European Union Referendum Bill

Lord Flight Excerpts

Tuesday 1st December 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Flight (Con)]

My Lords, how will these measures deal with contributions from overseas? This might not be a big issue, but obviously there is the thought that there may be significant contributions from the EU itself.

[Baroness Anelay of St Johns]

My Lords, I am particularly grateful for the intervention of the noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, because it encapsulated the issue. The noble Lord, Lord Jay, is content that we have gone as far as a government amendment, or indeed any amendment, can go—I think that is the point—within the statutory system. The Electoral Commission in its briefing, to which the noble Baroness, Lady Ludford, referred, is saying that, beyond legislation, there is the whole issue of people behaving properly. Clearly, we want to ensure that those people who are receiving donations carry out their best efforts to ensure that they come from a source from which they should receive them. But also there are those issues that I mentioned in opening, such as the fact that some people who are receiving donations will not know at that stage that later on they will want to register to be a permitted participant. Therefore, we have to be cautious not to overload them with regulation, because they cannot guess what they are going to do as the sums of money rise and how they will feel as their activity increases. The noble Lord, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, encapsulated that position very well.

My noble friend Lord Flight asked about overseas moneys. I referred during my presentation of the amendment to how that might be affected. I made it very clear in earlier stages of this Bill how money from overseas may be part and parcel of permitted donations. I do not think that it would be appropriate for me at Third Reading to go through the detail of that again, but perhaps it would be right for me to respond to my noble friend by making it clear that we have always set out that permitted participants cannot accept donations of more than £500 from the EU institutions, as these are not eligible donors under PPERA. With companies based in Europe, as long as a campaigner does not spend any other money campaigning during the referendum period, it would be possible for campaigners to receive up to £10,000 from a foreign company and use it to campaign. That is a necessary function of proportionate controls on low-spending campaigners. I went into this in some detail in Committee, so I shall not try to do so now. It is important that we have transparency in all these matters, and that is exactly what we have tried to put at the heart of this group of amendments.