Representation of the People (Variation of Election Expenses and Exclusions) Regulations 2024

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Tuesday 19th March 2024 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Rennard]

At end insert “but this House regrets the Government’s decision to lay the draft Regulations, given the large scale of the proposed increases, the proximity of elections on 2 May, the lack of evidence of parties and candidates being constrained in their ability to reach voters by current expense limits, and the effect of increasing reporting thresholds on reducing transparency of funding for elections.”

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, I begin by welcoming the clarification in election law that necessary security costs for candidates must not be constrained by being included as part of their campaign spending that is set against election expense limits. On 28 January 2000, a friend of mine, Andrew Pennington, was working for an MP when he was murdered by an attacker who came to the advice centre of my late friend Lord Jones of Cheltenham when he serving as the town’s MP. In the 1980s, well before there were any funds for security at MPs’ offices, I used to run the campaign HQ for my friend the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, which was where he held many advice centres as an MP. Anyone could walk in at any time. It was not safe. We need to protect Members of Parliament and all their staff, in this place and wherever they work, and we are thankful to all those who help to protect us in these dangerous times.

I also acknowledge that there is a case for uprating the mayoral election expense limits, and those for candidates for the Greater London Authority. But no case has been made for doing so by 81%, thereby increasing the unhealthy influence of big donors that has caused such problems and been so clearly exposed in recent weeks. Inflation, as measured by CPI, in the three years since the last London mayoral election has been about 18%. If we go back to the last London mayoral election in 2021, the three leading candidates each spent around £400,000, or 95% of the available election expense limit at the time. An increase now from £420,000 to £760,000 must be considered to be excessive. This is especially so when it means that the candidates are suddenly being allowed to spend an additional £340,000 in just the last six weeks of the campaign. Many of us here have experience of election planning and will know that parties will have budgeted perhaps a year ago to spend no more than the £420,000 limit in place until now.

It is not, however, just an extra £340,000 that is suddenly being pumped in for each of the London mayoral candidates. There are 14 constituency members of the Greater London Authority and, as the Minister said, the expense limit for each of those 14 candidates is suddenly being increased by the sum of £28,360. This means that each party with 14 candidates can now legally spend an extra £397,000 supporting them.

Then there are the party list candidates. A party will now be able to spend an extra £267,000 supporting its list. What does this mean for a party with a mayoral candidate and a full slate of candidates for the Greater London Assembly? It means that the total permitted expenditure for those parties will rise, at the drop of a hat, from £1,240,000 to £2,244,080. In London alone, a party will now be able to spend more than £1million extra in just six weeks before polling day on 2 May.

The expense limits are being raised not just for the London elections but for 11 more metro mayor elections across England covering almost half the country. Perhaps the Minister will be able to tell us what the combined increase will be in election expense limits for a party with a candidate in each of these 11 metro mayoral elections. What is the combined total of permitted election expenditure for these candidates under the present rules, and what will it be under these new ones? Perhaps the combined increase may be more than £1million, and this comes in all of a sudden, long after campaign budgets will have been set. A party with sufficient funds will be able to spend an extra £1million in London, and, if the figure is £1 million elsewhere, it will be spending over the next six weeks at the rate of a third of a million pounds per week, over and above existing plans. To be able to spend to the maximum of these new limits, it appears that the Conservative Party needs the donations of its disgraced donor, Frank Hester. Or are these increases simply being made because it has his donations? I think we should be told.

Last December, the Times reported that the Conservative Party is well on track to raise £50 million in a year. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in the very same month the Conservatives dramatically raised the expenditure limit for national parties in general elections from around £19.5 million to around £36 million. Is it not the truth of all these huge increases in election expense limits that the Conservative Party is feeling desperate? It lacks support, but it has money. It thinks that it needs to spend the £15 million believed to have been given by Frank Hester, the £5 million from Mohamed Mansour and all of the money from billionaire tax exiles whom it has just allowed to donate, and with as little scrutiny as possible, even if they have not lived here for several decades?

This is all about desperate spending to seek re-election, and not about the democratic principle of a level playing field in politics, which was established in law during Gladstone’s time. This principle was also agreed by all the parties in the legislation governing party expenditure in 2000. More recently, it has been supported by the words of the noble Lord, Lord True, in our debates on the Elections Act. However, action speaks louder than words, as they say, and it seems a very long time since the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, became Prime Minister, and pledged to “take the big money out of politics”.



It is most regrettable that the excellent report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life of 2011, when my noble friend Lord Alderdice served on the CSPL, was not implemented by the coalition Government. This report proposed a cap of £10,000 on all donations. These new, extremely high election expense limits mean that, more than ever, all parties must go begging to major donors.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

At different times, different parties have raised large sums of money from different places over many years. I look at the party opposite, which has been funded by the unions over the years; I believe that I have seen quite large donations given to the Liberal Democrats too. On party donors, I think it was the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, who asked why anybody would want to give money. Some people feel very strongly and passionately about the policies of some parties—I am not talking about just ours—and that is how politics works. The level playing field is the fact that no party can spend more on one candidate in any election than the other party.

Asking why we have waited so long, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, did, is a reasonable question. As intended by Parliament, it is for the Government of the day to review the limits and update them when they consider that to be necessary. The fact that we had low inflation for so many years probably meant that there was no real necessity to change them as quickly as perhaps we should have done. But, as we have heard, inflation has increased in recent years and the Government decided that uprating these sums was now necessary to ensure that we get that communication out to our electorate.

I think that I have answered everything, unless anybody has something that they want to repeat. I will look at Hansard to make sure, but I think the only thing that I need to respond on is the disabled allowance question.

These regulations are essential to ensure that campaigners can continue to communicate their views to voters and, importantly, that candidates and other campaigners can feel confident in procuring the security they need at any UK elections. I hope noble Lords will join me in supporting this instrument.

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for bringing this statutory instrument before us. We have shown in this short debate that it was worthy of greater consideration than the 16 minutes which it attracted in a committee in the House of Commons. There are many important issues here and I congratulate her on single-handedly defending the Government’s position in the face of all the opposition parties this evening, which suggests that the arguments are not quite so straightforward as she might suggest.

The principal argument which the Minister made, that this instrument had to be brought forward now with such huge increases in election expenses, was not about election expenses at all. The argument here and in the other place was on the urgency of clarifying election law about security arrangements for candidates and their teams. As an experienced election agent, I would never have allowed security considerations to be part of the election expense return which I was making.

If this was necessary, it could of course be done simply on its own and with all-party agreement, but there is not all-party agreement on such huge increases and on them being made at the last minute. No satisfactory explanation is given as to why they are so large or have been made so suddenly before polling day. On all these issues where the Government are clearly changing the rules in their favour, they are abandoning the principles of the level playing field. A level playing field requires not just the same maximum limit for everyone but equal resources on each side. An army with 100 tanks against an army with one tank is not an even competition, so we do not have a level playing field of the kind which the law provided for in the 1880s and the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act tried to provide for in 2000.

I do not feel the need to test the opinion of the House again, when I feel that its opinion on all these issues was well tested when the noble Lord, Lord Khan, did so a few weeks ago. I note that 90% of the Cross- Bench Peers voted in support of his Motion and against the Government, so as we know the opinion of the House on this issue, I will not test it further. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment to the Motion withdrawn.