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

Lord Hardie Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2013 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Hardie]

166: Clause 27, page 14, line 42, leave out subsection (1)

[Lord Hardie (CB)]

My Lords, in moving Amendment 166, I wish to speak also to Amendment 166B. At Second Reading, a number of noble Lords expressed concern about the changes to the existing limits on controlled expenditure that Clause 27 seeks to introduce. Justification for such a change is obviously necessary. The Explanatory Notes provide no assistance in understanding the rationale for this change. In his response at Second Reading the Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, did not explain what problems had been caused by the existing limits. I am confident that if there was sound justification for reducing the expenditure limits based on past experience of the operation of Section 85 of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 within its limited scope of activities, the Minister would have advised the House of that. That is particularly so where justification was sought by noble Lords, but none was forthcoming.

If there have been no problems, why reduce the limits which have been in existence for at least 13 years? Moreover, how can the Government justify reducing expenditure limits while at the same time increasing the range of qualifying activities? In his reply, will the noble and learned Lord the Advocate-General please answer the following questions? First, what is the reason for Clause 27(1)? Secondly, what problems have been caused over the years by having the existing limits? Thirdly, in proposing to reduce the limits, what assessment did the Government make of the likely increase in expenditure caused by the extension of controlled activities introduced by Clause 26? If the noble and learned Lord has no answer that justifies this extreme provision, will he acknowledge the strength of feeling that exists that this clause is grossly unfair, is a disproportionate interference in the right to freedom of speech and political engagement, and is an obstruction to democracy?

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[Lord Hardie]

My Lords, I am grateful to noble Lords in all parts of the House for speaking in this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, suggested that the 2011 report was the more appropriate one. I went back to the 1998 report because that was the one which founded the 2000 Act, which set out the limits that we are discussing. On that basis, I went back to that report to find the justification for the legislation.

I hear what the noble and learned Lord the Advocate-General has said in response. I am disappointed that despite his white hair he is not Father Christmas and will not give me the gift that I was seeking. But I look forward to the amendment on Report and hope that it sets appropriate levels, and may not be confined to the £2,000 and £5,000 levels, but will be above that, if the Government are truly listening to the concerns of the third sector. With these observations I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 166 withdrawn.

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Moved by

[Lord Hardie]

169: Clause 27, page 15, line 1, leave out subsection (2)

[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.

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[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

My Lords, I think I indicated that even with the reduced limits, on the list I have before me there were only two organisations that went above them, one being UNISON and the other being Vote for a Change Ltd, and neither of those got anywhere near the limits set out in PPERA. Even with the reduced limits, most organisations would not get anywhere near them. I take the point made about staffing made by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries. Even a political party, the Green Party, which fought a fully fledged election campaign, admittedly not in every constituency but one that registered in the national campaign, did not reach the reduced limit. In trying to strike these balances, these limits are not unreasonable.

[Lord Hardie]

I am grateful to noble Lords on all sides of the Committee for participating in the debate. I hear what the Minister has said about what the effect of these limits would have been had they been applied to the last election and I want to reflect on that. I note also that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, referred to the experience of the last general election.

I think that the noble and learned Lord also acknowledged that much of the difficulty might be removed if staff costs were taken out of the equation. Certainly that is a point the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, raised just now. I wish to reflect on these matters before Report, but in the meantime I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 169 withdrawn.

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[Lord Ramsbotham]

My Lords, because constituency-based limits seem to be even more inappropriate than some of the other sanctions we have been discussing when related to non-party charities and other organisations working in the criminal justice system, as the noble and right reverend Lord pointed out—and I have referred to these organisations already—I would like to preface my contention that Clause 28, which was so admirably described by the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, should not stand part of the Bill in its present form.

On Monday, we took almost six and a half hours to complete four groups of amendments in Committee, which not only confirmed what many other noble Lords have felt since it appeared—namely, that this is a thoroughly bad Bill—but caused me to reflect on its actual aim. My reflections were stimulated by the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, who suggested that its purpose was to prevent money taking over politics as it is doing in the United States.

On rereading Part 1, which is all about professional or consultant lobbyists, the scales fell from my eyes. The noble Baroness’s description of young people being trained to lobby by the Tea Party called to mind a conversation on the steps of Washington Cathedral one Sunday in September 1973 when I was accompanying my then boss, the Chief of the General Staff, to Matins during an official visit to the American army. A delightful elderly ex-ambassador to South Vietnam whom we met earlier in the visit said to him, “The trouble with this country is that it’s governed by whizz-kids, and the trouble with whizz-kids is that they haven’t got time to listen. You see, I’d told them that the Watergate building was in the Foggy Bottom district of Washington, and if they’d only called it the Foggy Bottom incident nobody would have taken them seriously”.

Then it dawned on me. Looking around Whitehall, I am struck by the numbers of whizz-kids advising every ministerial office. I understand that this is soon to be increased by 10 more per Secretary of State. They are not civil servants but whizz-kids: clever young people employed because they are uninhibited by practical experience. They are not afraid to put forward blue-skies theories, many of which I suspect that the more experienced Ministers would confine to the waste-paper basket.

The Bill is nothing more than a whizz-kid panic attack, brought on by the spectre of hordes of Tea Party-trained consultants flooding across the Atlantic and rotting up the 2015 election. Having panicked, they then tried to prove their virility by dreaming up preventive measures, which in their headlong rush they tried to process without submitting them to the normal procedures which, as we know, rubbished them once they saw them. This House too was swept along by this rush, until on Monday the voice of experience had a chance to make itself heard. I hope that on looking through Hansard their bosses will have realised that something is wrong and the whizz-kids need to be told to calm down. These hordes are not going to stream across the Atlantic, and even if they did we already have mechanisms in place that can cope with them.

Our political system, including our electoral system, may be at risk, in which case we may need to take remedial action. However, let us watch what happens in the 2015 election to see what action may need to be taken. Having made so much noise about the big society, the very last thing the Government ought to do is risk alienating voters by threatening the contribution of the voluntary sector, which is one the UK’s jewels. Rather than risk doing any more damage to ourselves and our reputation, surely we should now withdraw the Bill until we know whether we need such an instrument after 2015. I wonder whether any other noble Lords share the pious hopes of an old general.

I turn now to Clause 28. Again, we have had no examples from the Government of where disproportionate expenditure in one constituency has had an undue influence on the outcome of an election. Non-party organisations and charities, particularly those which work in the criminal justice system, are not organised into political constituencies. I cannot imagine how it is possible to divide their activities and apportion them to what is going on in constituencies, as my noble and right reverend friend pointed out. For example, consider the Shannon Trust, which provides the Toe by Toe reading programme in every prison in the country. Would it have to report how it is campaigning for funds in each of the constituencies which are involved in an election?

As has been pointed out, the Electoral Commission said that controls may be unenforceable within the regulated period, given the difficulty of obtaining robust evidence to determine and sanction breaches. If all of that is so abundantly clear to anyone looking at the whole system, why on earth are we presented with what the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, so rightly called gobbledegook which I defy anyone to understand?

[Lord Hardie]

My Lords, I rise as a fairly junior judge, and I also have pious hopes about the future of the Bill. My name is among those who oppose Clause 28 standing part of the Bill. I associate myself with the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, my noble and right reverend friend Lord Harries of Pentregarth and my noble friend Lord Ramsbotham. I will not repeat what they have said. Much of what I wanted to say has already been said, but I want to concentrate on two things.

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[Lord Hardie (CB)]

I did not say that. I was not anticipating 650 enforcement officers. I was suggesting that if there was to be contemporaneous enforcement of this provision, it would be necessary to monitor each of the 650 constituencies, and for the appropriate enforcement officer, who might be covering several constituencies, to take action.

[Lord Wallace of Tankerness]

I accept that clarification and apologise if I misrepresented the noble and learned Lord. As I think my noble friend Lord Horam indicated, the current political parties expenditure rules are not always the easiest to enforce. Very often the best enforcers are the opposition—because, as those of us who have had active experience of political campaigns know, if there is any hint that somewhere or other there has been jiggery-pokery or money spent that should not have been, the candidates on the receiving end will be very quick to alert the regulatory authorities to what has gone on.

The same applies to the question that was raised, quite fairly, about how expenditure could be attributed to a constituency. We believe that it would be in line with the current guidance that attributes spending between different parts of the United Kingdom. Where spending in constituency A has a minor effect in constituency B, the entire spending amount should be allocated to the constituency that it was aimed at. For example, if a third party advertised in a local paper in constituency A that just happened to be distributed in a small part of constituency B, the entire amount should be allocated to constituency A.

That was really brought home to me when the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, asked, “How would we allocate the timing of the activities of a battle bus?”. I say this with no criticism whatever, but those who have not been involved in party election campaigning do not understand the difficulties that are sometimes experienced by those who have to act as election agents in allocating and working out expenditure returns for those who are involved in it. The noble Baroness wishes to intervene but I am just going to give an example. In 1979, my noble friend Lord Steel of Aikwood, then David Steel, the leader of the Liberal Party, probably introduced the battle bus to British politics. Immediately after that election in May 1979, I was adopted as the Liberal European candidate for the south of Scotland, which included the constituency of Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles. I had as my election agent the agent for Roxburgh, Selkirk and Peebles, who had been David Steel’s election agent in the general election that immediately preceded it. He went by the wonderful name of Riddle Dumble, and, as my election agent, he told me, “I’ve got this nightmare of trying to do David’s election expenses return; I have to sit down and allocate the amount of time that his battle bus was in the constituency, and what part of it represented constituency campaigning and what was part of the national campaign”. This is not something that is new.