Trade Union Political Funds and Political Party Funding

Lord Stoneham of Droxford Excerpts

Wednesday 9th March 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stoneham of Droxford (LD)]

My Lords, the debate has shown that it has been very valuable to have this report, and that it was clearly an inspired choice to have the clarity of thinking, humour and diplomacy of the noble Lord, Lord Burns. It has vindicated the House asking for this work to be done. It should also confirm the view that the appropriate reform of political funding, which is long overdue, needs the involvement of independent and impartial voices if we are to overcome some of the differences. We need them in particular, I am afraid, to put pressure on the party politicians to do what is best for the political health of the country and not what is best for us in our respective parties.

The report has exposed the Government’s arguments that these clauses are nothing to do with party funding, but are simply about transparency. As the noble Baroness, Lady Dean, and other several other Peers have reminded us, we are arguing over something worth 9p a week, or £4.68 a year—the price of a Big Mac family meal—for individuals. The Select Committee has also confirmed the view that there would be a sizeable negative impact on the participation rate of union members in political funds.

The report has exposed the partisan nature of the legislation. The noble Lord, Lord Sherbourne, talked about the right honourable Nick Clegg’s views on the political levy, but he also said to the committee that he opposes legislation because of its partisan nature. The partisan nature of the legislation has been exposed by the Select Committee on the detailed transitional arrangements. Who really would have thought of a better way to get people to opt out than to have an unworkable three-month period of transition? The Certification Officer confirmed that individual unions would have to consult him on their rulebooks and that anyone conducting a process of this sort would clearly need a longer period to approach people and send them mailings.

I hope that the Minister will confirm her commitment to the digital world once again by saying that it is clearly inadequate to have a situation where people opt in simply in writing, not electronically. We know that those are barriers stopping people doing what is easy for them to do.

Despite the commitment of every member in a ballot already every 10 years, the Bill proposes that we now have it every five years, at the great expense of £5 million to £10 million—£5 million certainly, according to the input study, but almost certainly double that in reality. The Select Committee exposed the fact that the Certification Officer, amazingly, had never been consulted on the scale of the problem that we are meant to be dealing with in legislation, and, indeed, on how the process should be best implemented. Once again, the scale and proportion of the bureaucracy and regulation involved in the Bill is completely out of kilter with the scale of the problem. If the Government were wise, they would immediately look very carefully at the arrangements they are proposing.

I come back to what has been the theme of the evening. It is very important. We need to look again at whether we can ever get reform of political funding if we leave it simply to the politicians. This committee has produced, in six weeks, an amazingly consensual report. The first thing that should happen following it is that the Standards in Public Life Committee of the noble Lord, Lord Bew, should update its report. It can do it in three or four months—it took a year originally—and plonk a new report on the desk of the Prime Minister for him to receive when he comes back from the referendum in early July. Indeed, the Minister said in the debate on 20 January that there was nothing, in her view, to stop the noble Lord, Lord Bew, taking that action to move this forward.

If we look at what has happened since 2011, a number of new factors have come in. We have had a general election with a great disparity in donations between the main political parties. We have seen the Collins report, which I think shows very significant movement within the Labour Party in recognising the need for some process of opting in. We see a growing problem, still, following the general election, in the fact that the 1983 legislation on controlling expenditure in individual constituencies has completely broken down through the national spending rules being abused in the way they were at the last election.

So we have all these issues and in the mean time we have, as we have seen in the debate tonight, a public contempt for politicians. Despite all the predictions of a close election in 2015, still 35% of the electorate did not bother to vote, because of their disillusion and disfranchisement from our political system. So there is huge scepticism about political funding and the lesson from tonight is that we need independent involvement in trying to resolve these problems—we should not go down the route of partisan tinkering.