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

Lord Martin of Springburn Excerpts

Tuesday 21st January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I shall not detain the House for more than a few moments. I put my name to the amendment for all the reasons that the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, so splendidly and lucidly outlined. I will underline just one point, which was touched on by the noble Baroness in her concluding words. We have established in this country an Electoral Commission. It surely makes no sense to fly in the face of the commission and make its work more difficult and more complicated when it will have a difficult enough task monitoring the election in May 2015. My noble and learned friend, who has been extremely helpful and has listened with care, has come back to us with a number of improvements to this very unsatisfactory Bill—he himself has made it much more satisfactory than it was when it first came before your Lordships’ House—but I urge him to go just one step further and accept the good sense that is contained in this amendment, and to bear in mind that it has been in part drafted, as the noble Baroness said, by the Electoral Commission. We should listen to its sage advice and incorporate this amendment in the Bill.

[Lord Martin of Springburn (CB)]

Does the noble Lord envisage the third party groups being registered charities? Does he see any inhibition on a third party group being a registered charity?

[Lord Cormack]

I suppose that the answer to that question, which is a perfectly reasonable one for the noble Lord, Lord Martin, to ask, is that some would perhaps be eligible but others would not. We know from what we have debated in this Bill that not every such body can become a registered charity; it depends on what the aims are. It is possible that some could, but certainly not all of them.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Williams of Crosby]

My Lords, I intervene briefly in this debate because I am struck time and again in the exchanges in this House by the endless pursuit of perfection in an area where I do not think that perfection can be achieved. We have to accept that the best compromises that we can get are the best that we can do by this Bill at this late date. I know that it reflects the failure of pre-legislative scrutiny and I know that it reflects the lack of consultation, but given that we are where we are, I think that the recent amendments put forward—not least the ones by my noble friend and those by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth—further improve the Bill. We should be pleased with having produced that effect as the matter goes to the other place.

I completely accept what my noble friend has said that it is a great shame, given the lack of pre-legislative scrutiny, that the gap between the deliberations in this House and those that are starting in the other place tomorrow is, frankly, ludicrous. It does not enable the other place to take into account the very careful and deliberate thought that has been given in this House, not least by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, and his very impressive commission, which most people here agree went into this Bill in great detail, produced some excellent amendments and really gave us the opportunity to say that the House of Lords has made a constitutional contribution of the kind for which it is distinguished in a large range of legislation.

I do not want to detain the House, but I share the view that there are certain limitations on the whole issue of dealing with leafleting and all the rest of it. I also recognise that what has come out of this is the best attempt we could make to simplify an extremely complex Bill and to keep as largely as we can the concept of constituency limits.

I have the greatest respect for outstanding intelligence, but I think that, in what the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, said in her defence of the position she would like to see, she went a bit far. I think that she should have been a bit more fair about the extraordinary efforts made by Ministers in this debate to try to meet some of the points that she so forcefully made about the need to protect the freedom of speech and expression of the non-party campaigning groups. She is quite right about that, but I think that she was less than generous in her failure to recognise the extent—by raising the threshold and other ways—to which Ministers have tried to meet some of the arguments that she and some of her colleagues have made.

Having said that, I hope that Ministers will be able to pay particular attention to elements of what has been said in this House and to draw the attention of the other place—which means that they will have to work very hard tonight, I appreciate—to the points that have been made here that have not altogether been carried out. Having said that, in a very constrained situation, I think that this House and the commission can legitimately say that they have made a very substantial contribution to making this complicated Bill as good as it could be made.

[Lord Martin of Springburn]

My Lords, I come in briefly, having listened to the arguments surrounding this amendment. The noble Baroness is quite right that we cannot get perfection, but I wish that we could put on record and give due consideration to the men and women who, when a general election or municipal elections come, put their names forward as parliamentary candidates. I had the good fortune to be in a constituency where, although I hated the term “safe Labour seat” and cringed whenever anyone said it because the seat had to be worked at, I had significant admiration for those candidates who came into that constituency and said that they were flying the flag for their party—Conservatives, Liberals or the SNP. Remember that many of us get to our feet and talk about the new democracies in Africa and those that used to be behind the iron curtain, but one thing that we have to do as parliamentarians is to teach people how to be parliamentary candidates.

That brings me on to these campaign groups and it is why I asked the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, whether they might be registered charities. The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, said that they might be, if I picked him up correctly. Let me look at the registered charities which embark on campaigns. I know that the situation is different now when a general election is called, because we have got ourselves this five-year election term and people see that we can go right to the wire on a given date, five years from the previous election. In the old days, we used to sit in the tea room in the House of Commons wondering when the Prime Minister was going to go to the country, which meant that the campaign groups could not put the kettle on and say that it would be on a certain date—even those who were closest did not know that. Now that we have this five-year situation, perhaps I might send a message out to people in charities that they should use their heads. If they want to campaign, they have four years and three months, I think, in which to campaign. They should let the general election take its course with the parliamentary candidates because there is a danger here.

Let us take hospital closures, which the noble Lord mentioned. We all hate to see hospital closures, but we know that certain people have sinister reasons for being involved in a campaign, which is to embarrass a certain parliamentary candidate. I have heard the term “putting up score-cards” used during this debate. Some of these campaigns put up score-cards and say, “This is a good candidate, who has campaigned against the closure of a given hospital”. What if it was a Minister in that constituency who was holding office and had another portfolio? That Minister would not be allowed to say, “Don’t close that hospital”, yet some of these campaigners choose not to see that and say, “This is the good guy who is prepared to campaign, while your sitting Member of Parliament has been silent”. We know full well that the reason he or she has been silent may be that they are holding the office of Secretary of State. They could be holding the office of Prime Minister. However, what they have been doing in the background may have been excellent in fighting for the local community and its hospital.

I say to the charities that they really have to watch what they are doing. Every time I give to a charity, I am asked whether I am a taxpayer. If I am, the Inland Revenue will give money to that charity, so a high proportion of what charities are receiving involves the public purse and they should be careful about what they are doing. Also, it might be argued that a campaign body in an area that has no charitable status may call on other groups that have charitable status to support it.

I do not know if I am articulating my point properly, but we must give serious thought to the fact that decent men and women get into these constituencies during the general election and fight in good faith. It is wrong for some of these campaign groups to get involved when the democratic process, such as a general election, is on.

[Baroness Hayter of Kentish Town (Lab)]

My Lords, first, I endorse the words of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, about the work of what by way of shorthand we call the Harries commission. The noble and right reverend Lord and his colleagues have done both the charity sector and this House an enormous service.

As we have emphasised, we have two problems about the Bill’s brand-new constituency limits, which obviously apply to the wider issues covered by the Bill, which might in theory have an effect in one or more constituencies. The major problem has already been articulated: it is not their intention or purpose, in the words of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, but their workability. Charities and campaigners simply do not organise or do their accounts or even think in constituency terms. They focus on the proposed path of the HS2, the flight paths around Heathrow, the ground under where fracking will take place, the location of badger sets or the location of a polluting factory. That is the focus for their work.

For them, therefore, a requirement to record and account for their staff time and expenditure on a whole new geographical basis—indeed, on boundaries which are probably unknown to their accounts department—will be highly problematic. It will add enormous bureaucracy when, as we have said before, the Government are elsewhere trying to reduce red tape. Accounting for expenditure on the basis that it might have an effect on a constituency would require those charities and other groups to develop a whole new financial accounting system, a demand which surely cannot be achieved even by the new and welcome date of September.

Our second concern is also one that has already been mentioned. It is the worry of the Electoral Commission about whether the new constituency limits are enforceable in the timescale of an election. There is nothing worse than having a rule or a law that is unenforceable, because it undermines the rest of the law. The Electoral Commission considers that Amendment 11 would at least reduce its enforceability worries, although it still fears that it would often be difficult to get the information and evidence for any breach of constituency-level spending and deal with it before polling day. Amendment 11, which, as we have heard, limits the new reporting requirements to telephone calls, literature to households and physical distribution in a defined area, seems to us eminently sensible. That sort of spending is preplanned and easy to measure. As the Electoral Commission says in supporting the amendment,

“We see benefits in defining the scope of activity covered by the constituency controls more narrowly than in Part 2 of the Bill generally”.

Given the widespread support across the House for the amendment, I think that the Government would be well advised either to heed the wise words of the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, and accept the amendment or, at the very least, to undertake not to implement their new constituency rules until after the 2015 election. That would give charities time to think about whether it is possible to do their accounting in that way, and it would give the Electoral Commission the opportunity to sort out those demands on enforceability. I think that the former course is better—to accept the amendment. We certainly support it.