Donations to Political Parties

Lord Pack Excerpts

Thursday 12th February 2026 Grand Committee

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, likewise, I should acknowledge the exceptionally impressive timing of this debate, coming just after the Government have published the Representation of the People Bill. It is fair to say, from all we know of the Bill so far—I have not had time to read it yet by any means in full—there is a welcome direction of travel on many issues in terms of trying to improve the transparency around donations to political parties. I fear, however, that it does not go far enough. Obviously, some of those issues are to do with foreign money and potential foreign government interference. Hopefully, the Rycroft review will, in due course, set out ways in which we can go further on that.

I therefore want to concentrate on a slightly different issue in my brief comments. They draw on the research that I published with Chris Butler last year on donations that are made directly to candidates and rightly declared on the candidates’ election expense forms when they submit them, which is all above board, legal and how the law is intended to operate. However, those donations then, in effect, disappear from view because donations made directly to candidates at the moment do not then appear on the Electoral Commission’s register of donations. So, if you are, for example, an inquisitive journalist or somebody doing the due diligence process and you look at the obvious public records, the donations do not appear there at all.

This is not a trivial amount of money. Chris Butler and I estimated that, for the 2019 general election, £3.4 million of donations came into our political system, potentially influencing people, but did not then appear in the Electoral Commission’s records. Moreover, although those election expense forms are kept locally by the relevant returning officers, they are not published and are destroyed after a period. Although the Electoral Commission gathers such forms in, it does not publish them. Indeed, as Chris and I discovered, the Electoral Commission is not terribly keen on releasing copies of that information. When it did release some information to us, much of it was redacted.

With that redacted information, we did our best to compare, for those elected as MPs, whether the donations then appeared on the MPs’ register of interests. We found that around one in 10 of the donations made did not appear on the register. One should caveat that—there may be innocent explanations—but it adds to the general picture that there is a problem, which I hope the Government will be keen to address, about the volume of money that flows in as direct donations to candidates that is not properly caught by our current transparency regimes.