Democratic Political Activity (Funding and Expenditure) Bill [HL]

Lord Tyler Excerpts

2nd reading (Hansard): House of Lords
Friday 27th October 2017 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Tyler]

That the Bill be now read a second time.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, coming from a rather ecclesiastical family, I like to start with a text:

“There is a broad consensus that election law is fragmented, confused and unclear, with … poor guidance from the Electoral Commission. Conservatives are committed to strengthening electoral law”.


That was the official statement of the Conservative Party in June this year, just a few days before the general election polling day. For the governing party—and it is still the governing party, albeit in a minority—to do nothing about that situation in this Parliament would be extraordinarily irresponsible. I am here to help.

The context for that statement was, of course, the continuing saga of the discrepancy between the control regime for local, constituency campaign expenditure, on the one hand, and that for national party election expenditure on the other. This is the most urgent of many problems that my Bill seeks to address. At this time on a Friday I am anxious to keep my remarks brief and, in particular, to avoid too much repetition from the debate on 10 March 2017, when my similar Bill in the last Parliament received its Second Reading. I have reread Hansard this morning, as, I am sure, have other noble Lords, and I stand by everything I said during that debate.

However, I remind your Lordships’ House, as the Minister did on that occasion, that this Bill owes its origin to a cross-party initiative in 2013, based on the analysis and recommendations of the report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life in 2011. Here I should say how disappointed I am that the noble Lord, Lord Bew, is not able to be with us. He has had a slight accident and has sent his apologies. He would, of course, be contributing in his usual very effective way as the current chair of the Committee on Standards in Public Life.

My approach has always been collaborative and remains so. If, for example, the House, the other main parties and the Government share the view of the Conservatives that there is “a broad consensus” on the need for reform, I will be only too happy for my Bill to become the vehicle to deal with the most blatant defects in electoral law. On 10 March the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, said the time was ripe for,

“incremental reforms that achieve cross-party support”.—[Official Report, 10/3/17; col. 1622.]

Given the consensus suggested by that statement in June, I now submit that progress could and should follow as a matter of urgency. It would surely be unthinkable not to tackle the problems identified before another general election—or, indeed, another referendum.

In the debate in March I referred to the fact that since 1883 there have been firm rules to prevent individuals and organisations pouring excessive sums of money into constituency campaigns to secure the election of individual candidates. I am delighted to see the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury here, because, of course, it was Old Sarum that was always given as the example we should all refer to in that connection.

In past elections the noble Lord, Lord Young, and I were often warned by our agents that if we did not check every single sum, every penny spent seeking our election, we or our election agent could end up in court.

The recent practice, by all parties, of their national campaign concentrating an ever increasing percentage of investment in a limited number of target seats, bypassing those local limits, has led to the investigative exposure, notably by Michael Crick and Channel 4, of what the Times subsequently described as “election fraud”. The report Elections for Sale?, published recently by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, spells out in detail the consequences of this weakness in the law. I am sure that we all recognise the potential damage to the integrity and reputation of our political processes that is involved.

In March, I also expressed sympathy for the various individual MPs whose whole political careers could be at risk from that uncertainty in the law. The partial conclusion of the legal process since then has scarcely clarified the situation. Obviously, I make no reference to any outstanding legal action, but I am sure that Members of your Lordships’ House share my determination to make progress on the reform for which the Conservative Party was arguing in June. As long ago as 2010, my own party was arguing for much greater clarity in the apportionment of election campaign expenditure.

My Bill indicates in Clause 19(3) the national campaign activities which should now be separately recorded and capped as relating to the individual constituency. Its provisions include:

“(a) sending unsolicited material falling within paragraph 4 of Schedule 1 which is addressed to any person registered, or entitled to be registered, in the register of parliamentary electors for any particular constituency;


(b) making unsolicited telephone calls to such persons; or


(c) displaying digital advertising to persons based on the postcode in which they reside”.


If any Members of your Lordships’ House should think these are trivial matters, I draw their attention to the brief that gives us some figures on the expenditure by the major parties in these sorts of attempts to woo electors. We do not yet have the figures for 2017 but in 2015, the Electoral Commission reported that the total expenditure of all parties was £37.6 million but of that figure, £15.2 million was for material unsolicited by the elector. I submit that that very substantial amount of money is sent, as it were, to bypass local constituency campaign controls.

I am by no means wedded to the exact method by which we should do this. If we identify and regulate these activities, we can obviously find the best means by which they can be controlled. It is really important that the local candidates and agents should take on this responsibility, because I believe it is for them to take the full weight of that for money spent on their behalf. The key issue is to make sure that there is an appropriately increased cash limit. That, too, is something we can look at in the context of the Committee stage.

There is a similar consensus, I believe, that the rules governing the financing of campaigns for referendum outcomes must be re-examined. The fact that just 12 male millionaires—I do not know why that is significant, but it seems to be—provided the vast majority of private funding for the two campaigns in 2016 should surely give us pause for serious thought.

In the March debate, I and other speakers also referred to the huge sum invested by the DUP in that campaign. Curiously, every single penny of it was spent on the British mainland, where the DUP is not an active political party. Because the sources of political donations to Northern Ireland parties have been permitted to remain secret in the past, no doubt for some good reasons, this now raises serious concerns about transparency. The noble Lord, Lord Bew, made substantial reference to that anomaly in the March debate. Ministers could, and should, have dispensed with this out-of-date exclusion years ago. Now that the DUP is in cahoots with the Government, this mystery should surely be cleared up. In our March debate, the Minister reported that efforts were being made to regularise and standardise the arrangements for the whole UK. Have they been successful?

Thanks to the amazingly diligent investigation of Carole Cadwalladr and the Observer, we are also aware of the role played by Cambridge Analytica last year. Mr Arron Banks claimed that its artificial intelligence gave the leave campaign “unprecedented levels of engagement”, and he went on to claim it “won it for leave”, yet we still do not know, and apparently the Electoral Commission has yet to discover, who paid for those services. Was it the shadowy US billionaire Robert Mercer, who is said to own the company? Assistance in kind, like donations, from a foreign source raises serious issues. The Brexiteers thus stand accused of both lying and cheating.

Anyone who has read Dark Money, the product of very extensive research by Jane Mayer of the New York Times, will recognise just how dangerous it is for the UK to follow in the footsteps of the US by ignoring the influence of those with vast resources who want to play politics with their fortunes. In our debate in March the noble Lord, Lord Young, said:

“I agree that it would be better if all parties were less reliant on large donations and we had a broader base of membership donations on which to rely”.—[Official Report, 10/3/17; col. 1621.]


Here, too, there would seem to be growing consensus. There are suggestions in my Bill for the reallocation of the current very large amounts of state funding which could be redeployed to assist this.

In the interests of brevity, I do not want to reiterate all the points I and other noble Lords who supported me in March made in support of urgent attention to these issues. Indeed, the very comprehensive briefing note from the Lords Library sets out all the proposals in this Bill. I have only one correction to make in an otherwise impeccable account. In the second full paragraph on the fourth page—perhaps we could benefit from having pagination and numbered paragraphs—there is a reference to personal development grants totalling £2 million per year. I could do with one of those myself. I think I should also reiterate the point made in the previous debate, and underlined in the Library briefing, that my colleague Nick Clegg never objected to the reallocation of the very considerable existing sums of public state funding but considered a net increase undesirable in the austerity conditions of 2011.

In the current Bill, I do not suggest that the various proposals in Clauses 10 to 16 are implemented all at once but that in Committee we should look at which option would seem to be most advantageous. I am also making some suggestions about savings in the very large sums that the Government currently spend supporting various political initiatives, not least in their own advertising budget.

I am assuming that noble Lords have read the Hansard report of our previous debate, so we do not need to deal with all the points addressed then. Clearly, different priorities apply to each section of my Bill. I simply respond to the generous offer the Minister made to the House on that occasion. He undertook to facilitate discussion with the relevant Minister or Ministers to explore the potential for consensus and cross-party agreement. That has not happened in the intervening months.

The Minister sought to break the deadlock; it has not been broken. Given that remarkable Conservative change of attitude in June, with that claim of a broad consensus, I submit that the opportunity offered by my Bill should be grabbed by the Government as a sensible way forward. The Committee stage will provide a chance to explore commonly agreed priorities.

I repeat that I am only too willing, as I have been throughout this long period of gestation, to work with fellow reformers across parties. The public are looking to us to address some of these obvious discrepancies as a matter of urgency because politics has been brought into further disrepute by the inadequacy of the law. That was what was recognised by the Conservative Party in June. We must review with care those things which endanger the integrity and reputation of our electoral system. This too would fulfil the Government’s repeatedly stated willingness to proceed incrementally.

Throughout our debate in March, on all sides, there was a plea for consensus. That is the critical word today—that was the word that was used by the Conservative Party. It said that there is a broad consensus. The noble Lord, Lord Young, will, I am sure, be equally responsive, supportive and positive today. Again, I hope he will undertake to continue in the role of facilitator, for which he is so admirably well qualified, and I look forward with great optimism to his reply to this debate. I beg to move.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, I am extremely grateful to a number of noble Lords who have come again on a Friday. I am afraid we have taken rather longer than on the previous occasion, but I am full of pride for the way in which we have been able as a House to look at these issues on a consensual basis, if I may again use that word. I was particularly delighted that the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Salisbury referred to partial affections. I have always loved that phrase, and I have always wanted to work it into a speech in the House in some way, but he has gazumped me. If my wife is still listening to this debate—she is very patient—I should make it clear that as far as I am concerned some partial affections are still entirely acceptable.

It is extremely important that we pick up one of the last points made by the Minister. Politics is a reputable pursuit. I know on a number of occasions we may find it difficult to persuade the media of this, and on the whole the public sometimes have difficulty with it, not in relation to individuals, on the whole, but as a collective. Therefore, as the noble Lord, Lord Kennedy, and the Minister said, there is a very considerable case for looking again at small contributions to political parties being treated in a similar way to making contributions to charities. That would be a small sign that public life is a reputable pursuit in this country. Politics is not just a dirty game. I will come back to that point in a minute.

I am grateful to the Minister for repeating his agreement that we should have some more discussions about what could be incremental and what consensus there may be. As my noble friends Lord Whitty—he is my noble friend in this context—and Lord Wrigglesworth said, it was a very firm commitment in the discussions arising from the Select Committee on Trade Union Political Funds and Political Party Funding that the Government should look at that again, and the House endorsed that very strongly. Therefore, although a general election has intervened, I hope that that will still happen because I think we can make some progress.

On a couple of points of detail, I have not, my Bill does not and the proposals that have come forward from the Committee on Standards in Public Life have never said that there is one absolutely clear way forward. What we have said is, for goodness’ sake, let us look to see whether there is some way forward. I illustrate this with a point about the Royal Mail. I am told that the distribution of election addresses in June this year cost the state £42 million. There is an illusion out there which is shared by the Daily Mail and some other ignorant parts of the media that somehow or other there is no state funding of politics in this country, but £42 million is a lot of money. If you add to that the £100 million or thereabouts that the Government spend each year promoting their policies, not all above the threshold of impartiality that I was referring to just now, that is a lot of money too. It is important that we should make clear that none of us has suggested a huge increase in demand upon the taxpayer. We are just saying that we should try to make sure that taxpayers’ money is spent more wisely and in a way that they would accept.

That is where I very much agree with the Minister about the role of the Electoral Commission. I think the powers of the Electoral Commission should be strengthened. It is one of the specific issues that I have put in the Bill, and it has received a great deal of support in the past.

I return to the point about the reputation of politicians and politics. As the Minister said, the Committee on Standards in Public Life—I regret that the noble Lord, Lord Bew, is not in his place because he might have been able to refer to exactly where it has got to—has been asked by the Government to look at the intimidation of candidates and those active in our public life. I welcome that as extremely valuable. That inquiry into the extent of abuse this year and, I think, during the referendum is very important.

Although I welcomed the rather repetitive, if I may say so, contribution of the noble Lord, Lord True, I am disappointed that he did not take the opportunity today to apologise for the outrageous, abusive attacks by supporters of Zac Goldsmith on the former Member for Richmond Park. But that is a footnote. In the meantime, I seek the Second Reading of the Bill.

Bill read a second time and committed to a Committee of the Whole House.