituency limits that he and his colleagues have proposed, would, if they were to be implemented, mean that the sum of £1.25 million could be spent in a small number of target marginal constituencies. That is a huge sum of money. When we come to the other sections that deal with constituency limits, will he think about the implications of the interaction between those two propositions from his commission?

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth]

The commission is keen to emphasise that every aspect of the Bill is integrated with every other. Clearly, constituency limits have to be taken into account very seriously when we are thinking about raising either the threshold or the cap.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

I intervene briefly to support the Government and oppose the amendments put forward from the Cross Benches because the overall argument about undue influence is important here. As the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has just said in his intervention, it is not only a question of the total amount of money spent but of the way in which it is deployed in any geographical area, whether it is in one constituency, a number of constituencies, Scotland, Wales or England. That is the problem and that is why the Government are right to try to reduce the spending limits, with a view to reducing the possibility of undue influence.

There has been some discussion of the figures of a 60% or 70% reduction, and I obviously do not know exactly how they were arrived at in detail, but I know, as we all know, what happened at the last general election. As the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, rightly pointed out, spending by the Hope not Hate campaign throughout the whole country totalled £319,000. It was the third biggest spender, and only two registered third parties spent more than the Government are proposing—the public services union, Unison, which spent £671,000, and Vote for Change, which is a Liberal Democrat-backed organisation wanting change to the electoral system. Those are the only two organisations, apart from Hope not Hate, which spent anywhere near or above the amount proposed by the Government.

I fully accept that there will now be a different definition of controlled expenditure, and on previous amendments I pointed out that the Government should look very carefully at what is included in controlled expenditure, particularly in relation to staff costs. If they were to be removed from the definition of controlled expenditure, most of the problems in that regard would be solved. However, leaving that aside, the fact is that the spending of most other organisations that registered—all the fuss is about only the 30 or so organisations that took the trouble to register in the last general election—was way below £319,000, which is the limit proposed by the Government in the Bill. There is plenty of headroom there for people to run a proper campaign, given that they can concentrate those resources in a particular area. However, it is the overriding view of the Government that such a campaign should not unduly influence the result in any particular constituency. It is therefore entirely consistent with the logic of their position to reduce the spending limits as they propose.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth]

I hope that the noble Lord is not suggesting that the Hope not Hate campaign unduly influenced the election with that £319,000, which was spread right across the country. Was it not a fundamental expression of democratic rights that that campaign should have been able to do that? I am sure that he would not want its work to be hindered.

[Lord Horam]

I would not want its work to be hindered but there should not be undue influence in any particular set of constituencies or a constituency. That is what concerns me. If the noble and right reverend Lord says that this campaign was across the whole country, then clearly there was not an undue influence. None the less, if a campaign is focused on particular areas there may be undue influence.

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[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, again we are grateful to the noble and leaned Lord, Lord Hardie, for introducing this part of the Bill and the consideration of the overall spending limits. As no doubt the Committee is aware, third parties are subject to limits on the amount of controlled expenditure that they may incur during the regulated period of a United Kingdom parliamentary general election. The initial figures set out in PPERA 2000 set the limit at £988,500 for the whole of the United Kingdom and this Bill, as has been heard, seeks to amend that limit to £390,000. The limit in either case is of course the aggregate of individual limits of each part of the United Kingdom. That means that expenditure is allocated in accordance with where its effect is most significantly felt. If a body has its head office in Scotland, for example, but undertakes and targets its campaign work only in England, then that spending will be allocated to the English limit and not the Scottish one.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, has tabled amendments so that the spending limit for third parties remains as it is in PPERA 2000, and the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, has proposed limits that would take the spending limit to £1,406,000 across the United Kingdom as a whole. This substantial increase, as I understand it, is to reflect inflation since the original limit was set 13 years ago. There has been considerable discussion, not just in this House but also in the other place, about third-party campaigners and the potential to incur significant amounts of expenditure in campaigns. This was spoken about very eloquently by my noble friend Lady Williams. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayter, indicated that her party has no desire to see the cost of politics increase, nor, indeed, do we want to see a disproportionate effect on elections by those who have lots of money to throw around.

There is also the potential, given that limits are imposed on political parties—let us remember that, if we look at this in its full context, there are limits on political parties—that we would undermine that regime if their supporters could still demonstrate their backing by diverting funding to a formally or informally aligned party. Allowing very large sums to be spent to the benefit of parties that are candidates in this way risks, I believe, undermining the basic rules that have evolved over the years in terms of restriction of political spending in elections. The nature of third parties means that controls on their spending are necessary. I do not believe that we have really debated limits, but I do not think that anyone has challenged the principle that there should be some control on substantial spending.

There is some evidence of third-party expenditure increasing. In 2010, eight third-party organisations spent more than £100,000, although, as I think my noble friend Lord Horam correctly pointed out, most who were registered—and only 30 were registered—spent considerably less than that. Indeed, some who were registered spent nothing at all. Although there were eight who spent more than £100,000 in 2010, in 2005 only two groups did so. I believe, and we have said all these things many times, that it is about trying to strike the right balance to ensure transparency. We believe that the figure in the Bill is a reasonable limit for national third-party campaigning. Most campaigns in the last election did not spend anywhere near either the total amount that was available then or the amount that is proposed in this Bill.

It has been argued that these previous campaigns did not require third parties to account for a much wider range of activities, but it is worth reflecting on the fact that the Green Party, a political party, spent £330,000 on its national campaign in the 2010 general election. That campaign activity included incurring expenses on advertising, unsolicited materials, manifestos, market research, transport, media events and rallies—all activities that third parties should also account for. No one can doubt that the Green Party had a very strong voice in that campaign and indeed succeeded in getting its first ever Member elected to the House of Commons. It was a voice within a national debate. In fact, only four out of well over 100 registered political parties spent more than £390,000 in 2010: the Conservative Party, the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and the UK Independence Party.

We are setting a limit which, as I said, only four political parties exceeded in 2010, and a party that was recognised as having played a full part, albeit without standing in every constituency, in a national election in all its activities spent less than £390,000. We do not believe that third parties should be dominating the electoral landscape—by “third parties” I do not mean political parties but such as we have discussed in this debate, as of course I think third parties have an important role to play in the party-political scene—and creating campaigning inequality among political parties. We believe that the spending limits are appropriate and proportionate.

The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, drew attention to the differential that exists in Schedule 10 to the 2000 Act, and I accept that this Bill is looking at the UK limits. It will also recognise that while you might have a campaign to be undertaken on a pan-UK basis, it is not quite the same as if you were focusing solely on Scotland for a Scottish election and so I think that there is some scope for a differential.

We believe that, having reduced the limit to a sum that has not inhibited, or would not have caught, the Green Party at the last election or indeed the vast majority of third parties that were registered and campaigned, this is not an unreasonable balance to be struck. I invite the noble and learned Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth]

Will the Minister not acknowledge, in relation to the spending by the Green Party, that of course it did not have to include staff costs in the figure that he quoted? As the Bill now stands, third-party campaigners have to include staff costs, so there is not an even playing field. Furthermore, will he acknowledge that the whole political landscape now is very different from what it was, say, 20 or 30 years ago, with a dramatic decline in political-party membership and the rise in membership of third-party campaigners? Does the apparent indifference of so many people, sadly, to political-party campaigns and their enthusiasm and commitment to third-party campaigns not indicate that third-party campaigns should be treated equally seriously as a fundamental feature of our democracy along with political parties, particularly at election time?

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, makes a fair point that, as a party, the staff costs were not included, but I think one of the reasons was referred to by my noble friend Lord Gardiner on Monday. Political parties’ staff are fully committed and are very transparently fighting an election, whereas one might reasonably assume that, when larger organisations undertake political campaigning—and we accept that they are registered because they believe that their campaigning could reasonably be judged to give an electoral advantage, or disadvantage, to one party or another—their staff’s time is not entirely taken up with it. He makes a fair point, but there is also a distinction because it would not be the entire staffing costs of a particular organisation that would be taken into account.

I wholly accept the point that has been made about the richness of the debate, with groups contributing in ways they have not done before, much of which is made possible, I suspect, by electronic media. Those of us who have had to stuff envelopes in the past probably realise that there are easier ways of campaigning and getting the message across, as well as being cheaper than the printed material which the noble Earl, Lord Sandwich, mentioned in his earlier intervention. In some respects, campaigning costs themselves have gone down over the years because of the nature of much of modern campaigning.

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Our amendments in this group are designed to help make the constituency limit do what it is intended to do but without doing what it is not intended to do. Our approach avoids bogging people down needlessly in accounting for things that do not matter very much at a constituency level. It adds much needed clarity to the whole concept of a constituency limit and acknowledges the role of local campaigning and local fundraising. In exactly the same spirit as the noble and right reverend Lord’s commission, this is a practical package. It could be implemented and is workable, but it meets the extremely important objective of this legislation, which is to ensure that we still have proper controls over spending at the constituency level. I beg to move.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth]

My Lords, I take seriously what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has said and what earlier on the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said. Clearly, if there is a possibility of abuse, that must be guarded against. The commission takes that seriously. However, we must also take into account a number of other factors, not least that the Electoral Commission regards constituency limits as they are in the Bill at the moment as unworkable and unenforceable. It states:

“In our previous briefings on Part 2 of the Bill we have noted that except in extreme cases, the new year-long constituency controls may be unenforceable within the regulated period, given the difficulty of obtaining robust evidence to determine and sanction breaches”.

That seems to be a key point. If the Electoral Commission believes that these controls cannot be enforced, there must be something fundamentally wrong with the law.

It should also be noted that political parties’ national campaigning during the year before a UK general election is not subject to limits on spending at constituency level. Why is there one rule on this for political parties? Perhaps I can ask the Minister to reply to this. Why, when according to the Bill there is to be a limit on what third-party campaigners can spend, should the political parties have a rule that says that there is no limit on what they can spend in a particular constituency? Furthermore, PPERA did not contain the provision for constituency limits. We have heard a lot about the threat of abuse at constituency level, but there was no clear evidence of abuse at the 2010 general election.

The Electoral Commission states:

“The existing controls for constituency level campaigning are set out in separate rules under the Representation of the People Act 1983 (RPA)”.

These controls cover constituency campaigning by candidates who are standing for election and spending by non-party campaigners who campaign for and against those candidates, as, for example, in “vote for this candidate”. Earlier on the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, made a point of this. Any potential abuses of the kind that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, have pointed out are the responsibility of the police to investigate. The Electoral Commission does not have any enforcement powers in relation to these rules.

The main burden of the commission’s report, backed up by a number of vivid case examples, is that it would be impossible to comply with this law because a fair amount of campaigning crosses a number of different constituencies. For instance, the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign operates across three parliamentary constituencies. So far, the campaign has collected and spent around £36,000. The hospital serves a number of different constituencies. How on earth would the campaigning groups involved in the campaign allocate the different amounts of expenditure per particular constituency?

A similar problem arises in relation to Stop HS2. As well as the national organisation, there are 120 local action groups. In the Kenilworth and Southam constituency alone, there are 11 separate action groups. Stop HS2 goes through a whole range of different constituencies. How are the groups that are part of this campaign to allocate their expenditure to the different constituencies? Even if they were able to do that, how would the Electoral Commission be able to enforce it?

I shall not repeat other examples because of the shortage of time. They are all set out at the back of the report. One example relates to stopping climate change. We must take seriously what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has said. It may be possible for the Government to bring forward a very sharply focused amendment to deal with that problem. As it stands at the moment, for the reasons I have given, it would be difficult if not impossible for campaigning groups to comply with the law and the Electoral Commission would have great difficulty in enforcing it.

[Baroness Mallalieu]

My Lords, I, too, intend to oppose the Question that Clause 28 stand part of the Bill. I shall be brief.

Clause 28 needs to come out altogether. First, it is written in gobbledegook. At Second Reading I took up some of the House’s time by reading out part of Clause 28. I recommend it to the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for his insomnia. It is impossible for a criminal lawyer like me, not a charity lawyer or an electoral lawyer, to begin to understand it. It is inconceivable that any small charity or campaigning organisation without its own legal team would be able to look at it and understand it. They would be bound to have to seek expensive legal advice that would take money and staff away from the objects and the work that they were doing. Whatever else happens in relation to Clause 28, this present clause should be taken away and written in English.

Secondly, if the Government insist on having a clause of this nature, perhaps I may also point out, as has already been done by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, that it is unworkable. It is impossible to divide some of the expenditure by campaigning organisations between constituencies. Where does it leave the rally that draws people from a number of different constituencies? Where does it leave the battle bus that drives around the streets and crosses some constituency boundary? How on earth does an organiser who is running a national campaign apportion the particular pieces of his time to the various constituencies that may or may not be covered?

Thirdly, it is unenforceable. The Electoral Commission, comprising the people who are meant to be doing that, has said so, as your Lordships have just been reminded. One can well imagine the avalanche of complaints that are likely to be made to the Electoral Commission during and after a campaign, especially if a result has been close. Its resources are now stretched beyond what it is being required to do. It is unlikely that it will receive adequate additional resources to help with the Bill. If it does, they will be inadequate for investigating and dealing with the process of investigation and adjudication of these complaints.

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[Lord Horam]

My Lords, I agree with the noble Baroness about the way in which this clause has been written. I thoroughly applauded her speech at Second Reading in which she drew out the extent to which this is incredibly complicated, even for someone with some arithmetical skills, which I do not possess, let alone any understanding of law by a non-lawyer. None the less there is a supremely important principle in this clause and my noble friend Lord Tyler drew it out perfectly. In many ways it is the heart of this Bill.

The fundamental issue is that spending by political parties is controlled because we do not want there to be a free-for-all spending-wise in this country in the way there is in America. Therefore, we have control of political parties’ spending. We have control at a national level and we have control in a regulated period; we can argue about the length of the regulated period but we have one. We have control at the constituency level. That control must be strong. Therefore, we are really arguing about what the level of control should be.

I am quite amazed that the commission of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, said quite specifically that there should be no constituency limits on spending by third-party campaigners. That must be absolutely wrong in principle because they are not standing in the election. Why should they have an unlimited influence in a particular constituency as opposed to the people who have actually got the guts to stand for election and put their name, personality and fortune on the line in the hope of coming to Parliament? It must be wrong for them to be outbid financially by some third party, who is not willing to put their name and person up for election in the way the candidate has had the courage to do.

I hope that the noble and right reverend Lord will reflect on this. The idea that there should be no constituency limits is wrong in principle. Therefore, I think there should be a clause of this kind, although I would hope it would be very much better drafted than the one we have at the moment.

Secondly, the argument is put forward by the commission that any limits placed are unenforceable. Obviously, the commission is making the point that it is being asked to do a new task. Previously, the commission has looked post hoc at what has happened in a general election; here it is being asked to do it in real time, during the course of the election, to find out exactly what is going on and whether the system is being abused. That is a very difficult task and the commission is right to say that it is having tasks imposed on it that it has not done before and which therefore may well be very difficult to enforce, to the point of being unenforceable in some circumstances.

Those of us who have fought elections know that the existing limits on what parties can spend in elections are very often unenforceable in practice. As I know to my personal cost, parties find all sorts of devious ways around the amount that can be spent in a general election and it is very difficult to track them down. In that sense, the existing rules are unenforceable, but they do have a restraining effect. As a candidate in a general election, when I came to fight the election I knew that I had to get a little war chest together. The general assumption was that you had to try to get together about £10,000 to fight an election.

I will say in passing that most associations and local parties are extremely poor. Getting together £10,000 is quite hard to do. At the penultimate general election, when I was defending a majority of 269 against the Liberal Democrats, I reached £10,000 only by having a gift from the noble Lord, Lord Ashcroft, of £6,000; otherwise, I and the local party would have had to fork out. We are living in a poor world. Local parties do not have the resources of Oxfam and all those large organisations that want to home in on an election and put their view—as they rightly should, within proportionate limits—to the people who stand in elections.

Having constituency limits acts as a clear restraint on what parties think they can spend and what third parties think they can spend. Therefore, if there was a restraint of the kind the Government recommend, that would exercise a good influence on the whole electoral system.

The issue has been raised, in relation to the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign, that you cannot have a spending limit related to one constituency. There are three constituencies in Lewisham; of course you could have the expenditure divided between three constituencies. Some expenditure would not be allowed in a particular constituency. In Orpington, for example, there was always a huge banner, usually taped up by the Labour Party, in one main road in my constituency and it was never accounted for in the local expenses of the Labour Party in Orpington although it would actually influence people going round the M25 and other roads nearby. These things can be dealt with and there is no real difficulty in trying to apportion expenditure in the way that is described.

It is all perfectly possible, it is doable and it is essential if we are to have a proper democracy in this country. Indeed, I would argue that what the commission is proposing is actually anti-democratic.

[Lord Harries of Pentregarth]

I feel I ought to point out something that the commission made quite clear at the beginning of its report: that its recommendations were for the 2015 election only and that there should be a proper review post-2015. We had only six weeks to consult, despite the recommendation of a lot of bodies, including ourselves, that there should have been a proper three-month or six-month review. In the six weeks, we could not find a workable solution to this, so for the 2015 election our recommendation was that we should not have limits. We could not get our minds round this to find one that is really workable. The Government may be able to do this—we will just have to see—and they may accept the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Tyler. In defence of the commission, I point out that this was only for the interim because we had such a short time to consult.

[Lord Horam]

I understand what the noble and right reverend Lord is saying and I accept that. None the less, I want him to understand that, in running a proper democracy, at a constituency level this is a very important issue.