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

Lord Marland Excerpts

Wednesday 18th December 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I was delighted to be able to put my name to this amendment, which indeed has cross-party support. It would be fair to say that the four Members of your Lordships’ House who have put their names to the amendment have all had extensive experience, long commitment and real concern about the maintenance of our parliamentary democracy and its health. My noble friend Lord Marland has also had considerable responsibilities in this field, and I hope that he will be able to address your Lordships’ House in a minute because he will have a particular dimension to add.

I do not think that any of the four of us are dangerous radicals, exactly, but we have all of us given a great deal of thought to this issue and have a common concern. I and my Liberal Democrat colleagues have long recognised that a broad range of small donations is preferable to a small number of large donations; that is where we come from. Tax relief along the lines of gift aid would be a good way to embody this principle in regulations about donations. As your Lordships’ House is aware, we believe that those regulations should also include a comprehensive donation cap on individual and corporate donations; that is not for this evening’s debate but I very much hope it will come in due course. With colleagues in the other place, I launched a cross-party draft Bill earlier this year, which would have made specific provision both for tax relief and for a cap.

The amendment before us has the potential to move the debate forward. After so much self-interest has thwarted progress so far, I welcome a further attempt to put momentum behind this change. The amount of money that this would cost is clearly limited in the noble Lord’s amendment, which makes clear that the maximum tax relief for the first two years of operation would be only £16 per taxpayer, and in later years a figure of £96 or another figure set by the Secretary of State. We do not have figures before us for the total cost of such a measure, but we do know that there are ways to find this money without increasing the overall cost to the taxpayer of political parties. I think that it would be the common experience of Members of your Lordships’ House that this is not exactly the best time to be persuading our fellow citizens to spend more on political parties, or even the political process.

However, I have advocated before that the freepost election addresses from which candidates at UK and European parliamentary elections can send at the cost of the Treasury—of the taxpayer—should be converted into booklets of the kind used in the London mayoral elections. It is a staggering fact that a saving of something in the region of £50 million per Parliament could be secured by doing this, and could be put into a tax relief measure of the kind being suggested. Therefore there would be no necessary net increase in taxpayer subsidy to the political parties or the political process. Now that Royal Mail is privatised, it may be increasingly attractive to taxpayers to divert some money away from their coffers and profitability into this very simple way of improving how our political system is funded.

There is no reason for anyone in this House to fear this simple change. It seems that it would apply only to small donations and would roughly affect and benefit the parties equally. Given the desire for consensus in this area, that ought to be enough to recommend it to us. It is a very good measure which has my strong support and I hope it will make some progress.

Since I am an optimist, I hope I will not have to speak again in Committee. I am sure other members of the Committee will be glad to hear that. I therefore take this opportunity of hoping that colleagues on all sides of your Lordships’ House have a very collaborative, transparent, enjoyable campaign of partying during the Christmas recess.

[Lord Marland (Con)]

My Lords, I also support the amendment. I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, for tabling it and for being associated with the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, who does so much thinking on this subject it is a joy to behold.

I speak with some experience as a former treasurer of the Conservative Party for three and a half years. I may not be entirely supported by the Government on this amendment but most politicians I know think that money grows on trees when it comes to fundraising for a political party and have no concept of how incredibly difficult this is whatever time of the electoral cycle you are in. Working with former Prime Minister Blair, I was one of the instigators of the Phillips report. I participated keenly in that and was disappointed when it came to naught, largely over the issue of trade union donations.

I approach the amendment by asking myself three questions. The first question is: why do people join and participate in political parties? The simple reason is that they have a keen interest in politics and democracy. However, in my experience it is also—as the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said—fostering a hobby in the same way as you might join a museum society or any other club or society. It is therefore quite reasonable that a donation to a political party should be treated on the same basis. It also allows people to foster political debate. We are the home of democracy and, as the Prime Minister’s trade envoy, I have been proud to be able to use this as a message throughout the world. Democracy is created by political parties; political parties are created by the individuals who work for them and fund them. Democracy is therefore dependent on giving. New political parties like UKIP, for example, would not have been able to start had a large number of people not donated to it. That, in turn, fosters democracy.

We must also recognise that, as I said earlier, fundraising is incredibly difficult. Very few people like doing it, are good at it or like to be asked. Because funding is so important to our political parties, it is also incumbent upon those of us who are involved in politics to stop the continual denigration of people and institutions for giving money to them. In my experience of three and a half years as a treasurer there were very, very few people who wanted something in return for giving money and most of them were not treated with any respect. There are, of course, situations where people want to persuade a Minister or shadow Minister of the benefits of their ideas, but they will probably not take a blind bit of notice unless the idea has reasonable resonance with their political approach. It is incumbent on us to resist the temptation to criticise people who give political donations or to show them up in a bad light for doing so. It is they who allow us to promote democracy.

The next question I ask myself is: do we want to continue a mix of public and private funding of political parties? Let us not kid ourselves: political parties are funded by public money. There is something called Short money which is £6.5 million a year given to all the opposition parties. There is also the Cranborne money, which is given to opposition parties to support their shadow Ministers in action, which is public money, and a considerable amount. The future of political-party funding should be that blend of public and private support. Of course, the problem with Short money is that it goes only to opposition parties, and believe you me, there are times when parties in government suffer from a complete dearth of funding and therefore require financial support, which at the moment they do not get. Therefore the amendment proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, is worthy of support.

The final question I ask myself is: do we want to encourage parties to focus on increasing their membership and their small donations? Of course, there is overwhelming support for that. We have to rebuild our donor base of small donors and our membership, just to excite people into the task of politics and support for politicians, which has, sadly, been under attack and under threat. Every argument leads to a mixture of public and private funding. This is a very good start on the road to trying to find the best route to doing it, and so I have great pleasure in supporting the amendment.

[Lord Cormack]

My Lords, I will speak briefly in support of my three noble colleagues. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, has done a very good service to the House by tabling this amendment, and I hope that there will be a sympathetic and encouraging response from the Minister who replies. I take issue with just one point made by my noble friend Lord Tyler. I would not like to see the booklet sent out in place of the individual election addresses which candidates are able to send out, one to each elector, at public expense. That would be a further depersonalisation of our politics in this country. Every candidate should be encouraged to send out an individual election address which reflects that particular candidate and his or her interests—that should continue. However, I agree with all that my noble friend Lord Marland said about encouraging participation. It is right for us to give that modest encouragement and assistance, because, after all, it is capped—at a realistic and modest level—and it would not transform politics in the short term. One of the problems we have in this country is the declining membership of political parties. Nevertheless, that would be a move in the right direction and it has my total support.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Marland]

Before the noble Lord sits down, perhaps I could reiterate what I said earlier. The state gives political parties £7 million a year. Does he not agree that, because he did not know that himself, this has not been transparently demonstrated to the world at large—and that the proposition in the amendment is much more transparent than what currently exists?

[Lord Finkelstein]

Yes, I think I would agree that it is more transparent, but the noble Lord is assuming that for that reason I agree with the original proposal that we should be spending all that money in the first place. I am very nervous about the amount of money that the public are already giving to political parties. It is not very transparent to people, and I think that if they knew what was being given they would not agree with it. Although I can see why this idea might be an improvement, it is being proposed not as an alternative but as an additional sum.