Elections: Electoral Commission Recommendations

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Thursday 28th June 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The noble Lord raises a serious issue. I do not know whether he has had the time to read the Electoral Commission’s report on digital campaigning, subtitled Increasing Transparency for Voters, but it makes recommendations on the specific areas he raised. There are a series of recommendations about foreign involvement in the democratic process and recommendations about transparency on where money has come from, with particular injunctions on the social media to make it clear, when they put advertisements on their sites, who has paid for them. This is an important issue and to some extent it is embraced in the report I just referred to.

[Lord Howarth of Newport (Lab)]

My Lords, have the Government considered what additional resources and capacities the Electoral Commission may need if it is to address effectively the difficult and complex question of abuses of digital campaigning?

[Lord Young of Cookham]

The Electoral Commission is not funded by the Government. As the noble Lord may know from his experience in another place, there is an Electoral Commission committee that sits under the Speaker. That committee in the other place is responsible for fixing the budget for the Electoral Commission. I am not aware that there has been a recent dispute between the Electoral Commission and the Speaker’s committee about resources, so as far as I am aware the Electoral Commission has the resources it believes it needs to do its job.