Elections Bill

Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 28th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

The noble Lord is just slightly ahead of me, because I was going to come on to that. I will answer his question, but I was just pointing out very clearly the inconsistencies in what happens at local level. I will then answer his question on the other issue with what I was going to say, because if the Bill passes in this form, we will have to consider that. Will the Minister explain in very simple terms, to somebody who is not an expert in elections but just an ordinary citizen, how that can be justified? There must be a sense of fairness as the basis for people voting at local elections.

On national issues, if the Bill passes, we could also be in the situation referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Grocott. Take somebody who has not been in this country for 50 or 60 years: they have no family here; they do not pay taxes here; they left when they were 18 and have never worked here. They will be able to vote. At the same time, there are some people who have been here for 20 or 30 years, who pay their taxes and work here, but because of their status, they cannot vote. Can the Minister explain how that would be perceived as fair and a good platform for our electoral process? It seems to me that this is an important matter. This is the whole basis on which people not just pay tax and are citizens but actually influence services and taxes that affect their very life by being resident here. But as the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said, if the Bill passes, people who have not lived here for 50 years will have the right to vote and influence government policy, even though it does not directly affect them.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I wish to send my good wishes to my noble friend Lord True. I hope that if he has got Covid at all, he has it very mildly—he might think that preferable to another day on this Elections Bill Committee. I certainly wish him well, as I am sure we all do.

I made common cause with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, on various occasions in the past, and I shall do so again when we get to Amendment 197 in group 6 on donations. However, I am afraid that I part company with him on this occasion, and I take a rather different—some might say old-fashioned—view.

I go back again to my Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement and some of the evidence that we got and lessons that we learned while going through that episode. As good citizens, we all have rights, but we have an equal and opposite number of responsibilities. Unless each of us understands the balance between those two things, our society might become fractured.

One of the things that most obsesses me about our modern society is the increasingly widely held view that to compromise is to show yourself as weak. Modern social media shows us with reinforcing messages that we are right—and we all want to be proved right—and has fed that view in a very bad way. But compromise is the oil that makes our society work, and without it, as I said, it will become fractured and tense. I am spending a few seconds on this because it shows what a highly complex matter it is to be involved in the detail of a country—the balance that needs to be struck and for which, for younger people, good citizenship education is really key and important.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Understood. Listening to the debate, two words have come out, and we will reflect those. One is “safeguarding”, and one is “transparency”, as the noble Baroness has just said. Those two things are important as we move forward with the Bill.

The provisions in Part 6 of the Elections Bill will introduce one of the most comprehensive “digital imprint” regimes operating in the world today; that is the positive thing. However, it is crucial to take a proportionate approach to the scope and application of the regime to ensure that it is enforceable and to avoid stifling political debate. It is for this reason that the Government do not support the noble Lord’s amendments, as we consider that they would introduce unreasonable burdens on campaigners and therefore risk restricting freedom of expression.

Due to the way some digital platforms are designed, it will not always be practical to display the imprint as part of the material itself—for example, in a text- based tweet where there is a strict character limit. Amendment 180A would not give campaigners the much-needed level of flexibility and therefore risks unreasonably hampering their ability to campaign on particular digital platforms. I have listened to the points made about new technology coming out; it is important that we keep an eye on that, so that if that is possible in the future—

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

I am not asking my noble friend to reply this evening, because this is a complicated question, but I think I heard the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, say that the digital material would not have to have an imprint on itself and that it could refer you by a link to another page. If that is the case, we could have a situation where if you are retweeting things, you may get even further away from the reality of what is happening. It was also not clear to me, because of the Government’s reaction to an earlier amendment, whether a third-party campaigner had to disclose on their home page that they were registered as a third-party campaigner. I am not sure that I have the links quite right here. If the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, was correct, perhaps my noble friend could unpick that when she writes to us after today. I am not asking her to reply to that now.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I take note of that and will make sure that my noble friend understands the unpicking of all of that.

I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, that this flexibility does not amount to allowing campaigners to place the imprint wherever they want. Under our regime, campaigners would be required to ensure that their imprint is displayed as part of the material and only when this is not reasonably practical may the imprint be located elsewhere—as my noble friend said—but it must still be directly accessible from the campaigning material. Those who do not comply will be committing an offence.

Turning now to Amendment 194A, the Government are mindful that transparency requirements on campaigners remain proportionate and that they are not unduly discouraged from participating in public life. Candidates and registered campaigners already have to detail their electoral spending in their returns to returning officers and the Electoral Commission and provide invoices for payments over a certain amount. Invoices provided to the Electoral Commission are then made available for public scrutiny. The practicality and impact on campaigners of requiring them to submit more detailed invoices or receipts about digital activity would need to be looked at very carefully, as the detail provided is determined by the suppliers themselves and not necessarily by the recipient.

Similarly, in relation to Amendment 196A, the Government welcome the steps already taken by many social media companies in this area. We continue to keep transparency rules under review, but given the steps taken already by platforms such as Facebook, we do not propose to mandate centralised libraries of digital political content. Requiring all campaigners promoting paid political advertising to themselves maintain a library of those adverts with specified information for at least 10 years risks adding a significant and unreasonable administrative burden on campaigners, particularly smaller groups that rely on volunteers or groups that are established only for the lifetime of a particular election campaign. We know that some small campaigns happen and, in our opinion, keeping a library for 10 years would be unreasonable.