Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 23rd February 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, it is a very personal pleasure to welcome the noble Lord, Lord Moore, and say that I look forward to his maiden speech. When I was a student, the first by-election I worked in was the Cambridgeshire by-election of 1961 in which his father was a candidate. His father, as some Members of this House may already know, was a wonderful and inspiring speaker and would have been an adornment to this House. We hope very much that his son has inherited much of his fluency as a speaker and look forward to hearing more from him.

This Bill should never have reached Parliament in its current badly drafted and highly partisan form. The Ministers who presented it have made no attempt to build consensus on rules that are at the core of democracy. They have largely ignored four authoritative reports: first, the Law Commission report on the simplification of electoral law, published in March 2020; secondly, the Committee on Standards in Public Life—CSPL—review, Regulating Election Finance, published in July last year; thirdly, the Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee—PACAC—report on the Bill itself, published in December; and fourthly, the Intelligence and Security Committee—ISC—Russia report of 2018, which covered issues that this Bill addresses, making recommendations that the Government have also ignored. The Law Commission proposed to simplify and clarify the layers of legislation on electoral regulation. To the contrary, this 171-page Bill adds further layers of complexity. It is a major lost opportunity, as PACAC comments.

Part 4 of the Bill takes almost no account of the 47 recommendations for tightening controls on election donations and spending in the CSPL report. A Cabinet Office Minister told the Commons that there was insufficient time to include any of these in the current Bill. The Government nevertheless found time to introduce over 100 of their own amendments as the Bill as it moved through the Commons—strong evidence that the Bill had been insufficiently thought through beforehand. They even introduced a late amendment to narrow the voting system for mayors, without any prior notice to other parties. The Minister’s introduction suggested that the Government intend to return all elections to what he regards as the tried and tested first past the post system. I assume he is aware that the devolved nations use and prefer different systems.

The PACAC Committee Report is the most damning. It highlights

“potential gaps in the evidence base for the proposed measures”

and states that many witnesses considered that the Government did

“‘not have the evidence to understand the impact of their proposals’”.

It notes that the Elections Bill “does not adopt any” of the recommendations of the Law Commission’s 2020 report and says:

“Given the constitutional significance of the proposed changes to voting and the accountability mechanisms of the regulator of elections, the Committee is disappointed that a Joint Committee was not appointed to scrutinise this Bill in draft, to help ensure the legislation is fit for purpose.”


So a Commons Committee does not consider the Bill in its present state to be fit for purpose. It criticises the

“melange of delegated powers provided for in this Bill”,

and bluntly states:

“The Government should present the draft secondary legislation as early as possible,”


as the previous Commons Minister had pledged to do. The Government have failed to provide this before the Bill reached the Lords.

The report goes on:

“Introducing a compulsory voter ID requirement risks upsetting the balance of our current electoral system, making it more difficult to vote and removing an element of the trust inherent in the current system … Given the potential for a significant number of people not to vote as a consequence of the Voter ID requirement, the Government should not proceed with its proposals”


until further evidence has been provided. It then details the practicalities of implementation and the additional burden on polling station staff, which also need to be clarified.

The report is equally scathing about the further complications the Bill proposes about who can vote in UK elections and who cannot. It recommends giving the vote to all who have settled status on a residency basis, rather than extending the historical anomalies we have inherited. The practicalities of extending the rights of overseas voters have also not been explored. Its potential addition of several thousand extra voters to some constituencies—mainly urban—would negate the Government’s aim to reduce the variation in voter numbers from one constituency to another. Checks on their status and claims will be minimal, in contrast to the additional checks on those who vote in person.

I will leave it to others to discuss the complexities of regulating third-party campaigns and of electronic campaign material—both important issues to which the Committee should devote considerable time. I want to flag up the constitutional importance of maintaining and strengthening the role of the Electoral Commission, and of tighter regulation of campaign finance.

The Conservative Party says that it has lost confidence in the Electoral Commission. The CSPL could not find anyone—any witness—outside the Conservative Party who had lost confidence in the Electoral Commission. The PACAC report concludes,

“The Government has not provided sufficient evidence to justify why the proposed measures are both necessary and proportionate. We therefore recommend that Clauses 13 to 15 of the Bill are removed, pending a public consultation”.


I hope the House will follow that advice. The proposals, the PACAC remarks,

“risk undermining public confidence in electoral outcomes”.

Again, it notes that

“there was no formal or public consultation … and that there is a lack of supporting evidence to demonstrate that the proposed measures are both necessary and proportionate”.

The ISC Russia Report calls for the Electoral Commission to be strengthened, not weakened, saying that

“we have already questioned whether the Electoral Commission has sufficient powers to ensure the security of democratic processes where hostile state threats are involved; if it is to tackle foreign interference, then it must be given the necessary … powers”.

The Government’s response to the ISC’s call for them to publish the evidence they had gathered on foreign influence over campaigns was simply to state:

“We have seen no evidence of successful interference”.


They refused to publish while carefully not denying that such interference has been attempted and that there is evidence of it. We are entitled to know about attempts to corrupt our political processes, particularly when they focus on the party in government.

Part 4 loosens, rather than tightens, the control of expenditure. Britain has a party system in which one party can raise far more money than others, in increasingly large sums from a small number of wealthy donors. The United States is the only other democracy in which controls on party finance are so lax. The Bill aims to enable the Conservatives to entrench that advantage by loosening controls on how those funds are spent.

The Government published their response to the PACAC report quietly last week. It failed to address most of the committee’s powerful criticisms.

This is a constitutional Bill. It reshapes the rules of political campaigning and elections—central elements in a constitutional democracy. I hope the Minister will not try to push it through unchanged, stonewalling in overlong speeches into late-night sittings, as he did on the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill. He used to be a constitutional, one-nation Conservative. He has now become a Johnsonian populist, contemptuous of parliamentary scrutiny challenging the Prime Minister’s interpretation of the people’s will, as he has told us on several occasions.

I remind the Minister of two very different speeches about freedom and democracy in the last two weeks, representing incompatible understandings of Conservative values. The chairman of the Conservative Party, Oliver Dowden, made an extraordinary speech in Washington to the Heritage Foundation about threats to freedom. He asserted that these threats are now centred in our universities and schools—in intellectual elites questioning established values. He said nothing, to a Trump Republican audience, about the threats to freedom from those who refuse to accept the outcome of elections, encourage mobs to attack the legislature, erect barriers to voting by disadvantaged groups, and redraw the boundaries of electoral districts to favour one party against others. His silence suggests that he does not think that constitutional rules matter in democratic politics. This Bill arrives in the Lords with worrying echoes of American Republican ambivalence about democracy as such.

In contrast, Sir John Major, when speaking to the Institute for Government, warned:

“Our democracy is a fragile structure: it is not an impenetrable fortress. It can fall if no-one challenges what is wrong, or does not fight for what is right. The protection of democracy depends upon Parliament and the Government upholding the values we have as individuals, and the trust we inspire as a nation.”


I wish I could be confident that the Minister agrees with Sir John, rather than Mr Dowden.

This Bill aims to tilt the rules of campaigning further in favour of the Conservative Party. It would be a contempt of Parliament for the Government to push it through without careful examination of its half-digested proposals. If it becomes necessary to carry it over into the next Session, that would be better than rushing through democratically dangerous regulations. If the House considers that some clauses require more detailed examination in a Select Committee, following the Commons committee’s criticisms, then so much the better. Constitutional Bills deserve and require far more examination than this Bill has received so far.

Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Tuesday 15th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Sentamu (CB)]

My Lords, I share the sentiment of what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, has just said. The noble Lord, Lord Collins, is right to seek clarification of what “encouraged” means. However, why is the role given to the Secretary of State, and not the legislation itself, to define it? If we cannot define it, kick it out. Why should this responsibility be given to the Secretary of State, who “must by regulations define” what it means? It is a bit late in the day for that.

I also share the concern of the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, about how courts will define what “encouraged” means. I have a problem with it being defined by the Secretary of State “by regulations”. I am one of those who is always very suspicious of legislation, in a secondary way, allowing regulations to grow like Topsy as has been the case over the last so many years. The legislators are allowing it to go ahead. I would have thought that the Bill itself should define what it is. If it cannot define it, do not put it in.

After listening to noble Lords who defined what election agents do and their enthusiasm for the things that they do, I am glad that I could never be such a person, because I do not think that I am worthy of it.

I ask the Minister—because the Government have drafted the legislation and put it into the Bill—to explain to us what he means by “encouraged”. Will it stand up to the standards of the law courts? If it cannot, why is it not just taken out?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I am often grateful I was never an election agent. I fought five elections and was once approached and asked if I would work as an agent for an early election. I am eternally grateful that I did not accept, because I did not begin to understand the complications and responsibilities of the task then. I have learned some of them since, but life has got a great deal more complicated over the last 50 or 60 years as the technology of elections and the power of the national parties, compared with the local parties, have shifted quite radically.

When I read this clause, I was struck by the word “only”, which appears repeatedly. That was the word I wanted to challenge. For example, it says that

“facilities are made use of on behalf of a candidate only if their use on behalf of the candidate is directed”.

Why does “only” keep recurring in various different contexts? It is clearly intended to weaken the possibility that the candidate could, in any way, be regarded as responsible. That worries me. Any good lawyer would be able to unpick the candidate being responsible under most circumstances for what the national party had done within his or her constituency. We well know, from the case to which this clause relates, that the national parties as a whole have come to engage in specific constituencies to target them and to spend a great deal of money from the national level in them. I suspect that candidates are always aware of this, but they may not always have wished to encourage it.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I am grateful for this short debate. I will not enter into the discussions of election experiences, but I certainly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, that it is not always easy to find election agents. Anyone who has been involved in politics is mindful of the difficulties which sometimes arise in the course of elections.

What we are seeking to do in Clause 18—I will come on to “encouraged”, which has been suggested goes in the opposite direction—is to clarify the law on notional expenditure. A debate on Clause 18 stand part will follow this debate and it is probably the appropriate place for this. It makes it clear that candidates need to report only benefits in kind: property, goods, services and facilities provided for the use or benefit of a candidate at a discount or free which the candidate has used or which the candidate or their election agent has directed, authorised or encouraged someone else to use on their behalf.

This brings me to the amendment in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Collins. I say to the noble and right reverend Lord that I do not think that he is suggesting that the Secretary of State should draft regulations. I accept that this is a probing amendment; it is not a proposition that the Government have put on the Marshalled List. The noble Lord is seeking clarification of the term “encouraged”. The wording in the Bill was chosen to cover as many scenarios as possible and to capture circumstances where the candidate or their agent encouraged a particular use of property, goods, services or facilities, without going as far as directing it or specifically authorising its use. There is an area of uncertainty here, as he acknowledged. However, if only formal authorisation is required, the risk is that the candidate could encourage someone to use a benefit in kind without having to not report it as they did not give authorisation for it to be used. Requiring further regulations to define this term would risk reducing the breadth of the scope of these new rules on notional expenditure and opening up potential loopholes that we are seeking to address. The language in this clause has been crafted to strike a balance between the status quo, where no form of authorisation is required, which has generated understandable concerns from candidates and agents, and the overly blunt alternative of formal authorisation, which could risk being circumvented in practice, as the noble Lord suggested.

This clarification of the law on notional spending is vital to ensure that candidates should not fear being responsible for benefits in kind of which they had no knowledge. I think we would agree with that; the Explanatory Notes say that. Encouragement in the context in which we understand it and in this Bill must be a positive act. It is not intended to capture situations where a candidate did not have knowledge of someone using a benefit in kind on their behalf.

As I said at the outset, as an experienced campaigner I acknowledge that it is not always easy readily to apply the rules on election spending practically to the day-to-day reality of a campaign. We will discuss guidance in greater detail later today, but I assure the Committee that we intend that the Electoral Commission will produce guidance for campaigners to help them understand specifically these concepts and to apply and comply with the rules on notional spending in so doing. In the past, the commission has made good use of illustrative examples to aid campaigners. Further to this, we are broadening the scope of the statutory codes of practice on election spending that can be prepared by the commission to ensure that the codes include guidance on notional spending.

Some Members of the Committee asked for some specific comments on legal meanings or for further detail on “encouraged”. We expect that this guidance and the codes of practice will come forward from not the Secretary of State but the Electoral Commission. I understand where the noble Lord is coming from and will reflect on what has been said, and if I can I will put further clarification to him in writing and submit it to the House before Report, because I appreciate the direction he is coming from.

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[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, a kind of fiction has prevailed over a very long period of election history that, somehow or other, the crucial electoral battleground is each individual constituency. It has long been recognised that there is a need for strict limits on expenditure by individual candidates in individual constituencies. On the other level, however, there is the national campaign, where limits on expenditure are so much looser.

I was very alarmed, as I had not heard it before, by the information from the noble Lord, Lord Rennard—he is usually reliable on these issues—that there is possibly a huge increase planned in the maximum expenditure allowed at the national level. This may not be a popular thing to say to candidates—I may be talking to myself—but it is clear to me that, although both levels of campaigning expenditure are clearly important, if you had to label the one that is the most important in determining the overall outcome of modern elections, it would be the national expenditure and national campaign. All candidates believe profoundly that it is what they do in their individual constituencies that is of crucial importance.

I have also noticed that all candidates—I have been one of them—tend to think that, when they win their local campaign, it is down to a particular level of skill and expertise in their campaign, and when they lose, it is generally someone else’s fault. The truth at general elections is that, for all the variance you can get in 650 different constituencies, the broad truth prevails: when the tide is out for your party, the tide is likely to be out everywhere, and vice versa. This whole issue of the balance between control over national expenditure and control over local expenditure is fundamental.

Of course, the irony is that, for years and years, there was control over local expenditure. It has long been recognised that there must be limits locally. However, it is relatively recently in our parliamentary history that we have seen the need for national limits; as we have said, they are so loose now as to be barely limits at all—certainly for one party in particular. This is a crucial area of debate and discussion but, most of all, the one headline I want to get out of this—perhaps the Minister will address it when he replies because he is on the inside track and we are not—is whether there really is a proposal that there should be a colossal increase in the level of expenditure allowed at the national level by political parties. If the Minister has any inside information on this, I would love him to share it with the Committee.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, one of the things on which there was consensus from all the various reports that fed into this Bill was that what we need most of all is a simplification of electoral law. This clause is a classic example of making things more complicated. I think we all recognise that this is the Conservative response to the Thanet case. The case for having this in the clause is extremely weak.

I was interested to hear the noble Lord, Lord Collins, talk about the 1970 election campaign. I am older than him. I worked at party headquarters during the 1966 campaign. Looking back, it was incredibly amateur. The Conservative campaign was not that much more professional than ours at the national level. Then, the largest department in the Conservative headquarters, as I remember it, was the research department. We did not have phone canvassing, of course. We did not use opinion polls much. At the time, I was otherwise working as a research assistant to Dr David Butler on the first major survey of electoral opinion in Britain. We were using punch cards to get at our data; it was such a slow process that you could not analyse during the campaign at speed. We did not have any digital campaigning, of course. In those days, the Conservative Party had a couple of million members and raised a lot of its money and did most of its activity at the local level.

We have shifted a long way since then, soo I want to talk about some of the principles; I hope that the Minister still recognises that they are important. They cover this clause and Part 4. The first principle is that we should retain a clear distinction between constituency campaigning and national campaigning. After all, it is one of the most tried and tested aspects of our democracy that Parliament consists of people who represent local communities in constituencies. They have not always been individual constituencies as there used to be multiple-member constituencies; the noble Lord will go back far enough, but never mind.

That is the principle. It has already been weakened by the tightening of limits between constituencies, which means that the new constituencies that are about to be redrawn will represent recognisable local communities much less than they have done so far. We hear people—Jacob Rees-Mogg, for example—say, “We have already moved from a parliamentary system to a presidential system. That is how our elections now go”. I regret that. As it happens, I am in favour of multiple-member constituencies and a much more open voting system, but that is part of the argument we should be having about the quality of our democracy. To erode the distinction between the constituency—that is, the election of an individual MP—and the national campaign would be a fundamental shift in our democracy larger than changing the nature of our voting system. I hope that the Minister recognises that.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

I agree so much about the importance of the close connection between individual candidates and individual constituencies but I am sure that the noble Lord would agree with me that that is much weakened under a system of proportional representation.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

We need not discuss the various alternative forms of voter registration. “Not necessarily” is the easy answer.

The second principle I want to focus on, mentioned by my noble friend Lord Stunell, is that there should as far as possible be a level playing field. We have seen what happened as that disappeared with the lifting of funding restrictions in the United States. The quality of American campaigning and the level of trust in American democracy have gone down, and that is partly because of the sheer weight of money that now deforms American politics. We have it here. I read in the Sunday Times the weekend before last that in the last three months of 2019, Ben Elliot, the chairman of the Conservative Party, raised just over £37 million for the Conservative Party, more than it was able to spend legally in the course of the campaign, and that it represented two-thirds of the money raised by all registered parties in that period. That takes the whole idea of a level playing field for democracy into deep and difficult trouble, and it strengthens the case for making sure that the regulation of expenditure, which is what Part 4 is about, is kept tight, clear and simple.

The third principle that I hope the Minister will agree on is that funding and expenditure should be as transparent as possible, both by registered parties and, as we shall come on to, by third parties, and that this clause does not help in that regard.

Clause 18 weakens regulation. It complicates and confuses it. I think we have seen from Second Reading and from our first day in Committee that noble Lords throughout the House generally agree on the need to strengthen regulation and the Electoral Commission. For these reasons, I suggest to the Minister that the clause as drafted and as intended does not match the Bill.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, I come back to the comment I made on the earlier group of amendments: what is broken? What is this clause trying to put right, and does it solve it? I think we have heard from the debate on it that it does not really address the issue. Whatever happened in Thanet—and there may be other instances that were not subject to court cases—it has certainly gone through a proper legal process. As we have heard, both the Supreme Court and the Electoral Commission have addressed that issue.

I regret that we have moved away from the requirement that fundamental changes be subject to consent across all parties. That has been an important element of maintaining our democracy. Of course, the Trade Union Act was the first part of that attack by the Conservative Party on one party, which broke that consensus on funding.

As I have said before, the Conservative Party likes a debate about spending limits— “We can have a limit here, and the national limit and so on”—but the real debate is not about spending but about income. When David Cameron was Prime Minister and we have had discussions about it, we have seen that it is the income side of our politics that brings it into disrepute. Very rarely is it the spending side. The income side is about who has given the money, how much they are giving and what they expect for it. Taking big money out of politics is the issue. I say to the Conservative Party that its time will come, because when it is in opposition there will be a strong focus on the income side of this debate, and it will not like the result. It will not be able to rely on a large number of very wealthy people; it will have to rely on a larger number of low-income people, because I strongly believe that caps on donations are far more important than limits on spending. That is a debate for another day, but it is important to set today’s debate in context.

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[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I suggest that the Government believe that it does clarify; that is exactly what it does, so we will have to disagree on that. We feel that Clauses 18 and 20 of the Bill do precisely what the Labour Party asked for and supported in PACAC.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, if I have understood the argument that the noble Baroness has been making, this clause would not in any sense change the outcome of the Thanet case. If it is clarifying things in that direction, the clause is not necessary.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

No, what I am saying is that it will clarify for candidates and agents what is required and what was not very clear at the time of that case.

We have sought input on these measures from the Parliamentary Parties Panel and we are confident that they will bring important clarity to the rules and support compliance. Indeed, Craig Mackinlay, the Member of Parliament for South Thanet, whom we have talked about a number of times, knows better than anyone the deficient nature of the current rules, and he welcomed and praised the clarity which this Bill brings to notional expenditure.

In this clause, we are also making an equivalent amendment to the notional expenditure rules for other types of campaigners, such as political parties and third-party campaigners, to ensure that all the rules are consistent. Together, these changes will bring much-needed reassurance and clarity to candidates and their agents on the rules that apply to notional expenditure for reserved elections. Alongside guidance from the Electoral Commission, with which we are working closely, this measure will support compliance with the rules and ensure that those wishing to participate in public life can feel safe doing so, clear in their legal obligations. It is for this reason that I urge that this clause should stand part of the Bill.

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[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I just want to intervene, not about the substance of the matter we are debating but about the process. We have two very interesting parallel amendments which have what one might call different routes to market. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, said she did not really mind which was followed. I think she should worry, for reasons I shall explain. We tend to pass by—too easily, in my view—guidance, statutory codes, as just referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, regulations and rules. Who devises them, who decides what they are, who implements them and who enforces them? I think it is important that, at some point in the debate on the Bill, we take just a moment to think about the different ways this cat can be skinned.

In the debate on Clauses 14 and 15 in the last day in Committee, the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, who is not in his place, led the charge, assisted by several other noble Lords from around the House, to give my noble friend the Minister a kicking. I think the idea behind those speakers was to buttress, protect and safeguard the independence of the Electoral Commission. The noble Lord, Lord Stunell, referred to this earlier. Well, up to a point. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, and I are absolutely as one about the need to improve the way we scrutinise secondary legislation in this country; it is clearly deficient and no longer fit for purpose.

The Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee, under my noble friend Lord Blencathra and now under my noble friend Lord McLoughlin, produced a report at the end of last year about the democratic deficit. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, which I chair, produced a report on government by diktat. My noble friend the Minister will be fed up with me going on about this, but we are going to go on and on and talk to our colleagues in the Commons until we begin to get a better balance in the way we handle these things. That is, of course, a debate for another day, but in those two reports, we draw attention to the danger of what one might call tertiary legislation—that is, rules and regulations made by bodies that have little or no democratic control over their self-standing and no parliamentary control. It is important that I used the phrase parliamentary control, not government control. I am talking about control by the legislature, not by the Executive.

What I am saying is in no way a criticism of the Electoral Commission, but times change, commission members change just as Ministers change, and I am not convinced, as a matter of principle, that the Electoral Commission should be given too much independence in devising and implementing processes that go to the heart of our democratic system. We may feel that the system for scrutinising secondary legislation is not good enough, but we do at least have a chance to debate it and talk about it in public, here in your Lordships’ House and in the House of Commons. We cannot amend it, and I know that is a weakness, but we do provide a focal point for people who wish to comment on it, raise issues and express their support for it, discontent with it or opposition to it.

I see the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, in her place. The SLSC was very unhappy about some aspects of the procedure the Government followed about GMO and the new regulations, and therefore last night there was a lengthy debate. Could the regulations be amended? No, they could not, but there was a great deal of opportunity for people to express their concerns about that particular regulation. If the Electoral Commission produces a code, ex cathedra, there is no point at which that debate can take place. People can complain about it or write in, but there is no forum where Parliament—again, I say Parliament, both Houses of Parliament—can say its piece about whether it is fit for purpose. After all, it is Parliament that will be most concerned with and most expert in what is being proposed.

I favour Amendment 25, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, which says it should go through the Secretary of State. I assume that when she revises her amendment, she will say “by regulation”: he or she is not just going to write it, it will be by regulation that it would come into force. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, that if he were to amend his amendment to say that the Electoral Commission has to produce a code which will become a statutory code, I think that would also serve the purpose. At present, we need to be very clear that the Electoral Commission is not the answer to everything. There is a need for the democratic process to have some input into the way this is all moving forward, or else we will have a situation where a body may be moving away from the central ethos of what the two Houses of Parliament believe is the right way to conduct things.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

This is an important principle. The noble Lord and I have spent some time looking at the Charity Commission, on which he is much more expert than I am. I used to be able to quote CC9 and other bits of Charity Commission guidance by heart when I was a trustee of a charity. Does he think that the principle he is enunciating should apply to most of these commission regulatory bodies, or is the Electoral Commission a special case?

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

I think the Electoral Commission is a special case because we are talking about an elections Bill, but it goes wider than that. My noble friend Lord Blencathra is hot on this. He has a list of bodies that are, as he would say, running too free, but the Electoral Commission is a special case because of the nature of the Bill we are discussing. A subsidiary question is, do we need more codes elsewhere? I have some amendments down later on, which we shall get to on Thursday, which will provide a way of clarifying and giving third-party campaigners some security and safety about what they are doing— I think that is much more important. However, that is a discussion for Thursday.

My last point is to the noble Lord, Lord Collins, about his Amendment 30B. We have said again and again that we need to have our election law in one place. The fact we are having to discuss RPA 1983 in connection with this Bill in 2022 shows how urgent this is and how the points made across the Committee need to be taken on board by the Government, who at some point need to find time to pull this all together.

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[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, this is a probing amendment, but it is highly topical. I am trying to see the relationship between the registration of parties and the sanctions legislation that we recently adopted. Following yesterday’s consideration of the fast-tracked Bill, Liz Truss plans to name even more people. It would certainly make it easier for Ministers to impose sanctions on those with Kremlin links. One of the things we addressed last night was the loopholes that have allowed oligarchs and kleptocrats to evade scrutiny. They have been quite successful in hiding their assets, certainly property—an issue we have discussed for quite a long time.

One of the things that I have been banging on about quite a bit is the Russia report and its recommendations on security risks to our democracy from interference from foreign powers and how we address that issue. We addressed this at Second Reading. It is not just some of the messaging and social network-type interference which we have seen, particularly in the US but also here, but about how our political parties are funded.

Boris Johnson told the House of Commons that

“it is very important for the House to understand that we do not raise money from Russian oligarchs.”—[Official Report, Commons, 23/2/22; col. 313.]

For many of us, it was very difficult to take that remark seriously when we look at some of the records that have been exposed. It is obviously impossible for someone with only Russian nationality, however rich, to donate legally to a United Kingdom political party, but what has undoubtedly happened is that a series of people with dual UK/Russian nationality, or with significant business links with Russia, have donated heavily to the Conservatives in recent years. Based on electoral information, Labour has estimated that donors who have made money from Russia or Russians have given £1.93 million to the Tory party or to constituency associations since Johnson became Prime Minister. In the other place, Ian Blackford of the SNP referred to the Conservatives having raised £2.3 million from Russian oligarchs.

I recognise that “oligarch” is a loose term associated with people who generally made their money from the financial free-for-all of the post-Soviet, Putin era, but those people often keep a very close link with the Russian President. One reason the legislation is so important is the connections. You can have a permissible donor who is linked very closely to someone who is not a permissible donor, and if the links to the assets and the finances are obscure it is difficult to follow the money, as Liz Truss said.

One of the biggest single donors to the Conservative Party is Lubov Chernukhin, who has donated £700,000. She has been a British national since 2011 and is married to Vladimir Chernukhin, a former deputy finance Minister under Putin. Documents published in the Pandora papers in October suggest that he was allowed to leave Russia in 2004 with assets worth about $500 million and to retain Russian business connections. Lawyers representing the couple say that none of the wealth was acquired in a corrupt manner and none of Vladimir Chernukhin’s wife’s donations was funded by improper means or affected by the influence of anyone else. That is extremely difficult to understand when you look at some of the documents in the Pandora papers published by the Guardian. Lubov Chernukhin is also notable for winning the prize of a game of tennis with Boris Johnson at the party’s 2020 fundraising ball. It is not clear whether she has managed to get that prize yet.

That shows us the extent of foreign money coming into our political process and our political parties. The reason I am raising that on this clause is that we have yet to see political parties being established for the purpose of undermining the political system we have. I anticipate all kinds of reactions from friends of Putin—to put it that way—that we have not seen before. If our sanctions legislation gets stronger and we have the economic crime Bill that we anticipate seeing in the next Session, we may see this hidden money going in different ways that will perhaps have less scrutiny but very strong connections. I am probing this to see what the Government have thought of in terms of transparency in the establishment of political parties and what they are going to do about the broad recommendations of the Russia report, which they have not really taken into account. We will certainly be returning to the question of donations to political parties later in consideration of the Bill, but I thought that this was an opportunity to look at whether there has been any risk assessment by the Government of how political parties that could fundamentally undermine our system may be established and funded. I beg to move.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I am conscious that there are other democracies in Europe which have parties on the right that have admitted to receiving money from Russia as loans or as grants. Happily, this country is not in that position, but a number of shadows hang over our politics and we have got quite close to it on a number of occasions. It currently affects the Government because they refused to publish the evidence the Intelligence and Security Committee collected on foreign interference in British politics four years ago and they have not yet published the evidence on the suitability of those who came in on the golden visa scheme between 2000 and 2015. That report was commissioned four years ago. If one goes back to the referendum campaign, so far as I am aware, we still do not know where the largest donation to the Brexit campaign came from, although I had one very odd conversation with a senior member of the City of London who told me that everyone knew that it came from a particular foreign country. There are issues here. We shall return to them when we get on to donations.

I mark in general that this is yet another reason why we should be lowering the limits on campaign spending at national and constituency level, not raising them, because money corrupts politics. I think that the Conservative Party has come close to corruption in the way it has very successfully expanded its fundraising, with the creation of a donors’ club. I have read on the front page of the Times that donors have said that they are unhappy about what the Prime Minister is doing on this, that and the other, and that clearly shows that donors influence politics to a considerable extent in the Conservative Party.

Yes, of course, we are all guilty. My party has also accepted one or two large and very welcome donations which were a little bit questionable. That is because we are so desperate for money for campaigning—and it is part of the reason why I agree that we should be lowering limits. So, I support the probing amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Collins. We will return to this on a later day in Committee. It is a fundamentally important issue for British politics, because part of what is corroding public trust in politics at present is the deep suspicion that money buys Ministers.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I in no way suggested that. I merely remarked that the question of where the largest donation to the Brexit campaign came from has not been explained, which is entirely different. I trust that the Minister is also concerned about that, rather than making jokes about it.

[Lord True (Con)]

I made no joke. I drew attention to the noble Lord’s remarks, and they will stand on the record. So far as this matter is concerned—and I have heard the cascade of innuendo ending with the remark that Ministers can be bought, which will also lie in Hansard—I move on to a serious response to a serious—

[Lord True (Con)]

I stand by the remarks I made in response to comments from the Front Bench of the Liberal Democrat party. I would like to—

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I do not know whether the noble Lord reads the Sunday Times—perhaps he only reads the Sunday Telegraph—but the Sunday Times in the last two weeks has included a good deal of evidence on the role of the donors, access to Ministers and what one of the Conservative Party’s largest donors has called “access capitalism”. Perhaps he has missed all that.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I was working on my allotment on Sunday morning. I will come to the point that was raised by the noble Lord opposite, which I take extremely seriously. It is a probing amendment but an important subject. I have discussed it with the noble Baroness and the noble Lord. I look forward also to engaging in discussions when we come to her amendments, which are on an analogous subject.

What the noble Lord suggests is, obviously, on the face of it, a good idea: that the commission should reject the application of a political party if its declaration of assets and liabilities demonstrates assets designated under the Sanctions and Anti-Money Laundering Act 2018. I absolutely recognise the importance of that regime, although a debate on its intricacies does not fall within the scope of this Bill. I do not make any complaints about that, however, and I am happy to address it because of the gravity and importance of the issue.

On the specific point the noble Lord raises—I will be brief—sanctions law is incredibly clear: all individuals and legal entities who are within, or undertake activities within, the United Kingdom’s territory must comply with UK financial sanctions that are in force. This includes not only political parties but candidates and other types of campaigners listed in the relevant areas of the legislation. Where a person or entity is designated as subject to financial sanctions, the nature of the resulting restrictions means that the person’s assets are frozen and consequently that person would be prohibited from using those assets for any purpose. This would include the funding of a political party.

While the Government entirely agree with the principle that sanctioned assets should not be used for the benefit of anyone—including prospective political parties, which we are discussing specifically on this amendment— we believe that the current sanctioning regime already provides for this and we remain to be convinced that an additional provision is required in this Bill. I am sympathetic to the noble Lord’s intentions here. I believe that his point is already acknowledged but, in the light of the importance of the matter that he has raised, I will make doubly sure that that is the case. With that assurance, I hope he feels able to withdraw his amendment. I am ready to discuss the matter with him further, as we have already engaged.

Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Tuesday 15th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

I would have to be advised on that matter. I understand where the noble Lord is coming from, because I agree that it is hard to believe that a group would want to proceed in that way. I shall share with the Committee what information is available on this.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

We on these Benches are totally unaware of this organisation, but I am glad to hear that it was staffed by Liberal Democrats. I am sure the Minister would expect it to be a dastardly Liberal Democrat plot, but I am completely unaware of it. Could his private office provide us with some information and background—there must be some—to inform us of the case, how serious it was and how it was dealt with? It somehow did not hit the Sunday Times on my Sunday morning, just before I got to my allotment.

[Lord True (Con)]

The noble Lord will be taken to task for not reading the Observer if he keeps coming out with his Sunday morning reading. I was not there and the Government were not there but, looking at the empirical record, we believe that this was a prima facie case. I can report only what information I have: that it was staffed by former Liberal Democrats and operated in five target Liberal Democrat constituencies, but I accept the noble Lord’s assurance that he knew nothing about it.

The clause that we have put in the Bill will prohibit recognised third-party campaigners registering as political parties and gaining access to a spending limit for each registration. The list of individuals and entities permitted to be on the third-party campaigner register will also be amended to remove political parties.

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[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I support the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, in his amendments. I am acting as a kind of understudy for my noble friend Lord Blunkett, but I cannot say that what I shall say would be his lines, but in his absence, at least there is a Labour Back-Bencher speaking in favour of the amendments.

I should perhaps first declare my interest as vice-chair of Compass, which is a left-of-centre campaigning organisation that has been promoting a progressive alliance for some years, and as honorary president of the Child Poverty Action Group. I worked for CPAG for many years and, during that time, worked on trying to get child poverty raised as an issue in many general elections.

The question of the 365-day limit was raised in the Public Bill Committee: why is it so long? I think the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, made a strong case for it being too long. When questioned, the Minister in the Commons had three arguments. The first was that we all have a fairly good idea of when an election will be. Do we? There is already speculation that there could be an election next year. Indeed, those who have been lobbying about the Bill, sometimes groups in combination, could find that they are in the regulated period already. We simply do not know, now that we are outside fixed-term Parliaments. A prudent organisation would need to start taking steps very soon not to get caught out.

Secondly, the Minister argued that, in effect, we are all in it together: we all have the same amount of information, so it does not matter. I will not be affected by this legislation, but the kind of organisation that I am associated with could well be.

Thirdly, and most worryingly, the Minister said:

“People will need to take that into account when they are campaigning politically.”—[Official Report, Commons, Elections Bill Committee, 26/10/21; col. 314.]


Well, exactly. That is the problem: what is often called the chilling effect will take effect. If organisations involved in campaigning take account politically, that could stop them campaigning for large periods of the electoral cycle. That cannot be right. The noble Lord made helpful distinctions. Looking back, when I was at CPAG, there would have been big periods when we could not try to make child poverty an issue because we would have been caught by this legislation.

Perhaps the Minister will have stronger arguments for why 365 days is appropriate, but certainly the arguments put in the Commons were either weak or worrying. I am not clear why we need any retrospective regulated period. Why can it not just start when the election is called? However, in the spirit of compromise, I am happy to support one or other of these amendments and am very interested to hear what the Minister has to say about them.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the scars are still on my back from having taken the transparency of lobbying Bill, now an Act, through this House. I remind the Minister that we paused it when we ran into waves of criticism from all sides and arguments that we had not entirely got our own arguments in line. It was not quite as messy as this Bill, but we did at least manage to sort out something which did not displease everyone too much.

I have read the very useful report by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, which I compliment him on. It does its best to strike the balance between a number of very difficult and different priorities. All of us who have been involved in politics know that there are many civil society organisations. Some are easily politically neutral—as the Church is, most of the time—while others are inherently a bit on the right. Those of us who are old enough to have fought campaigns that the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children was active in will remember how vigorous, to say the least, it could be in its campaigns and how biased it was. Development NGOs and poverty NGOs, being in favour of greater public sector spending and greater equality, tend naturally to be more on the left. The balance between advocacy and electoral campaigning, as the noble Lord has said, is a difficult one, which we must all strike. In debating this issue with some of the organisations concerned, there were those who felt that they were entitled to campaign entirely as they liked because they were morally right and therefore should not in any sense be controlled in an election campaign.

I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that 120 days is much better than 365 days. We no longer know when the election will be. It is one of the many bits of incoherence of this Government that putting through the abolition of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act in the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill has not sorted out entirely the knock-on effects of that for this Bill. If I recall correctly, in his report, the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said that looking back on how various NGOs and civil society groups have spent on their advocacy and campaigning, the spending does come very much in the last few weeks and months before the election, rather than being spread evenly over the previous year.

Therefore, I strongly support Amendment 39 and hope that the Minister will accept that this is a reasonable adjustment in the Bill which the Government could accept, and which makes life simpler for those civil society groups which we all want to see engaging in campaigns and public debate. This tidying up would be a help to all concerned.

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, for introducing these amendments at this stage. I know that we will have further debates but, like him, I think it is really important to set this in context. I am grateful to my noble friend Lady Lister for doing so. She has an incredible record of promoting civil society and action groups focused on particular issues. I know from my own experience that civil society activity is really important; one of the most important groups I have participated in is one that my party, the Conservative Party and other political parties were a bit uncomfortable dealing with—LGBT rights. It took a civil society, cross-party campaign to change things and influence manifestos.

I said at Second Reading that a thriving democracy is not limited to Parliaments and parliamentarians. Countries that fail to protect their citizens force civil society to stand up for them and defend human rights. That is really important. The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and my noble friend, who was more explicit, talked about that chilling effect. That is what we must look at. Perhaps it is even an unintended consequence. However, it is a simple fact that we do not know the date of the general election; it is in the gift of the Prime Minister to set, and sometimes it can be a long campaign and sometimes it can be short. We do not want those civil society organisations campaigning throughout a five-year period, raising issues such as child poverty, to stand back because they fear that they might be caught in this regulated period.

I agree with my noble friend that the simplest solution is to say that the regulated period should start when a general election officially starts, but I will compromise with the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, on four months. Importantly, in some of his later amendments we will come to issues such as defining what might reasonably be regarded as campaigning, which he rightly raised. I agree about a code of practice being brought before Parliament.

Even if the Minister cannot accept these amendments today—I have no doubt that he cannot—I hope he will take away that this will have an impact on civil society that will impact negatively on our democratic activity. I hope the Government will listen to both the noble Lord and my noble friend Lady Lister.

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It is the Government’s view that reducing the established period, notwithstanding the arguments I have heard from my noble friend—and I have the highest admiration for the care and concern he has put into studying these matters and his championing of the civil society sector and charities—would allow unregulated, uncapped spending and provide less transparency for the electorate than we have had over the past two decades.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

The Minister referred to the established 12-month period. I was not aware of it as an established principle. Perhaps now or in a letter, the Minister will tell us when it was established, how long it has been in effect and how it has been tried and tested, since he is so good at telling us that.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I will stand corrected if it is not the case, but the principle of a 12-month regulatory period has been in place for more than 20 years. That is the advice I have and if I am wrong, I will gladly correct that; no doubt my noble friend behind me will correct me very fast.

The closely related Amendment 33A seeks to create an exemption from expenditure rules for third-party exempt campaigners where they could not reasonably be expected to be aware that they were campaigning during a regulated election period. One understands the arguments that were put, but regulated periods have been in place for years. Third parties engaging in election campaigning should be aware of the rules and of the existence of regulated periods. However, the Electoral Commission has produced extensive guidance to help third parties understand the rules. It states:

“Most campaign activity undertaken before an election is announced is unlikely to meet the purpose test”.


It is an important test that is specifically intended to protect civil society, because

“you are unlikely to be reasonably regarded as intending to influence people to vote in an election when you do not know or expect that the election is happening.”

I have heard arguments around the corner of that, but the basic principle of the purpose test is there, and therefore the Government do not accept the idea that regulated periods for third parties are overly burdensome. It is important that spending is regulated and transparent and it is right that spending that promotes a political party in the lead-up to an election is regulated, whether that is undertaken by the party itself or by a third-party campaigner. Therefore, with great respect, I fear that I cannot accept my noble friend’s amendment and ask him to withdraw it.

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[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I wish to speak in support of the probing Amendment 35 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. We have to ask what my noble friend asked. What is this trying to solve? In the regulated period of one year and at a figure of £700, we are saying that an organisation that spends £1.91 a day for 12 months before a general election could be committing an offence. That is the amount that would have to be spent per day by the organisation or £13.46 a week or £58.33 a month. The very simple question I would like to ask the Minister is: how was that daily amount of £1.91 calculated? Why is it deemed to be illegal if an organisation exceeds that amount and exactly what problem does it solve?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, may I ask the Minister a question? I do not entirely understand this clause and the unincorporated association element is the least clear to me. I googled “unincorporated association” this morning and came away more confused than when I started. I think we would all be very grateful if the Minister’s office could circulate a letter explaining why this is there, what sort of organisations they have in mind, whether there is a history or problems with unincorporated associations and, if so, what they were, so that we have some idea of why this is necessary. I get a sense from others who have spoken that we are puzzled by where this clause is coming from, why it is there and what it is intended to do.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I have to confess that I irritate my wonderful team in the Box when I say—and this of course plays straight into the attack—why is this not a consolidation Act? Of course, in the great scheme of things, consolidation Acts on all sorts of things would be wonderful. As I have said, this is intended to be a reforming Act dealing with some matters which are relatively urgent, but I agree that the way that it operates is relatively opaque and I understand why noble Lords have asked these questions.

Like others, I am not going to stray into Clause 25, although I realise there is an interrelation between the two. I know from the engagement I have had with colleagues on all Benches that Clause 25 is an issue which the House wants to consider in some detail, and I am fully ready for that. If the House will forgive me, I will not go into that except in so far as it deals with this matter.

Clause 24 is intended to do something that we would all like to do, which is to ensure that campaign spending comes only from UK-based or otherwise eligible sources. The clause is intended to address some of the concerns raised by the DCMS Select Committee in the other place in a 2019 report on disinformation—so-called fake news and foreign interference in UK elections.

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While there may be issues in relation to Clause 25 that we will wish to address, I hope that, with that explanation, noble Lords will understand that we are seeking to restrict foreign campaigning.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I am sorry to be obtuse. I do not entirely understand Clause 24(7), which defines the requisite UK connection of an unincorporated association. I think I understand it as meaning that there must be at least two people associated with it who, while they and anyone else in the unincorporated association may be living overseas, are at least on the register. Is it therefore envisaged that we will have more unincorporated associations which are based overseas but campaigning in Britain?

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, it is required to have a UK connection. I will write to noble Lords to explain that clearly. In the two days that I have been listening in Committee, your Lordships have rightly—sometimes gently, sometimes aggressively—asked the Government to deal with foreign intervention. That is what this clause is intended to bear down on. We can have further discussion on the meaning of subsection (7) and I will undertake to write on that but I hope that, with those assurances—

Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Thursday 17th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Lord Haskel) (Lab)]

My Lords, if this amendment is agreed, I cannot call Amendment 44, because of pre-emption.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak on whether Clause 25 should stand part, which is grouped with these amendments in an attempt to improve Clause 25. I will begin with some remarks about Part 4 as we have so far examined it.

I came away from Tuesday’s Committee much more worried about the coherence of this Bill than I had been until then. We learned that Clause 18 is there primarily to reverse the court’s judgment in the Thanet election case, although the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, in her reply, attempted to persuade us that it does not really change the law; in which case, the clause is not necessary. We learned that Clause 22 was entirely about the threat to our electoral system posed by a body called Advance Together, which, on examination, fought five seats in the 2019 election and gained in total just over 400 votes. We did not learn the purpose of Clause 24. Indeed, after the Minister’s explanation, I and others were more puzzled about the purpose of this clause than we had been before we started, and worried as to whether there is some underhand objective that we have not yet uncovered.

When reading through Section 88 of PPERA last night, which defines “recognised third parties”, I could find no reference to unincorporated associations as recognised third parties. Can the Minister or his staff kindly inform me before Report whether the inclusion of unincorporated associations in Clause 24 is intended to bring these bodies within this category for the first time or whether they were already covered in existing legislation? I also found in the briefing a reference to permitting only overseas-based unincorporated associations consisting entirely of UK citizens, which is not the wording in the Government’s text.

The Minister gave us to believe that the small group of former Liberal Democrats who formed Advance Together, and then merged it into Renew, represented a major threat to the UK, but that foreign money and foreign interference, most evidently from Russia, do not present any serious threat. The Minister suggested that the paragraphs in the ISC’s Russia report and elsewhere that flag up the seriousness of that threat are little more than “innuendo”. It is astonishing that he can suggest that Russian interference should not be a serious concern to us as we consider this Bill—at this point above all.

Now we have Clause 25, which gives full power to the Secretary of State to add or remove descriptions of third parties from the approved list. I am grateful to the Minister for offering us a government amendment to delete the power to

“make such amendments of this Part as the Secretary of State considers appropriate”,

but this is only because the Government consider that PPERA already provides sufficient authority. As I wade through sections of PPERA to understand the provisions of this Bill, with the occasional reference to the earlier Representation of the People Act, I am repeatedly reminded of the CSPL’s declaration in its report on election finance that there is an “unarguable” case in favour of consolidating and simplifying electoral law.

The Minister must recognise, as he struggles to explain and justify this Bill clause by clause, that it totally fails to consolidate or simplify. The Electoral Commission’s briefing for Second Reading stated, accurately, that the changes in Part 4, including these clauses,

“would add new requirements to laws which many campaigners have said are already complex and hard to understand. The added complexity of these changes could deter some from campaigning at elections ... Voters could therefore ... hear from a narrower range of sources.”

It therefore falls to the Minister to justify the inclusion of Clause 25 and the powers that it gives to the Secretary State, and to explain, as we keep asking, what problem it is intended to resolve. If he cannot persuade us that it is necessary, we shall ask for it to be removed.

[Baroness Meacher (CB)]

My Lords, I support the intention to oppose Clause 25 standing part of the Bill, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace. In so doing, I also support Amendments 41 and 42, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury.

Clause 25 introduces significant delegation of powers in relation to Clause 24, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has indicated. We understood from the Minister last week that the purpose of Clause 24 is to protect the country from electioneering by overseas organisations. I am quite happy to support the Government in that purpose. However, the Minister was unable to assure the Committee last week that non-charitable civil society organisations in this country would remain outside the scope of Clause 24 and therefore also, importantly, of Clause 25. I hope that the Minister can clarify this significant point in his summing up.

I do not want to repeat my concerns about Clauses 24 and 25, which I expressed last Thursday, so will focus solely on the delegated powers in Clause 25, and in so doing declare my interest as a member of the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee.

It is concerning that, in Clause 25, the Government have provided wide-ranging powers for Ministers to amend Section 88 of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 to which Clause 24 applies. In a sense, it feels a little unnatural to be talking about Clause 25 when these two clauses are so very closely aligned and intertwined. The Government need a very good reason to introduce Henry VIII powers under which a Minister can amend an Act of Parliament.

I want to focus on Clause 25(1)(b) in that respect. I am sure that the Minister is aware that the DPRRC has particular concerns about this paragraph, which relates to the list of third-party organisations that can exceed the spending limits contained in Section 94 of PPERA. He may also be aware that, in its memorandum to the DPRRC, the department admits that preventing other categories of third party being able to campaign has the potential to impinge on freedom of expression under Article 10 of the ECHR and the right to enjoy a free election under Article 3 of the first protocol of the convention. The department has argued that it is important that, if a legitimate category of third party emerges, it can be added quickly to the legitimate categories to ensure that these restrictions on campaigning remain proportionate and no more extensive than is necessary to meet the aim of preventing campaigning by those with no genuine stake in the UK. As I said, I understand that objective, but this clause seems to go much wider and, with the delegated powers in Clause 25, we have no idea where it may go. The DPRRC is clear that the Minister needs to explain the need for Ministers to have Henry VIII powers to remove third parties. If Ministers are unable to provide a satisfactory explanation, these powers are inappropriate. That is the view of the DPRRC, not my view—I am simply a member.

I have brought this issue to the Floor of the Committee because if the Minister can explain the need for these Henry VIII powers in Clause 25 it may help noble Lords when deciding whether to bring back this issue on Report. I hope the Minister will be able to assure us that organisations based in the UK and which are not controlled from overseas will be clearly excluded by the Bill from Clauses 24 and Clause 25, thus taking fully into account the concerns of the DPRRC.

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[Lord True (Con)]

All those bodies in the current list in Section 88(2) of PPERA are carved out, whatever their description. We will come on to the concerns raised about what is in Clause 25, but I repeat that assurance. In saying that, I understand some of the suspicions and concerns raised by noble Lords.

I do not wish to be adversarial in any way, but the other thing I would say in starting is this. As I have said several times in these discussions, I agree that, one day, ideally, a consolidation Bill would be highly desirable. I fully accept that. There are issues here that are relatively urgent, whether we are agree or not: for example, around foreign money, digital campaigning and so on and so forth. The Government are seeking to make progress on those, but it is not a zero-sum game. In presenting this legislation—by the way, as a Minister who has himself had to try to get his mind round all the various references and cross-references in the Bill—I am not in any way saying that a consolidation Bill, one day, is not a desirable end. Anybody involved in the political world would agree.

Clause 25 is really what this debate is about. The potential problems and suspicions—raised, for example, by the noble Viscount—arise from the perceived view of Clause 25 that has been expressed in this debate. Perhaps I could deal with the first part, which is about potentially adding new categories. We are conscious that, as the world evolves, new legitimate categories of third parties that are not currently on the list might emerge. Because they are not protected by the carve-out in Section 88(2), they might be significantly restricted in their ability to campaign by this provision if they could not be added to the list quickly. That is why Clause 25 makes provision for the amendment of the list of eligible categories of third-party campaigns in PPERA, to add a new category of campaigner that might emerge. That would allow any Government, not just this Government, to amend the list to enable new groups or styles of campaigners to take part. Parliament would have a lock on that, via the affirmative resolution procedure.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I simply wish to congratulate the Minister on following so very clearly the precautionary principle in legislating here for something that has not yet happened and might happen, because it would be useful to have this in place if it did happen. That is what I understand him to be saying.

[Lord True (Con)]

I am saying that there is a practical possibility that this might arise. I take it that, however expressed, that was assent from those Benches, and I am grateful for that.

These provisions will ensure that we can be responsive to the emergence of new categories of third parties, or changes to the legal description of existing categories of third parties—there is some legal language in Section 88(2) —so that they are not unduly restricted from campaigning and participating in our democracy in the future. That is added with a parliamentary lock.

I am grateful for the engagement on the points we come to next; I have heard the concerns of the Liberal Democrat and other Benches, most notably, as we heard again in the debate today, from the party opposite. I thank all who have spoken to me on this subject, and the noble Lord, Lord Collins of Highbury, for the points he made on Clause 25 regarding the power to remove—the specific subject of his amendment—or vary the list.

I hope that part of making progress on a Bill is making progress, but it is the person at the Dispatch Box who has the responsibility to listen—my job as a Minister. I hope we can go forward with that in mind.

The Government have listened to the concerns raised. I pay great respect to the Delegated Powers and Regulatory Reform Committee’s recent report on the subject of Ministers having the power to remove entries from the list of eligible categories of third-party campaigners in Section 88(2). That is why I asked my officials to meet, as the noble Lord said, with the TUC and TULO on 7 March to discuss their concerns.

Although powers to update lists in legislation are not unusual—and indeed can be important where, either due to changes in legal definitions or oversight, Governments may need to respond quickly—we acknowledge the concerns that have been expressed. The Government have heard the concerns around whether the power in Clause 25 could be abused by a future Government. I reassure the noble Lord and others who have spoken that before the next stage of the Bill I intend to consider at the very least what further safeguards could be added to the clause, along the lines of, for example, Amendments 42 and 45 from the noble Lord, relating to the role of the Electoral Commission. I have heard the force of opinion in the Committee on these provisions.

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Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Thursday 17th March 2022 Lords Chamber

The second reason for tabling the amendment is that, as has already been said, it represents a better and fairer approach to third-party funding than that proposed in Clause 27. It would bring transparency, and it is based on recommendation 21 of the committee’s report, which, as others have said, builds on the Electoral Commission’s own 2015 report and the report by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson. It is a simple and, I believe, practical measure to increase transparency, and I hope the Minister will support it. However, the better, and the right, thing to have done was for the Government, if they needed, to pause this Bill and take proper account of the full recommendations of the committee’s report.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, we on these Benches hope that the Government will be willing not only to listen but to accept both of these amendments, either in their current form or in some reshaped form. They would be constructive and non-partisan additions to the Bill.

I recall that the review undertaken by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, came about as a result of what some people felt were the botched efforts of the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Act, which was rushed through Parliament. Of course, if this Bill becomes law in anything like its current form, I should warn the noble Lord that he—and perhaps not only he but other Members of the House too—will be called on several more times to do post-legislative scrutiny on various aspects of it.

We differ from the noble Lord in one or two respects. We would have fought for Parliament against the executive prerogative of the monarchy in the Civil War; that is where my party comes from. We are therefore in favour of the Electoral Commission being responsible to the Speaker’s Committee much more than to the Secretary of State. We will want to consider and discuss between now and Report whether the Speaker’s Committee too needs to be further reinforced, and perhaps slightly reshaped. Apart from that, we strongly support where both amendments come from, and we hope that the Government will be willing to incorporate them in further discussions on the Bill.

[Lord Mann (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, made a distinguished contribution, based on his great experience—although I fear that in identifying Conservative clubs he was thinking of Walsall North Conservative Club, which defines itself online as a pub that has gone out of business, rather than the neighbouring Aldridge Conservative & Unionist Club, which defines itself online both as a social club, which it is, and also as “community and government”. That rather makes my point about some clubs—not only Conservative clubs but also Labour and Liberal clubs.

I want to make one brief comment on Amendment 54B and what the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, said, and will requote one of the principles he identified, which is clarity. In 1995 I was tasked with ensuring that the Labour Party and the trade unions stayed within the law, as it was emerging under the Nolan committee, to which I presented evidence with my noble and learned friend Lord Morris on behalf of all trade unions. Before the law changed, my experience was that clarity was critical. I was able to go to senior politicians—my noble friend Lord Blunkett was an exception because he was always exemplary on all financial matters, but not everyone was because politicians are often more enthused about their political campaigns than by exactly how they are funded—and one of my roles was to ensure that everything was within the spirit of the law and within the law we already had on trade union funds. Clarity was critical.

It would probably be a best seller if I cited some of the spectacular examples, but there were some ferocious rows. I explained to people that they were not having that money because the way they were trying to get it was not technically legal, despite the fact that the way they wished to spend it was clearly for social good. Politicians have a weakness when it comes to money, especially when it is to do with elections. Clarity is critical.

When the law changed, and treasurers were about to be elected in my local party, when I was a Member of the other place, I always used to say, “You’ll go to prison if you get this wrong.” That quickly weeded out those who wanted the position of treasurer for some kind of political enhancement and left a tiny number who were prepared to ensure that the finances were in order. They were awkward to me, because I kept saying “That’s perfectly legitimate”, and they would delay income or expenditure because they wanted to be absolutely certain.

That is the beauty of what the noble Lord, Lord Kerslake, is suggesting: a designated treasurer with a duty that they will apply with draconian consequences for breaching the law. I strongly commend this approach and this principle as one of the levers to ensure that transparency is delivered. I think this is rather a good proposal.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

As I said, the Electoral Commission has agreed to do much of this. I will come to local authorities now. The noble Baronesses, Lady Hayman, Lady Pinnock and Lady Meacher, quite rightly talked about the costs of this to local authorities. The impact assessment presented a range of costs that could be incurred by the introduction of these measures in order to ensure that local authorities and valuation joint boards are provided with the funding to implement the changes successfully. We will continue to refine our estimates of the future new burdens required to reflect the design of the secondary legislation. Government analysts are engaging with local authorities and valuation joint boards as this model is developed. Work is being done by all those involved.

Any allocation would be subject to detailed consideration of the varied pictures across local authorities and the valuation boards and would seek to allocate funding according to need. As was the case with the introduction of individual electoral registration, new-burdens funding will be provided to cover the additional costs resulting from the changes.

The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, asked about the different needs of different authorities. We accept that. The administrative burden will be driven by a variety of factors across local authorities, including their existing capabilities. The allocation of new-burdens funding, including for any additional staffing required, is being modelled and discussed with local authorities and other key stakeholders, working with the programme team in the department. The allocation of the new-burdens funding will take into account the different requirements and characteristics of all local authorities. We are working with local authorities and with the Local Government Association, and we are looking at all the different characteristics of those individual authorities. As a local authority person, I understand this.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I want just to check on the question which has already been raised about the extra security costs. While preparing for this Bill, I went to talk to the Bradford electoral registration team. One of the strongest messages that came from them was that a significant number of poll clerks in Bradford were young women. We all know that intimidation is the most frequent election problem in parts of Bradford. When faced with rather aggressive men of one sort or another whose identity is being challenged, young women are going to feel very unsafe. This will require extra staffing and police. Has this been factored in?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I cannot tell the noble Lord whether that has been factored in. I will ask the team and come back to him. The fact that local authorities are working with the team means that those sorts of issues will come up and be dealt with.

We have also already established a business change network covering England, Scotland and Wales, specifically to support local authorities with the implementation of the policy changes arising from the Elections Bill. The network allows the regular flow of information both ways between local authorities and officials in DLUHC, acting as a local presence with knowledge of the Elections Bill and supporting and engaging with administrators during the implementation. That is where these sorts of issues need to come up and I expect them to be dealt with in that way.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, brought up training for returning officers. This will all come out of the same network. We continue to work with local authorities to understand their needs and the needs of voters in relation to training on the new electoral system. I think that deals with all the points, so I will now get on to the actual amendments.

These amendments and those in the groups just after place a requirement on the Secretary of State to publish a wide range of reports, impact assessments and reviews, as well as to hold consultations on the impacts and estimated impacts of various measures in this Bill. Amendment 55 would prevent Schedule 1 coming into force until the Secretary of State has made a statement before Parliament on the estimated cost of the provisions, in addition to the potential impacts on voter turnout across different demographics.

This amendment is entirely unnecessary. A detailed estimate of costs for all the provisions in the Bill was published alongside it, as was an equality impact assessment. To suggest that the impacts of the measures in the Bill have not been considered in great detail would be a disservice to the many officials in the team who have spent considerable time modelling the various impacts and who are already working very closely with the sector to prepare for its implementation in a thorough and very considered way.

On the financial costs, we have worked extensively with the electoral sector to assess the impacts of the measures and have rightfully modelled a range of costs to account for a number of scenarios. We continue to work to refine these as the detail of implementation planning is settled. Our priority remains ensuring that local authorities have the necessary resources to continue to deliver our elections robustly and securely, and we have secured the necessary funding to deliver that goal.

As is usual for programmes of this kind, any additional funding required will be delivered to local authorities via the new burdens mechanism. Rollout of any funding will be timed to ensure that local authorities can meet the costs incurred. This is not the first time that the Government have delivered a change programme in this area. The Government have worked closely with the sector to deliver a number of national programmes, including canvass reform and the introduction of individual electoral registration, to great effect. This programme, while complex, is no different and we will continue to take the same open and collaborative approach to implementation.

When it comes to publications, the evaluation of and reporting on funding for programmes of this kind are already subject to publication requirements, particularly as this qualifies as a government major programme. Furthermore, we are developing robust evaluation plans and intend to produce a process and impact evaluation of the programme across all policy measures. Therefore, in light of the already published assessments for the Bill and the assurances that existing plans will provide ample transparency, I beg the noble Baroness to withdraw her amendment.

Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 21st March 2022 Lords Chamber

Debate on whether Clause 1 should stand part of the Bill.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I shall wait for just a minute while those who do not wish to hear my exciting speech absent themselves.

Those who heard the remarkable speech by the noble Lord, Lord Woolley, on Thursday will know that the case for this clause to be included in the Bill is very weak. He said it all, in effect. First, this is an extremely small problem; secondly, it will disfranchise the poorer and more marginalised elements of the electorate; and, thirdly, the larger problems of our electoral system lie elsewhere. The PACAC report, which has been much quoted in Committee so far, states:

“There is very limited evidence of personation at UK elections.”


These proposals represent

“a disproportionate response to a problem that appears not to be widespread.”

Paragraph 96 states:

“Introducing a compulsory voter ID requirement risks upsetting the balance of our current electoral system”—


that is a real constitutional reform in the wrong direction—

“making it more difficult to vote and removing an element of the trust inherent in the current system.”

The more urgent problems facing our electoral system include some things we will discuss later today, such as intimidation, of which I have experience, but above all the missing 8 million to 9 million citizens who are not on our electoral register. The Bill leaves to one side the issue of the incompleteness of our electoral register. As it happened, last week, I turned up in my pile of Cabinet Office publications one from December 2017 entitled Every Voice Matters: Building a Democracy that Works for Everyone, introduced by Chris Skidmore, then the Minister responsible. As we were discussing in Questions, there have been several changes of responsible Ministers since then, which has no doubt contributed to the incoherence of the Bill. Skidmore argued very strongly in that document for citizen engagement, greater participation and a more complete register.

Here is a major weakness in the integrity of our elections. Previous Conservative Ministers thought it important, but the Bill instead chases after other imagined problems—ones that US Republicans also chase for reasons not concerned with election integrity. The Bills that Republican-controlled state legislatures have passed under the title of election integrity have been concerned with pushing people—marginal, poor, black and others—off the register. The Minister will be well aware of the wide suspicion of the degree of Republican infiltration of the Conservative Party and of Conservative imitation of right-wing Republican enthusiasms and campaigns, most recently illustrated in the remarkable and awful speech which the chairman of the Conservative Party gave to the Heritage Foundation only two weeks ago.

Perhaps the Minister would like to argue that the absence of evidence of a serious current problem should not deter us from turning to the precautionary principle—introducing this in case there turns out to be a larger problem in future than there was—but he has told us that he does not accept the precautionary principle. After all, it is a European principle disliked by all true Anglo-Saxons.

The cost of introducing voter ID across the entire electorate could instead be spent on citizen education and engagement, to encourage more young people to play an active role in our electoral system and its campaigns. We could experiment with moves towards automatic registration—that is, automatic entry on to the register, which we will discuss later in Committee.

--- Later in debate ---

I want to make progress. I appreciate that not everybody has enthusiasm for these provisions, but I beg your Lordships to understand that they are part of a set of provisions—they do not stand alone. They stand alongside all the other measures in the Bill which are intended to secure the integrity of the ballot. On reflection, I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, will feel able to withdraw his opposition to Clause 1 standing part of the Bill.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a long and often confused debate. I have to say that I am as confused at the end of it as to what the rationale for Clause 1 is as I was at the beginning.

We have touched on a range of issues which we will return to on later occasions. The noble Lord, Lord Hayward—for whose expertise I have the highest respect—talked about the uncertainties of our electoral system and the problem that, in many constituencies, local and national, the selection meeting is the important one because we all know who is going to be elected. That is actually a gross abuse of our electoral system, to which perhaps one might consider either the introduction of primaries or a change in the electoral system to give the electorate a wider choice. I mark that in passing.

I have much sympathy with the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, on the point about the failure to modernise the pencil on sacking style of polling stations and the very antique business of local registers and local registration, which is totally unsuitable to the digital age. I also agree with the noble Lord, Lord Desai, on that.

What we should have had here was what page 48 of the Conservative manifesto—which I think I know almost off by heart—refers to: that the time has come for a “broader” approach to our constitution. That is one of the aspects the noble Lord told us that they have now abandoned. We could have discussed some of these issues together.

The noble Lord, Lord True, said that all of us should want to do both things at once: security and engagement —and I assume, therefore, proper modernisation of our electoral system. The problem with the Bill is that it does not do both things at once. It does this but not the other things. That is why I find this such an unsatisfactory half set of measures. It is a Bill which does things that help the Conservatives but does not address some of the evident inadequacies of our electoral system and electoral campaigns, and does not modernise, as the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, rightly says. Therefore, it seems to me that the Bill fails the test of appropriate legislation. This is a disproportionate attack on one small part of the inadequacies of our electoral system, which leaves untouched many of its other inadequacies. On that purpose, we shall therefore wish to return to this on Report. I beg leave to withdraw my opposition to Clause 1 standing part.

Clause 1 agreed.

Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Monday 21st March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

My Lords, I support the amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman. These Benches concur with a lot of what she had to say. When I asked why the number of postal voters should not be in the Bill, the Minister replied that it was better to deal with it flexibly, under secondary legislation. I note that the Bill states that the number of proxy votes which can be used by an elector is four. What is the difference between having this in the Bill for proxy voters but not for postal voters?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I have a question more out of ignorance than expertise. I am old enough to have gone round as a young man in the days when different parties competed in treating the matrons of care homes, and relying on them to collect all the votes up and make sure that everyone voted in the right direction. I am sure that that no longer happens—let us hope that it is something that we left behind in the 1960s. However, this raises questions about care homes. How are people assisted to vote? Who posts their votes for them or holds their proxies? I wish for a little assurance about this.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, in answer to that question from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, keeping the numbers at four and not allowing anybody to have as many proxy votes as they like will help control this sort of behaviour. We all know that it happened in the past.

I will get an answer on why postal votes are to be in guidance and proxy votes are in the Bill, and write to the noble Lord, Lord Scriven.

I turn to the amendments concerning the measure in the Bill designed to strengthen the current arrangements for proxy voting. Currently, somebody can act as a proxy for up to two electors and for an unlimited number of close relatives in any constituency in a parliamentary election, or any electoral area at a local election. This can give rise to situations where somebody could cast an extremely large number of proxy votes, over which they could also exercise undue influence. This is where the issue of care homes and such like comes into play.

The Bill introduces a new limited of four on the total number of electors for whom a person may act as a proxy in UK parliamentary elections or local government elections in England. Within this figure, no more than two may be domestic electors—that is, electors who are not overseas electors or service voters. All four may be overseas electors or service voters. This approach will tighten up the rules on proxy voting, while also providing appropriate support for overseas electors and service voters wishing to appoint a proxy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I shall move this amendment very swiftly because I was intending to spend most of this speech discussing what the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said about his amendment, but I have missed my opportunity on that.

Amendment 106ZA is about expanding the list of activities which may constitute undue influence to probe whether causing or threatening financial loss to a political party should also be included. At the moment, it just refers to financial loss due to persons, but clearly undue pressure could be put on political parties, particularly the smaller political parties, around potential financial loss if they go down certain policy routes, for example. It is just to probe that, so I beg to move.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 106A. As I have already said to the Minister, this is very much a probing amendment. Clause 8 is an important clause. We all recognise that it has to be in any elections Bill. I note that in various references to the clause the statement is made that there is a need to clarify the law on undue influence. One of the things I asked the Minister in advance was whether he could tell us how often there have been successful prosecutions for undue influence, because it is not that easy to prove.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Scriven (LD)]

I want to follow on from the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, because his concerns were also mine. I am not clear what the definition of some of these issues would be in law and how they would be taken by the courts. Are there issues like this in legislation elsewhere and has there been interpretation by the courts, particularly regarding spiritual injury? For example, if someone was to stand up in a Catholic church and ask for people not to vote for candidates who supported abortion, would that constitute spiritual injury? Would that be undue spiritual pressure in determining which way people vote?

This is a very finely balanced issue, and I have not come across it before. Therefore, the Minister needs to explain very specifically where the lines and the boundaries are. It is a balance between people having the right to freedom of speech and of faith—I say that as somebody who does not have a religious faith—and the issue of them not being unduly influenced or forced to go against what they believe in. It would be really interesting to hear a clear definition and clear examples from the Dispatch Box for us to be able to determine exactly what this means in legislation.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I shall give my noble friend an American example, which has been debated in the United States very recently. There have been Catholic bishops who have suggested that President Biden should be denied communion, as a Catholic, because he is not prepared to be sufficiently anti-abortion. That, it seems to me, would be undue spiritual influence—although the spectacle of a Catholic bishop or archbishop being prosecuted for undue spiritual influence would be quite an interesting one.

[Lord Adonis (Lab)]

I will elaborate on the noble Lord’s point. There is a difference here, in the ordinary reading of the words, between pressure and intimidation. I took the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, to be referring to intimidation, which is clearly something that we want to guard against. But what constitutes spiritual pressure? As noble Lords have just said, would a sermon in a church constitute pressure? A reasonable person might think that it would; after all, it is not serving much of a purpose if there is no pressure. This is a lay man speaking, but I think there is a difference between pressure and intimidation. We want to guard against intimidation, but we absolutely do not want to curb freedom of religious speech.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord True (Con)]

Yes, I had better write at this hour. I had it somewhere, but I have lost it in the folder. I will certainly write to the noble Lord. I tried to answer the question. If I have not, I will write; sorry.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I think it is the sense of quite a few of us that it might be wiser to remove the phrase “causing spiritual injury to” because that is, I think, the most difficult element of it. I think most of us would understand

“placing undue spiritual pressure on”.

I respectfully suggest that the noble and learned Lord, Lord Mackay of Clashfern, might be a useful person to consult on this. Some of us may remember the occasion when, as Lord Chancellor, he attended a requiem mass for a Catholic judge in Glasgow and was threatened with exclusion from his own church, very clearly threatening to use spiritual pressure. He has presumably thought all of this through extremely well.

I thank the Minister for explaining the efforts that have gone into defining “undue influence” rather better. I still feel that we are looking at something which we all know is there but we are not at all sure that the police, let alone the Crown Prosecution Service, are going to want to take on very much. This is an area involving the boundaries between campaigning, free speech, improper behaviour and downright offences which we will probably have to live with, unsatisfactorily, because that is part of the nature of democracy.

Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Lipsey (Lab)]

My Lords, I put my name to this stand part debate. When I was in journalism, people used to say of me, “He may be no good, but at least he is quick.” I will try to follow that precept this afternoon.

The first thing I wanted to say will cheer the Minister. Like him, I do not think much of single transferable votes—I do not agree with my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours on that. The immense defect of STV compared to its obvious alternative—the alternative vote, which is an exhaustive ballot—is that it does not produce a candidate who commands a majority of the electorate. AV infallibly does, which is why we so sensibly use it for the election of hereditary Peers. It seems very basic that, for mayors in particular, and perhaps police commissioners too, we want somebody who commands a majority of the electorate, and that STV does not do.

The second thing I want to say is about haste. More than 20 years ago, on the Royal Commission on Electoral Reform chaired by the late Lord Jenkins, we were as quick as we possibly could be. People who have served under Lord Jenkins as chair know he was not a man who permitted excess words or allowed discussions to meander. Even so, it took us about 12 months to come to a conclusion. It may or may not have been right, but it took us 12 months to get there. The complexities are enormous. At that time, I could have distinguished between three varieties of Sainte-Laguë system for the distribution of majorities, but now I can hardly remember the words, and I certainly cannot remember what those were. But these are immensely complicated matters of immense importance, and they can affect the results of elections, which are the expression of our democracy. To do this by introducing an unheralded amendment in Committee in the other place is, to use a word much used by my old boss Tony Crosland, frivolous.

The third thing is that different places need different electoral systems. It does not follow that because first past the post may be felt by some to be right for the House of Commons it is right for every election. It clearly is not. Parliament legislated for different systems in Scotland and Wales—the AMS system. A whole set of desiderata attached to electoral systems apply differently in different elections, and this is a very poor reason for having first past the post.

It is particularly poor because the winner can have a very tiny share of the vote, not much more than 20%; I can cheer the Government up for a moment by citing one such perverse result in an East Anglia PCC election in 2012. The winner on the first ballot was one John Prescott, known to many in this House. John Prescott’s lead—he had just over 20% of the first ballot votes—was soon got rid of, and his votes transferred, to elect Matthew Grove. Where is Matthew Grove now?

We cannot openly countenance a system where candidates with 20% of the vote rule over our big cities and order our police. I use the word again: this is a frivolous approach to constitutional reform in general and to electoral reform in particular. This House should have nothing to do with it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, my name is on some amendments in this group. As Members of the Committee will know, I am extremely disturbed by this Bill as a whole and by the way it has been introduced. Of all its provisions, I think Clause 11 is the least justifiable, introduced as it was after a Written Statement by a middle-range Minister last September after the Bill had already begun its Committee stage in the House of Commons, and pushed through for clearly partisan reasons.

On Monday, the Minister was asking us to look at the practice on voter ID in other countries as a justification for what the Government propose. I am sure he recognises that in the Irish and Danish constitutions, any change in the voting system is a constitutional amendment and therefore has to go through exceptional procedures. That is also true in a number of other countries. In this respect, of course, he will probably say that we should pay no attention to other countries. I deeply respect that, privately, the Minister knows this clause is impossible to defend, and I recognise that he nevertheless has to stand up for it as best he can in the circumstances that this was a Conservative pledge in 2017 and someone up there has not forgotten that.

Yesterday, I read a very good article in the Political Quarterly of 2019 entitled “The UK Politics of Overseas Voting” by Susan Collard; I will return to it when we get on to overseas voting. One of the things that struck me about the introduction was that it talked about the package of measures that might have been agreed among the parties in 2016-17 about voting reform. It was discussed among the parties in the Commons that we could have moved towards automatic voter registration to reduce the number of people not on the register—by and large, the young and the marginal. We could have had a major effort at citizen engagement to encourage people to go to the polls. We could also have included votes at 16, which would almost definitely have helped the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens and others. In that context, overseas voting and the extension of overseas voting would have been part of the same package. That could have been negotiated as part of a—

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

Were these official interparty discussions or informal exchanges?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

These were exchanges on and off the Floor of the House of Commons.

That would have been a major set of changes to voting rights that might even have included some form of examination of our voting system. I draw attention to Amendment 140, which suggests that we need a citizens’ assembly on methods of voting for different elections in this country. That would be highly desirable, encouraging an intelligent approach and taking out of the control of parties the question of whose advantage is most looked to in this respect.

This Government have mucked about with local government over an extended period. I am not a great fan of metro mayors—certainly not metro mayors without the scrutiny of elected assemblies—but the Government have them. The Government have reduced the number of local councillors, and now they want to muck about with the system, partly because what Michael Gove and other enthusiasts thought they wanted—independently minded people like we saw in New York and Chicago—has not yet emerged very strongly. But some of those who emerged are rather good, or not so good, Labour candidates, who do not please the Government. Be that as it may, we have a current system for elected mayors.

The only argument, in effect, that the Government can make in defence of this change is that the voters of London and other cities are not as intelligent as their counterparts in Ireland, Scotland and elsewhere and are not capable of understanding a complicated system such as the supplementary vote and therefore we have to go back to the first past the post. That is not a good argument, and I look forward to hearing what alternative argument the Minister may wish to produce.

One of the problems with the first past the post system is that it works really well only when there is a clear two-party system and the two-party system has broken down in almost all democratic countries in recent years, except for the United Kingdom and the United States. In the United Kingdom and the United States, factionalism within both major parties has almost wrecked our politics, partly because the extremists —or less moderate—in both major parties have done their best to take over their party rather than going off and forming their own.

I was very struck by an argument made by the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, during our previous day in Committee, which was that you need to be very careful about how the selection process for candidates works because in most constituencies in Britain the selection process decides who will be the MP. The attraction of any form of alternative voting, supplementary voting or proportional representation is that it gives the voter some choice among candidates.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

In European elections, for example, if you are top of your party’s list, it is pretty close to being a safe seat.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

The noble Lord and I will have conversations about list systems and non-list systems off the Floor of the House.

On Amendment 144C on proportional representation in local elections, I recall very clearly many years ago that the borough of Rochdale had all-out local elections and thus required three candidates for each ward rather than one. What was most striking was that that was the point at which Rochdale ceased to have overwhelmingly white male councillors because if the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats and Conservatives each had to choose three candidates, they tended to choose one white man, one woman and one Asian. That gave people a choice and in some wards people voted for the woman or the Asian in greater numbers than they did for the Labour or Conservative candidate, which you might think is not a bad thing as a matter of choice in elections.

I remind the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, who is deeply committed to the idea of the constituency, that until the first five years of my life the tried-and-tested constituency system in the United Kingdom included a large number of multi-Member constituencies. The last double-Member constituencies were abolished in 1945. I know I am older than him and that was not in his lifetime. We had a number of three and four-Member constituencies in counties and large boroughs, so if we are talking about things that are un-English, English history—the tried-and-tested systems referred to by the noble Lord, Lord True—includes multi-Member constituencies and different forms of voting in return.

Now is not the time to have a full debate on methods of voting, but I commend to the Committee the idea that we should move towards a citizens’ assembly. I hope that whoever makes up the next Government will indeed move forward on this, but I also say as strongly as I can that now is not the time to introduce into a Bill at a late stage, as Clause 11 does, a proposal that the Government have introduced solely because they think it will advance the Conservative Party and disadvantage others.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

I will allow the noble Lord on my right to speak first.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, arguing for consensual politics in a characteristically aggressive speech—and it is a pleasure to follow the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, as well. There must be a misprint on the Marshalled List, because the noble Lord told us that he did not want to discuss proportional representation. But there is an amendment tabled here, with his as the lead name, proposing a new clause with the heading, “Proportional representation for elections to the House of Commons”. I do not know whether he wants to discuss that—

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I said “at length”. I assure the noble Lord that I can discuss proportional representation at very great length, but I fear that might tire the Committee.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

I shall certainly follow the injunction not to speak at length, but I cannot resist responding to arguments about proportional representation. Oddly enough, I think I am the first the noble Lord so far to speak passionately in favour of first past the post, which shows once again how unrepresentative this House can be of British public opinion. On two specific occasions, it has been the subject that dare not speak its name. There are two issues that have not been mentioned, either by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace—and I do not blame him—or by the noble Baroness, Lady Jones. One is the small matter of an opinion poll, and I shall call it that to be a little contentious, held in 2011, which consisted of 19.2 million voters, who the noble Baroness, Lady Jones, has told us probably represent something that is dying out and departing. That opinion poll was in a referendum which the Liberal party made a condition of its membership of the coalition—and at any stage, if the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, wants to interrupt, of course he can. He was a Minister in that Government.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I thank the noble Lord for the invitation. He will remember that this was the first occasion on which Dominic Cummings managed very successfully to make the argument that it would be much too costly to change the electoral system and that the money would be much better spent on the National Health Service instead—an argument that he also used in the Brexit referendum. In neither case was the money spent on the NHS.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

Well, to bring Dominic Cummings into it sounds like a good argument to a point that I was not discussing and do not intend to discuss.

The referendum was a condition of the Liberal Democrats’ membership of the coalition Government; they said that there should be a referendum on the voting system in this country. Some 19.2 million votes were cast, 6 million in favour of the alternative vote system and 13 million for first past the post, as specifically referred to. There was a 2:1 majority for first past the post, and a widely held debate right across the country. I am pretty shocked that, having demanded that referendum and having rejected the result, which is not an unusual characteristic, the noble Lord wants, by means of an amendment to a Bill, to change the electoral system away from first past the post, not by another referendum—because referendums keep giving him the result that he does not want—but by an amendment to a Bill. I find that a very unsatisfactory way of proceeding, but I am afraid that it has become a behaviour pattern. I am sorry, because I agree with the Liberal Democrats on a lot of aspects of this Bill, but not on this. It is a very similar pattern to what was followed in relation to the European referendum, whereby they voted for the referendum, did not like the result but knew that it was too big a risk to put it back to the people—so, instead of having another referendum, they proposed to change it without one and back to the original situation.

I am afraid that this approach of no compromise with the electorate that seems to be being offered by one party to this discussion is really not a satisfactory way for democrats to proceed. Of course, people can change their mind; people might decide, at some future date, that they want to change the electoral system. But, again, I have noticed—and this is why I both enjoy but am frustrated by discussions about the voting system—that one thing that people who are in favour of changing from first past the post always manage to do, whenever you criticise them for anything that they are proposing, is to say, “Oh, that’s not the kind of proportional representation that I’m in favour of—it’s completely different.” In fact, of course, they will even argue, although it was more proportional, that the proposal in the 2011 referendum, which was for the alternative vote system, was not proper proportional representation. It is not, but it is much more proportional —and I am quite certain that they see the electoral systems for mayors, police commissioners and everything else just as a stepping-stone towards proportional representation.

I am the first noble Lord to mention the referendum. The other thing that proponents of proportional representation always avoid mentioning is the test bed that we had for quite a long time—thankfully, no longer —for elections to the European Parliament. They were done on the basis of proportional representation. I remind supporters of the system of the arguments that are tediously repeated about the great merits of proportional representation, the principal point of which is that it reaches parts of the electorate that are ignored at present. It is said that there are tens of thousands of Labour voters, say, in the south of England and tens of thousands of Conservative voters in the north of England who never have their voices represented, and that if you released all that potential by proportional representation, the public would be energised.

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[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, it has been a lengthy debate. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, that I have not presented any amendment. I am presenting to your Lordships’ House a Bill which has been passed by the elected House, and your Lordships are expressing opinions on it. It is certainly not the Government who have sought to Christmas-tree the Bill with a generalised debate on proportional representation. The actors in that are elsewhere than at the Dispatch Box.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, the amendment which was introduced in the Commons and is now Clause 11 was a Christmas-tree addition to the Bill by the Government.

[Lord True (Con)]

I will come to that, my Lords. If the Committee will be indulgent, I think it has heard quite a lot of debate on this subject and I will try to come to the point. As I see it, this very lengthy debate boiled down to two things. First, do we like first past the post? Regrettably, a lot of your Lordships who spoke do not seem to like it, although, like the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, having fought a few elections myself, it seems pretty simple and clear for electors to stick a cross on a piece of paper and get a result. The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, was not impressed by that, but the simplicity and clarity of first past the post has a lot to say for it. The second issue in the debate was: should we do this now, in this Bill and in these particular elections? I shall seek to address both of them.

It is irresistible to contemplate the thought of the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, poring over his opinion polls about how popular PR is. I remind him that, before the referendum in 2011—you can look it up on Wikipedia if you like—the opinion polls said how rapturously enthusiastic the majority of the British public were about PR. When the actual argument came along and it was put, they voted for first past the post by—I cannot remember the figure, but I think the noble Lord, Lord Grocott, said it was 68%. I would not advise the noble Lord, Lord Scriven, to put too much faith in his opinion polls, although it is a characteristic of that party.

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[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I am speaking to what is before the Committee at the moment. As far as the Scottish and Welsh elections are concerned, the noble Lord knows very well that there is devolution, which this Government respect.

I will respond to what the noble Lord said about the London Assembly. It involves rather more complex issues in terms of the Assembly’s potential make-up. We will be considering further how these principles could be applied to the London Assembly and perhaps promoting the use of first past the post, but we are open to representations on how that could be implemented. For the moment, the proposition is on these specific elections, against the background I have described: the Government committed to first past the post, the Elections Bill and the evidence of problems in 2021.

I turn to the broader amendments—which I must because they are before the Committee—from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and the noble Baroness, Lady Jones of Moulsecoomb. It is always the less popular parties which clamour for PR. They want to introduce a new clause abolishing the use of first past the post at parliamentary general elections held more than six months after the passage of the Bill. For the reasons I have already discussed, we cannot accept that. First past the post ensures a clear link between elected representatives and constituents in a manner that other voting systems do not. The noble Lord, Lord Murphy, was compelling on that point.

The new clause proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, is not clear even on what sort of electoral system he wants to introduce—that is the most bizarre thing about the amendment that he is asking your Lordships to agree with. He wants to get rid of the present system within two years, but he does not say what would happen if an election came along before that or in the period where there was uncertainty because a new system would require further primary legislation to enact it. There is a real risk, if we went down the road proposed by the noble Lord, that we might not have an established legal method as to how Members of the other place were elected. To be confronted with this question mark of an amendment when the Government are charged with being frivolous—I think the proponents of this amendment are frivolous. All we know from the noble Lord’s amendment is that he wants a system that would have had, over the past five parliamentary general elections, a mean average Gallagher proportionality index of less than 10—that will get them jumping around in the pubs in Saltaire and Moulsecoomb, I am sure.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

I am sure that the Minister knows that this is copied from the SNP amendment in the Commons. One may talk about umpteen different proportional systems—and no electoral system is perfect, of course—but there is a choice to be made, putting it simply, between the Irish and the Scottish and Welsh systems. I prefer the Irish, but I think it would be appropriate to have some consultation among parties before a decision was finally taken. The point that a number of us have been making throughout the Bill is that, on constitutional matters such as this, it would be appropriate to aim for some consensus among the parties, rather than have each party—as in our aggressive two-party system—changing the rules to favour itself.

[Lord True (Con)]

The noble Lord has completely failed to answer the core question. He has thought about this amendment and tabled it, it is here on the list and in it he says:

“The simple majority system must not be used for any Parliamentary general election after the end of the period of six months beginning on the day on which this Act is passed.”


Who knows when the end of the Session will be, but let us say that this Act is fortunate enough to get on to the statute book, that means that for any election in 2023 or 2024, we would not be allowed to use first past the post—if your Lordships agreed to the amendment that the Liberal Democrats have put before the Committee, supported by the Green group—but would have to flounder around to find some other system, which the noble Lord will not specify, which would have a mean average Gallagher proportionality index of less than 10.

I am accused—the Government are accused—of coming to this Dispatch Box arguing for first past the post, which people understand, while the people on the other side come forward with a kind of canard of nonsense, such as in the noble Lord’s amendment. We are also asked for citizens’ assemblies, but I can only repeat what the noble Lord, Lord Grocott said, with much greater eloquence than mine, that we did have a big citizens’ assembly of nearly 20 million people who decided this in 2011.

I am not convinced by the arguments that I have heard on proportional representation; I do not believe that this is the appropriate Bill in which to try to change our system from first past the post within six months, as is proposed. But, returning to the core of the question, I do believe that it is reasonable to have a simpler system than the system that proved so confusing and led to so many wasted votes in the London elections and that we should go for first past the post, as the Government have maintained very clearly. I ask the House to reject the amendments that have been tabled.

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Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

137: After Clause 11, insert the following new Clause—
“Voting from age 16 in parliamentary elections
(1) The Representation of the People Act 1983 is amended as follows.(2) In section 1(1)(d) (definition of voting age for parliamentary elections), for “18” substitute “16”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new Clause would lower the voting age to 16 in UK parliamentary elections.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, Amendments 137 and 138 are grouped with Amendment 143 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, who will undoubtedly want to speak to that amendment.

We have just had a long debate on voting systems because the Bill contains a clause that intends to change part of our voting system. The Bill also has a number of clauses that add somewhere between 1 million and 4 million extra voters to the electorate by extending the overseas electorate. I declare an interest as I have two sisters who have lived abroad for 50 years who would now be able to vote in British elections, not to mention a niece born in Britain, so I am conscious of the problems with that.

That means that the discussion as to whether or not the electorate might also be extended to include those between the ages of 16 and 18 is within scope of the Bill. As I mentioned in my earlier speech, it would have been appropriate for that to have been considered together with the question of whether to extend the electorate by increasing the opportunities for overseas voters to register. I do not intend to rehearse all the arguments for voting at 16. I say merely that I was converted to this by going round schools and learning about, first, the lack of citizenship education; secondly, the lack of engagement by young people in politics; and, thirdly, our failure to get young people to register.

The proportion of people aged 18 to 25 on the register is, in some areas, as low as 40%. That is an extremely poor failure within our electoral system. It is also very bad for our politics that we have an increasingly elderly electorate, which votes. Parties recognise this and therefore produce policies that appeal to older voters. Young people do not vote, which therefore means that the parties tend not to produce policies that they think are particularly important for younger voters. Again, I declare an interest, as I have twice led the manifesto process for my own party and I can remember, in 1996-97, people saying, “William, that’s not terribly important; we have to produce policies that appeal to people in their 40s, 50s and 60s, not those in their 20s and 30s, because those are the people who really care about this.”

The two amendments on which I am speaking are for parliamentary and local elections. I raise these as probing amendments. I suggest that the Government ought at least to be open to the idea of opening voting in local elections to young people aged 16, because it would involve them in discussing local democracy. It would therefore help to educate them about local democracy and that is very important for the future of our country.

I will make just one further remark. The last debate was remarkably English, with the exception of the contributions from the noble Lords, Lord Murphy and Lord Kilclooney. We have had proportional representation in the United Kingdom in two different forms in Northern Ireland and in Scotland and Wales. I am now talking about the problem of young people throughout the United Kingdom. I hope the Minister will at least address the problem of how we engage young people in politics. How do we get citizenship education back into our schools? How do we make sure the young do not switch off from politics, as there is substantial evidence that they have? I beg to move.

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I support Amendments 137 and 138, to which I have added my name, and oppose Amendment 143. Last November, the eminent professor of politics at Cambridge University, David Runciman, published an extended article arguing that children should be allowed to vote from the age of six. He cited a new book by John Wall which makes the case for no lower age limit on voting rights in the name of true democracy, and which addresses objections such as those based on competency. Wall suggests that parents and guardians should be able to cast proxy votes until such time as a child feels ready to vote on their own behalf. Runciman argued that

“if societies want to be truly democratic, they need to overcome their engrained biases and embrace the whole human community”.

I cite these examples not to make that argument but to show how modest and unradical the growing call for votes at 16 is. It is a step already taken by our sister Parliaments in Holyrood and Cardiff. Nevertheless, I acknowledge there is not a consensus in favour, as was clear from the evidence presented to the Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement, of which I was a member and which was chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts.

Indeed, children and young people themselves are not unanimously in support, as I discovered in research I undertook into young people’s transitions to citizenship some years ago. The main reason given against the idea in that research and elsewhere was that the young people did not feel they had sufficient knowledge and understanding of politics to vote wisely. To my mind, the very fact they think that indicates a greater thoughtfulness about voting than some adults show.

That underlines the importance, as has already been mentioned, of citizenship education. As we said in our Select Committee report,

“Citizenship education is a crucial piece of the puzzle for thinking about the age at which people can vote.”


We noted that

“The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child recommended that if the UK should choose to lower its voting age it should ensure it is supported by ‘active citizenship and human rights education’.”


Unfortunately, the committee found the state of citizenship education to be pretty woeful, and I do not have reason to believe that it has improved much, if at all. But that is not a reason for not extending the vote to 16 year-olds; rather, it is an argument for giving much higher priority to decent citizenship education, as recommended by the committee.

There are instrumental arguments in favour of extending the franchise to 16. With decent citizenship education, 16 and 17-year-olds could be much better prepared for voting than older voters. They could be more likely to vote and then to keep voting as they get older. If they had the vote and used it, politicians might pay more attention to their needs and concerns, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, has argued.

For me, the overwhelming argument is that so many in this age group are already acting as citizens and have been taking the lead on crucial issues such as the climate emergency. In the study I carried out, those who wanted a reduction in the voting age felt that without it they were not being listened to or respected, and that the vote would help them feel that they belonged and that they had a say as full and proper citizens

In the same vein, the Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement heard from the young people we met that the lack of the vote was “a sore point”. Even if votes at 16 are not young people’s top priority, they pointed out to us that

“the Make Your Mark campaign coordinated by the UK Youth Parliament included … votes at 16 one of their core campaigns”,

voted for by over 950,000 young people. What better way to recognise these young people as full citizens than to extend the vote to them?

It is because of the implications for citizenship that I oppose Amendment 143, as tying the vote to employment and income tax status would create two classes of citizenship. In doing so, it would be divisive and exclusionary, which is the very opposite of what citizenship should be about and what we want to achieve by extending the franchise. From a practical point of view, it would be subject to annual decisions about the level of the tax threshold so young people on low incomes could find their right to vote fluctuating like a yo-yo, which is not conducive to them turning out to vote.

In the Commons, two Oral Questions on votes at 16 were met with a one-word answer: “No.” I have no doubt these amendments will be rejected also, but I hope not in similar peremptory fashion. I hope that the Minister will first give serious consideration to the case made, which is gaining more and more support.

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[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

My Lords, I will try to be brief. The Labour Party has supported and continues to support lowering the voting age. I would just say to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that the last time we were in government and lowered the voting age, we lost the subsequent election. That was in 1970.

On civic education, in many of my contributions, I have mentioned the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and his committee’s report. It is excellent and worth rereading. He is absolutely right about the Government’s failure to respond properly to it. But citizenship education in schools and lowering the voting age are not mutually exclusive. Speaking from personal experience, I joined the Labour Party in 1970, partly because we had organised a mock election in my school. As a consequence of standing as a Labour candidate in that mock election, I went out and campaigned for Harold Wilson, even though I did not have the right to vote. I joined the Labour Party at the age of 15—noble Lords can now calculate how old I am.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

Too young for the Lords!

[Lord Collins of Highbury (Lab)]

Well, there you go. I am still below the average age—just. The important point is that they are not mutually exclusive. This is about how we encourage people to participate in democracy and, as the noble Lord said, participation is not simply about voting. We want people to properly engage in civic society. That includes other groups which campaign and organise, because that is what influences our politics. Young people are certainly doing that, which is why we are very strongly in favour of this.

Of course, we have the evidence. Scotland and Wales now have a lower voting age, but they are not the only places. The Isle of Man and Jersey have it, as do Guernsey, Brazil and Austria, and it applies to some elections in Germany, Malta and Norway. There is strong evidence of how it can encourage participation and build this in, because when people start voting at a young age, they continue to vote. That is a really important point.

Picking up the point that I think the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, made, the noble Baroness, Lady Davidson of Lundin Links, changed her mind through her experience in the referendum campaign. I read an article that she wrote for the Tory Reform Group as a consequence of that experience in 2016. She said:

“Those in favour of the status quo argue that while the referendum offered a clear, unambiguous choice, parliamentary elections present a more muddied, multi-layered decision which require a more mature electorate.


But having watched and debated in front of 16 and 17-year-olds throughout the referendum, I have found myself unable to agree. My position has changed. We deem 16-year-olds adult enough to join the army, to have sex, get married, leave home and work full-time. The evidence of the referendum suggests that, clearly, they are old enough to vote too.”


I agree with her. We should do this.

[Lord True (Con)]

My Lords, I fear I cannot accept these amendments, although, having been mildly disobliging on the previous group about those against first past the post, I will open with an area of agreement. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, my noble friend Lord Lexden and the party opposite that we must do more—as much as we can—to engage young people in civic education and understanding what it is to be a future citizen. We are also having other discussions on trying, we hope, to persuade more young people to vote. There is strong agreement there.

We cannot accept these amendments because the Government, having reflected on the matter, simply do not believe that a reduction to 16 is the correct course. My noble friend Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts made a very strong speech on this. There are many difficult questions, as the noble Baroness, Lady Chakrabarti, said, about what constitutes full adulthood, which society has to wrestle with. We think, in common with most countries in the world—although not, I acknowledge, the devolved Administrations in Scotland and Wales—that the current position is correct.

We made that very clear to the electorate; we were not trying to hide it, because it was and is a subject of discussion between the parties. We have been criticised for our manifesto not being clear, but it was absolutely clear on this point:

“We will maintain the voting age at 18—the age at which one gains full citizenship.”


That was very explicitly stated. You may not agree with that, but it is the position. I hope the Committee will respect that. Eighteen is widely recognised in the vast majority of democratic countries as the right age at which to enfranchise young people.

There are difficulties. For example, the very radical proposal by the Liberal Democrats to legalise cannabis was not for people below 18 because they were not mature before that age. In 2010, the party opposite raised the age for using sunbeds to 18. Other examples have been given on some more fundamental and difficult questions of peace and war. With respect to the arguments I have heard, the Government believe that the settled, present position is correct, in common with most other democratic countries.

My noble friend Lord Holmes of Richmond’s amendment seeks to lower the voting age to 16 and 17 year-olds by linking the franchise to taxation. I fear I must disappoint him; taxation has never been the basis of democratic representation in this country. For example, an American citizen of voting age who works and pays taxes in the United Kingdom does not have the right to vote in parliamentary elections simply by virtue of tax. However, a British citizen of voting age who pays no income tax, such as a student, rightly retains the right to vote, as do those earning less than the tax-free allowance. In council tax there is a class S exemption—I think it is called that; it was in my day—for households of 16 and 17 year-olds precisely so that they should not pay council tax. The mixing of taxation and voting rights raises difficult problems. It would also potentially disfranchise people who could, for a range of reasons, be unable to work or find work or who may be working but not earning enough to pay taxes.

With respect to those who have a different opinion, the Government have reflected on this. Engagement is important; I was very proud when I was leader of a local authority—I know many other local authorities do the same—of the UK Youth Parliament and youth engagement through schools. I have similar recollections to the noble Lord opposite. These things are important. Let us work together across parties to try to do that, but I cannot recommend that the House adopts this principle in the Bill. I forecast to the Committee that, if it were proposed, because it was a manifesto commitment by the Government to maintain the present position, it would not find favour in the other place. I therefore ask the noble Lord to withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, in withdrawing this amendment, I point out that, if we are saying that there is a problem—which the Minister has admitted, but has said that this is not the answer—then the question of how we manage to get more young people on the register, which we will come to on automatic voter registration, is important. The very near collapse of citizenship education in our state schools is an urgent matter, which we should all address on a cross-party basis. I look forward to the Minister returning to that. I hope he will take back to his colleagues in the Department for Education how important many of us feel this to be.

I merely remark to the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that the extensive coverage in this Bill of the extension of overseas voting is there because Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, Conservatives Abroad and the Conservative Party’s international office decided that this would be to the Conservatives’ advantage. Surveys in the mid-2000s suggested that 68% of those voting overseas were voting for the Conservative Party. I was suggesting earlier that a little bit of balance and cross-party agreement on how one extends the electorate might be desirable. Sadly, I do not think this Government are in the mood for that. That is one of the many things I regret about the way this Bill has been introduced and is being handled. I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 137 withdrawn.

Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

Relying on the services listed in these amendments would be costly and time-consuming. I am unaware of any single public service that, as part of its application procedures, captures all the data required to determine eligibility to register to vote: name, address, age, nationality and immigration status.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

The noble Baroness may be aware that there is an equivalent of a national register: Experian, which collects a great deal of data and is used by a lot of private and public authorities. If it can do that, why cannot the Government?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I do not know, but I will look into that with the team.

Automatic registration therefore risks not being truly automatic or adding ineligible people to the register. For example, under the EU voting and candidacy rights changes provided for in the Bill, very few EU citizens who arrived to live in the UK after 31 December 2020 will have the right to register to vote, but most will be issued with a national insurance number. Moreover, most national insurance numbers are issued before someone is 16, which is too young to be added to the register, even as an attainer, in England and Northern Ireland. Therefore, the Government have no plans to introduce automatic registration at this stage, and I request that this amendment be withdrawn.

The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, and a number of other noble Lords asked what we are doing to encourage registration. Since its introduction, the register to vote website has revolutionised the ability of electors to participate, with over 60 million applications to registers being submitted since 2014. In the last UK general election, a record 47 million people were registered. We continue to refine and adjust the way that the digital system works to improve its security.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, brought up accessibility. It is very pleasing to see that the register to vote service has the highest accessibility rating—AAA—under the web content accessibility guidelines. It is also the responsibility of the Electoral Commission to promote participation, and it runs an annual campaign to encourage eligible voters to register.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I speak to Amendment 150 and on some of the broader issues. I was quite worried, listening to the last debate and the Government’s answer. They now seem to be saying that they are not interested in broadening the number of people who vote, filling in the gaps in the register, or in much modernisation of the system, because they are quite happy with the inconsistencies that we have.

I think that the United States and the United Kingdom are the two democracies with the largest number of people eligible to vote who are not on the electoral register in each state or local authority. That is a scandal. It suggests that some of those behind this Bill are concerned with voter suppression, or at least with discouraging people from voting who they do not think may vote Conservative. That should worry us all. I fear that we are heading towards a bad-tempered Report, because the Government will railroad this through without any consultation or discussion.

On these proposals, I strongly agree with the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, that modernisation and digitisation is where we should be going. When in government, I was concerned with the digitisation of Whitehall, and I agreed very strongly with Francis Maude, now the noble Lord, Lord Maude, on the efforts which he was making to push digitisation through a rather reluctant Whitehall and a group of largely uninterested Ministers. I much regret that, since 2015, the Government appear to have lost momentum on all that. There are ways of linking government databases without sharing all the information that could make life much easier for citizens on whom the Government hold a fair amount of information which is relevant to them.

I was deeply affected by what happened with the Windrush scheme, when all those people were told that they had no right to be in Britain, or that they had not been living in Britain for the last 20, 30 or 40 years. There was information in various Whitehall departments demonstrating that they had been here, but the Home Office did not look for it. In terms of modernising the electoral register, in terms of managing the vote and in terms of managing another couple of million applicants for overseas voting, who need to be checked properly when they come on to the register and need to have the chance to vote within a tight time scale, digitisation is clearly part of the answer.

The amendment tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, and my amendment, are saying that the Government should be looking at this. Other Governments are way ahead of us in this. Everything that the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, said in Committee on a previous day about how astonishingly old fashioned our electoral process is, compared with many other democratic states, is absolutely on target. I hope that the Minister might at least give us a very slight indication that the Government might be just a little interested in this, even though it would be very dangerous for them to encourage more people to vote.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Holmes, for his introduction to his amendment. I thought what he said about the opportunities that are available for new technologies to drive inclusion in our electoral process is really important if we are looking to the future. We completely support his aim to encourage the Government to invest much more in technologies in this area. As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said, let us catch up with many other countries which are looking to do this and looking to invest more in this in the future.

One thing we do know is that electronic voting machines are often more accessible for disabled voters. I give the example of the United States, where visually impaired voters can use an audio interface while those with paralysed limbs can select candidates from a screen using head movements. There are all sorts of different innovations that we should be looking to investigate and see how we can bring them into our own system.

I turn to my amendment. The Government’s 2019 manifesto—I go back to their manifesto—included a commitment to

“make it easier for British expats to vote in Parliamentary elections”.

I also say, as part of that, they should be looking at the Electoral Commission’s research after the elections since 2015, which has consistently found that overseas voters have experienced difficulties in voting from outside the UK. This is mainly because many did not have enough time to receive and return their postal vote before the close of the poll.

I am aware that the Government are looking at ways to improve that, but it strikes me that as the Electoral Commission also recommends that the Government explore new approaches to improve access to voting and draws on evidence from other countries, there is an opportunity here, which is why I tabled the amendment. I hope that this will encourage the Government to consider more research into digital technologies and look at what is happening in other countries in order to drive inclusion and enable a quicker and more efficient system for those voters who live outside the UK.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, overseas voting extension is an important part of this Bill, one of the many bits that is substantially changing the pattern of voting. It could add a couple of million extra voters and deserves better than the treatment it is getting at present. Some of us may wish to discuss whether we will oppose Clause 12 standing part on Report just to make sure we have a proper discussion. I have been struck, in everything I have read and discussed with Ministers and officials, by the fact that this has not been thought through and has been poorly prepared. If I were unduly suspicious, I would say that Ministers are more interested in getting donations from people who will then come on to the register than they are in really getting proper overseas representation.

We know where this comes from: the campaign that Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, when he was head of the Conservative Party’s international office, took to encourage overseas voters, particularly retired British expatriates in Spain and France, to register. Academic research that I found, which the Minister, when I spoke to him, appeared to be unaware of, showed that the distribution of votes—I do not know whether the Minister is listening to me; he may not be interested—in constituencies had been lopsided from the start. It was always concentrated in London and the south-east. Now, it continues to be very lopsided. The Minister said that he was unaware of the distribution of votes by constituency. I found it out quite easily, through the Office for National Statistics. I am sorry it was not available to him. It ranges from over 2,000 in several north London constituencies, to 25 or so in various Welsh constituencies. If we double that, the maldistribution of overseas voters in different constituencies will entirely undo the redrawing of the boundaries to make them more accurate, which is just going through.

The academic research in the mid-1990s suggested that two-thirds of overseas voters in 1992 had voted Conservative, but only in small numbers. After the introduction of individual electoral registration allowed Conservatives abroad to mount a registration drive on individual registration from abroad, numbers rose from 33,000 in 2010 to 106,000 in 2015. The Conservative Party International Office encouraged targeted donations from abroad to marginal seats in the 2015 general election, showing that donations were a very important part of this. After the referendum, the numbers registered surged to over 300,000, which perhaps suggests that the Conservative assumption that they are all going to vote Conservative may have been a little shakier than they had intended.

There are many weaknesses with the proposals as they currently stand. First, in a Bill that tightens identity checks for domestic voters, the identity checks for overseas voters are extremely weak. Furthermore, the Government do not know who the overseas citizens are, how many of them there are or where they live. I put down a series of Written Questions six months ago, and the answers I got to most of these was “We do not have the figures”. I asked the Foreign Office what information it had, and it said that it plays no role in the registration of overseas voters and it does not expect to play any role in assisting them to vote. If the Minister had looked at comparisons of the way in which other Governments handle overseas voting, he would have noted that embassies and high commissions play a very active role in this. The noble Lord, Lord Hayward, reminded me that the largest polling station in Australia is at the other end of the Strand in London. The British Government apparently do not want to get involved in that, and it would be very complicated.

The problem we were discussing about digitisation and how to get the balance out and then get them back in a short campaign, remains and is already a grievance with overseas voters.

The absence of preparation, therefore, is absolutely clear. The problem of how you identify fraud is very considerable if the Government have such little information on where citizens are and who they might be. The identification checks are very weak, and the powers given to the Secretary of State to take whatever measures he thinks appropriate to provide information campaigns suggest that a particular Secretary of State might decide that Portugal, Spain, Italy or France are where he wants to concentrate their efforts, rather than on those who retired to Jamaica or southern Nigeria or Pakistan.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

Or Belgium.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

Or Belgium: exactly. There are many weaknesses in this. We put down another amendment, which comes in the next group, suggesting that the appropriate answer is overseas constituencies. The idea that people should vote in constituencies in which they have not lived for 50 years is absolutely absurd. My conversation with my local ERO suggested that trying to check on whether they actually have lived there or not might prove an impossible task.

This is a very shaky part of the Bill. My conversation with the Minister and officials suggests that they have not thought this through; it seems the Minister is not interested in thinking it through any further. I suspect, therefore, that it is the donations that they are really interested in, and this leaves me very discontented with this part of the Bill.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I want to ask some technical questions, without necessarily knowing what the correct answer is myself. I hope that the Minister, if he is not able to answer today, would be prepared to write to provide a further explanation.

I start by referring to some of the text of Clause 12. On page 14, line 13, under the new section “Extension of parliamentary franchise”, there are various conditions that a person has to satisfy. They have to be,

“not subject to any legal incapacity to vote (age apart)”

et cetera. I take it—perhaps the Minister can consult the Box to get an answer to this—that that is to make sure that nobody overseas registers who is under age. I assume that is the meaning of that. If I am wrong about that, then there might be a whole set of questions arising, but that seems to be the common-sense explanation for those two words in brackets.

I want to move on to the next page of the same clause. New Section 1B is headed,

“British citizens overseas: entitlement to be registered”.

The proposed new section sets out that, essentially, there are two ways in which one can qualify to be registered. The first is as a former elector in a United Kingdom constituency. There will be discussions about that, I am sure, but the second is what I want to focus on at the moment. The second condition is that you were a former resident in a UK constituency. We already know that there is quite a large number of people who are not registered, because we discussed earlier on that the Electoral Commission’s estimate is that in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, there are somewhere between 8.6 million and 9.8 million people who are currently resident but not on the electoral roll. There is, therefore, quite a large pool of people who, presumably in approximately equal proportion, will be overseas now. There is no special preference for people who have registered being the people who have migrated.

So my question is: does this legislation grant voting rights to someone who left the UK with their parents as a baby and moved to Switzerland, say, to claim their vote alongside their parents, once they reach the age of 18 overseas? If it does, I note that there does not seem to be any requirement for that baby to have been born in the United Kingdom; they need to establish only that they were resident here. As far as I can tell, there is no specified minimum period for that residence.

I will take a case that is not entirely hypothetical. Parents who came to the United Kingdom, having been working in Ghana, with a baby who was born in England, move to Switzerland six months later. It seems that nothing is set out in the legislation to prevent that baby from claiming their vote on reaching 18 while still living overseas. I want to check that I have not misunderstood what the legislation is saying there and that, by virtue of that brief period of residence, they would be eligible to vote and—I suppose I could add—to make a donation. If that is true, I know of two British nationals now in their 50s who will be very happy to take up the offer.

But I want to know whether that really is the extension to the franchise that the Government want or whether I have actually missed something and, in some other part of the RPA—or Schedule 9 or goodness knows where else—there is something that would prevent that absurd outcome.

--- Later in debate ---

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

149: After Clause 12, insert the following new Clause—
“Creation of overseas constituencies
(1) Within six months of the passing of this Act, and prior to section 12 coming into force, the Secretary of State must lay a report before Parliament on proposals for overseas constituencies.(2) A report under subsection (1) must consider proposals on—(a) the most suitable deployment of overseas constituencies;(b) the ratio of nationals per MP;(c) the impact on existing UK constituencies;(d) the local administration of ballots;(e) the appointment of returning officers; and(f) the form of proportional representation best suited to electing Members of Parliament to represent overseas constituencies.(3) In preparing a report under subsection (1) the Secretary of State must consult—(a) the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee of the House of Commons;(b) the Constitution Committee of the House of Lords;(c) the appropriate committees of the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru and the Northern Ireland Assembly;(d) the Electoral Commission;(e) the Association of Electoral Administrators; and(f) any other person they consider appropriate.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment requires the Secretary of State to report on the creation of overseas constituencies.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, if the Government were in a mood to try to build any sort of consensus on the Bill, which they clearly are not, I would hope that they would be willing to consider accepting some part of this amendment; it does not say that we should necessarily create overseas constituencies but that we should at least consider them.

If I may anticipate the Minister’s comment that this would be an enormous innovation, I point out that the extension of the franchise to people who have lived abroad all their life is itself an enormous innovation. If I were to follow the line that he has argued on former subjects—that we should be looking at the practice of other countries—overseas constituencies are a practice in a number of democratic countries for very obvious reasons. If you are looking after your overseas voters, they have lost their links with their local constituencies, they are much more distant than they were and they have a different set of interests and it is therefore perhaps appropriate for overseas constituencies to be created.

It may be that we have not yet thought this through. I suspect that the Government have not thought about it at all because they do not have the numbers or any of the practice or documentation that the French, for example, have about their overseas citizens with support from their embassies, consulates and others. Nor have we looked into what we do about dual and triple nationals, an increasingly large and difficult category, as we have discovered in our relations with Iran and China in recent years, which takes us into the question of how we might redefine British citizenship as such in a much more global world. The question of how parties fund keeping in touch with overseas voters is the most sensitive one because we know that one of the underlying structural biases in our electoral system is that one party has two-thirds of the funds available for political parties and the others have a great deal less, so we know which party will be able to keep in touch with the overseas voters it wants and the others will not be able to do so.

Having said that, I hope the Minister will recognise that there is a case for looking at this. The current proposals will concentrate overseas voters, by and large, in London, Surrey and other home county constituencies. We do not know the implications of that. A Conservative Peer of my acquaintance told me that the one overseas constituency in France which consistently votes left is the one that includes London; he suspects that there might be some similar interesting differences in where people are living as opposed to where they come from, but at least we ought to be looking at that as part of the package. I therefore ask the Government not to close their mind to this and not to demonstrate that getting this done without thinking through the implications is all they are really concerned with. As part of approaching this major extension of the British franchise, they should look at this, as other countries have done. I beg to move.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I have very little to say other than that it is a very interesting suggestion and I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for bringing it forward and giving us food for thought. I had no idea that France had overseas constituencies until he tabled his amendment and I looked into it. It is an interesting suggestion.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I fear that at this late hour, I will disappoint the noble Lord. This amendment would require the Government to prepare a report on proposals for the creation of overseas constituencies. The Bill will allow overseas electors to continue to vote in constituencies to which they have a significant and demonstrable connection. This constituency link has always been and continues to be a cornerstone of our democracy. Creating overseas constituencies is therefore not something the Government are considering. To commission a report on the topic is unnecessary. Overseas electors will continue to register in the constituencies to which they have a significant and demonstrable connection.

As the amendment acknowledges, there are extensive and complex bureaucratic challenges to implementing overseas constituencies. There would, for example, be ongoing complexities regarding how constituency boundaries and their electorate would be determined and maintained with a constituency stretching across multiple countries and being affected by fluctuating migration. Furthermore, electoral administration for overseas constituencies would have to be done in a very different way from the current process, whereby it is undertaken by local authorities. We would need to address matters such as: who would be responsible for maintaining the register of electors and administering the polls for an overseas constituency. Overseas constituencies would not fit in with the existing arrangements for organising constituencies and delivering elections, and establishing them would require the consideration of a range of complex issues. I hope the noble Lord will feel able to reconsider this suggestion and withdraw his amendment.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, that is not at all surprising as an answer. I point out that the extensive and bureaucratic challenges to which the Minister refers are involved in extending the vote to overseas voters in the first place. Those challenges will be met by local registration officers in Britain, but if we are to have a different relationship with our 5 million to 7 million citizens abroad, we need to look at it in a rather more rounded way and consider how we manage it. It is not a question of just extending the vote and leaving it like that.

After all, we have got into some difficulty in recent years with the question of how we relate to overseas citizens, particularly our dual nationals when they are imprisoned in the other countries of their nationality—and these are not particularly friendly countries. That needs to be thought about.

What I hear from the Government throughout the Bill is that they are not interested in anything except their current agenda. They are not interested in thinking through the implications of some of their proposals. I have talked to Canadian Senators about how they cope with these voters. I am aware of the French system; I am surprised that the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, was not. The Britain, Ireland and Nordic constituency is one of its five overseas constituencies. Many people in London are French and therefore vote in French elections. In the last presidential election campaign, Macron came to address a large meeting in London as part of his campaign. If we were to move in that direction, of course British politicians would need to think about which other countries they would go to campaign in. There are some large implications of this which, if I may say so, the Government appear simply not to have thought through as they push this through.

That is the problem with an awful lot of this Bill. The noble Lord, Lord True, will be responsible for having assisted and enabled a thoroughly badly thought-through Bill to become law. That will be on his conscience and his responsibility. I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment 149 withdrawn.

Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 28th March 2022 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

152: After Clause 13, insert the following new Clause—
“Voting by EU nationals
In section 1(1) (entitlement to vote in parliamentary elections) of the Representation of the People Act 1983, for paragraph (c) substitute—“(c) is a Commonwealth citizen, a citizen of the Republic of Ireland or a relevant citizen of the Union; and”.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new Clause would allow EU citizens to vote in UK parliamentary elections.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I regret that the noble Lord, Lord True, is unable to be with us. I gather he is down with Covid, and I send him sympathies. I hope I have not caught it from him—we shall press on. This creates some further difficulties in completing the Bill, on which I hope I may briefly remark. We need to have some discussions between Committee and Report. I hope there will be some—time is short and they need to be fixed up very quickly. As many of us have remarked, the state of the Bill is unsatisfactory. We know that the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee said that the Bill was unfit for purpose as presented to the Lords. We have explored many areas already in Committee, such as overseas voting, which we debated late at night in our previous sitting, when it was quite clear that the Government did not have answers to a number of our questions. How that will be implemented if the Bill is passed is, to put it mildly, extremely unclear and probably very messy.

We all regret the missed opportunity of this Bill. It is clear that there will have to be another elections Bill within the next two to three years to achieve what the Law Commission proposed, which is a simplification and rationalisation of our electoral law. This Bill is not that.

This group of amendments deals with the tangle of voting rights left by imperial history and various other things, which the Government appear not to be concerned to rationalise. We have rights for Commonwealth citizens. We have had rights for EU citizens. We have no rights for long-term residents from the United States, which is extraordinary given the Conservative Party’s long feeling that we were closer to the United States than any other country.

My Amendment 152 is a probing one to spark a discussion on how we might think about rationalising the system. EU citizens resident in this country for a very long time—there are 100,000 French citizens in the London area alone, for example—have had the right to vote in British elections. Some would say that they should no longer have the right to vote in British parliamentary elections, but the case for the right to vote in British local elections for those who are resident here, pay council tax and contribute to other British taxes seems to me strong. As far as I am aware, the Government have no particular clear ideas on any of this.

Amendment 155 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, takes us to a recommendation of a number of reports that preceded the Bill: that we should move towards a residency requirement. That seems a rational suggestion. It has a clear principle, unlike the present situation. A residency requirement, at least for voting rights in local elections, would be a very sensible way forward. I am very sorry that it is not in the Bill as drafted.

The rationale for extending rights to overseas voters does not seem to go along with a refusal to recognise that the argument for extending the rights of residents to local voting ought to be considered in the same context, but, sadly, the Bill leaves that as tangled as before. Part of the problem is that the concept of UK citizenship is also a tangle of historical legacies and anomalies.

I find it odd that the Government are happy with this. Do they not consider that a wider reform with a clearer rationale for the changes proposed is now needed? Why is it not in the Bill? The passage of this Bill in its current form will require a successor Bill as soon as possible by this Government or their successor. I beg to move.

[Lord Desai (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I speak on this amendment because, when I arrived here in 1965, I had an Indian passport and I was surprised when, during the 1966 election, someone said to me, “Have you voted yet?” I said that I did not know I had voting rights in this country. He said, “Get on with it and get yourself registered.” This explained to me that, in the UK, we were subjects, not citizens. It was as subjects of the monarch that we qualified. Since the monarch also ruled over the Empire, all subjects of the Empire were equally qualified to vote in the election.

As far as I remember, the notion of citizenship only came with our membership of the European Union. We began to talk of ourselves as citizens, and we had differently coloured passports and things like that. However, the muddle that the noble Lord referred to in moving his amendment is that we are not clear as to what entitles us to vote. Is it our status as subjects of an empire? Is it our status as local taxpayers, as used to be the case before the universal franchise came in? Is it residency? If there is ever another, better version of this Bill, perhaps the first part of it should clarify the status of an individual under which he or she is qualified to be a voter. Until the muddle is clarified, we will have to proceed with a compromised mish-mash of rights.

--- Later in debate ---

[Earl Howe]

The noble Baroness, Lady Deech, is, of course, quite correct and we will be looking at the question of voting rights for noble Lords in a subsequent group of amendments.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a very useful debate, which has yet again exposed how unco-ordinated and ill thought through this Bill is. I strongly agree with what the Minister said: local elections are different from national elections. Indeed, in the late-night debate we had last week on overseas voting, it was pointed out that overseas electors are allowed to vote in our national elections but not in our local elections. If there is a good, rational argument for that, then there is an equally strong argument why long-term residents in Britain should be allowed to vote in local elections but not in national elections. If one were to think these things through, and clearly the Government have not, we would be moving in that sort of direction.

Similarly, if we had automatic voter registration, the complexities of residents and non-residents would be clearer. Incidentally, the logic that says overseas electors are not allowed to vote in local elections because they no longer have any connection with the local area goes completely against the logic that they should be allocated to constituencies, which they have lost touch with over the decades since they were in Britain. That is why I put down the amendment on the creation of overseas constituencies, but that has not been thought through either.

We all understand, as someone said to me at the weekend, that the Bill is driven by staff in No. 10 who are above all concerned with increasing the chances that the Conservatives win the next election. One of the strongest arguments for prioritising overseas voter registration over other categories is that they are thought to be more likely to vote Conservative.

[Earl Howe (Con)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for allowing me to intervene. As I understood it, it was official Liberal Democrat party policy to scrap the 15-year rule that has existed up to now on overseas voters. Can he confirm that that is the case, because that is what the Bill does.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

Yes, and to create overseas constituencies. I am looking at the noble Lord, Lord Altrincham, who was deeply shocked to be told by the noble Lord, Lord True, in a meeting a few weeks ago when he recommended the creation of overseas constituencies on the French model that that was Liberal Democrat policy. I hope he has now recovered from the shock.

There are tremendous problems with the Bill and the failure to connect all these dimensions. We will come in the sixth group to one of the other reasons why the Conservatives want to push ahead with extending the rights to overseas voting without thinking through the other dimensions of it, which the Liberal Democrats have thought through—the expectation that, once overseas voters are on register, they will be able to increase the systemic advantages—

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, for talking about people thinking through the consequences of legislation, and of amendments. I remain puzzled by the Liberal Democrat policy that these 2.5 million additional people, who have never lived in this country, other than maybe for a very short time when they were very young, and who do not pay taxes into or own property in this country—not that that should be a qualification to vote, of course—must now be given the right to vote, should they choose to do so, in British general elections. There are lots of ramifications that the noble Lord has not thought through.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

There are lots of ramifications that we have discussed extensively. I am happy to discuss them with the noble Lord off the Floor. What I am objecting to is dashing ahead with this without the creation of special constituencies and a number of other things that would begin to match the demand for them to come in.

The noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, might be disappointed to hear me say that we do not disagree on very much. I strongly agree with his emphasis on citizenship. The badge of a liberal democracy is active citizenship. One of the things that most concerns me about the drift of politics and legislation in this country is that we are heading towards a much more passive model of citizenship and a much more populist model of democracy. That is another thing to which, in broader terms, we must at some point return.

For the moment, having recognised that the Government have not worked out what they want on all this, and that they have inherited a tangle of historical rights to vote and denials of the right to vote, I am happy to withdraw my amendment. I hope this might just possibly be one of the issues we will discuss between Committee and Report.

Amendment 152 withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Green of Deddington (CB)]

A lot has changed in 14 years, but the thrust of what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, said is absolutely right. We now have a system that has developed somewhat in defining what a UK citizen is—I accept that—but it is not too difficult, is quite well known and has been discussed recently. I do not think that undermines his recommendation or the logic of saying that the clear thing, if you want to vote in this country, is to become a citizen, and you know how to do that.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I have great sympathy with the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Green of Deddington; I am sorry he looks so surprised. We need to sort out what we mean by UK citizenship. I cannot now remember which election it was when I was canvassing in Southwark and I came to a block that had a large number of Congolese-born people and a large number of Tanzanian-born people. The latter had the right to vote; the former did not, although I deeply suspected that some of them had got themselves on the register, somehow or other, because the local people were not quite sure who was what. This is at least as much a legacy of empire and our great-grandparents’ day as the sacking and pencils in polling stations, which the noble Baroness, Lady Noakes, was talking about. Both need to be modernised and it is high time we did so.

I ask the Minister whether he can tell us when Mozambique joined the Commonwealth and whether that meant that all Mozambiquans in Britain immediately gained the right to vote. I think I am right in saying that Rwanda joined the Commonwealth and that must have given them the vote, as well. The noble Lord, Lord Howell, if he were in his place, would remind us that he has campaigned for Algeria to become a member of the Commonwealth. The hypothetical question of how many voters we would be adding each time a new country became a member of the Commonwealth is interesting.

Of course, we should be sorting out the categories of our voting. We have been saying that all afternoon. The noble Lord, Lord Green, is entirely right on this and I hope that the Government take some notice, but I suspect that they will not act on this unfortunately illogical and messy Bill.

[Lord Horam (Con)]

I declare an interest as a former electoral commissioner. First, I agree with the remarks made on the previous amendment by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, that this Bill should have included the findings of the Law Commission, which have cleared up a lot of the complexity of language involved in legislation. It sometimes goes back to the Victorian times and is really a wholesale mess, frankly. I was glad that the Law Commission came to such clear conclusions.

Of course, the noble Lord will appreciate that the Law Commission by itself cannot alter anything and does not alter the law as it stands. None the less, I agree with him that it is a missed opportunity that we have an Elections Bill of this kind but are not able to take into account the views of the Law Commission. When I was on the Electoral Commission, it would have wanted the Law Commission’s findings to be taken into account as soon as practically possible, as it certainly would now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I will briefly intervene, having heard the noble Lord, Lord Mann. It is important to understand that, as far as Clause 39 goes, the amendment talks about making sure there is some way of identifying the message you have. Of course, if it says “Vote for Mann” it might be a reasonable presumption that it had been sponsored by somebody supporting the candidacy of Mr Mann, as it would be. But the evil, if I can put it that way, of much social media advertising is that it is not clear what it is doing. You have negative campaigning as well as positive campaigning. It is not necessarily done in a way that makes it obvious that what you are reading is not a news item or a fashion page—to pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Mann—but it nevertheless conveys an important message to a particular category of reader. So I ask the Minister to address the substance of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones’s Amendment 180A.

“Reasonably practicable” has already been completely circumvented in Scotland, so we know it does not work there. It is inconceivable that whatever lessons were learned by campaigners in Scotland will not immediately transfer to campaigns across the United Kingdom. It is a good challenge for the Minister to explain what is wrong with “possible” and maybe, behind that, to say whether the Government have decided not to implement the clear advice of the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the Electoral Commission, both of which, I respectfully suggest, might be offering advice that is slightly more researched than that of the noble Lord, Lord Mann.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones for the amendments he has brought forward with a great deal more expertise about this new dimension of campaigning than I have. I first learned about this new dimension of campaigning when I looked into post-Soviet Russian politics and discovered the new term “political technologies”, used by campaigners working for Putin to mould public opinion and to try to interfere in other countries, using the newly available digital media to help their efforts.

Of course, this also costs money. As we have seen in the United States, the use of digital media, data mining and negative campaigning—as has already been mentioned —is one way in which, unfortunately, American politics is being debased. We do not want that to happen in Britain.

Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Monday 28th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, there are quite a number of amendments in this group, of which Amendment 197 is mine. I want to pay attention to amendments specifically looking at foreign interference in our elections and some of the consequences of the provisions to extend the overseas elector franchise. Under the previous group of amendments tabled in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Clement-Jones, we discussed foreign interference, but looked specifically at digital materials, whereas this is wider.

By way of introduction, I say that voters deserve to know that elections in the UK are free and fair, and that laws are in place to safeguard them from unlawful influence. The Bill is an opportunity to make that tighter and better. The Electoral Commission recommended introducing new duties on parties, based on existing money laundering regulations, to enhance the due diligence and risk assessment of donations. The reasons behind this are to protect parties further and to build confidence among voters that sources of party funding are thoroughly scrutinised.

Unfortunately, we do not believe that the Bill takes this into account or does enough, as the Electoral Commission recommends. We need an effective regulatory and enforcement regime that ensures that foreign and dark money cannot enter our political system through donations to political parties. We believe there is the risk not only of money coming into the system that should not be there but of losing the level playing field that we have always striven to achieve in our election law. It is disappointing that the Bill so far does not address these problems. Our amendments and those of other noble Lords aim to address this.

As it stands, the Bill creates a paradox, because it opens the floodgates for a potentially large influx of foreign-based money into our democracy while making it harder for civil society organisations, charities and trade unions to have their say—as we heard during the debates on previous days on Clauses 24, 25 and 27—despite the massive contribution they make to British life. We have tabled amendments that would protect our democracy from this foreign money that is already impacting our politics. We believe that this Bill threatens to make the situation much worse.

Concerns about how our democracy is being affected by malign foreign influences have been highlighted in the Russia report and were mentioned in the previous debate. I am sure we will hear more about this from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, when he speaks to his amendment on this specifically, so I will not go into any more details about the Russia report.

Why are we concerned that the Bill will allow even more foreign interference in our democracy? The system created by the Bill is more vulnerable to overseas interference. It allows a person to call up any and every local authority to say that they were resident in the area 30 or 40 years ago and provide what we think is fairly flimsy proof; I am sure that it will not be a photographic identification, as would be the case for other electors. Having done that, they would then be able to donate enormous sums of money, if they wished. I am sure that the Minister will say that that is not the intention but, if he accepts our amendments, he can be sure that the possibility of this happening is strictly safeguarded.

We have a number of amendments. Amendment 197 specifically looks at whether a person making a donation for political purposes is a “permissible donor”—if not, that is then rejected. My noble friend Lady Smith of Basildon has an amendment that would require donors to be based in the UK, and one that would prevent overseas electors from donating. My noble friend Lord Collins has an amendment about the Secretary of State publishing

“draft legislation to regulate expenditure deriving from donations by non-UK nationals.”

We also support other amendments in this group that have been tabled to provide better security against overseas donations. If the Minister has understood our genuine concerns and intends to close this loophole that will weaken our democracy, he can choose from plenty of amendments that will greatly improve the Bill. We believe that this is a serious matter and that these amendments bring proportionate safeguards.

However, if the Government do not accept these amendments or commit to introducing their own in a similar vein, it will look as if the real motivation behind these changes to overseas voting is to create a loophole in donation law that would allow donors to bankroll Conservative Party campaigns from their offshore tax havens. What other justification is there for changing the law in this way, without closing this loophole?

Let us look at some of the evidence. Research from the Times shows that, through existing methods, the Conservative Party was able to accept about £1 million from UK citizens living in tax havens ahead of the 2017 general election. The Bill takes away the barriers that kept this at just £1 million. With the situation in Ukraine, it is more important than ever to end the flow of dirty Russian money flooding into our country—and that must include political donations, to block the threat of foreign interference in our politics.

We appreciate that it is impossible for someone with only Russian nationality, however rich they are, to donate legally to a UK political party. But what has undoubtedly happened is that a series of people with dual UK-Russian nationality or with significant business links with Russia have donated heavily to the Conservative Party in recent years. Questions about Russian donors that warrant further investigation have been raised in the media during the current Prime Minister’s tenure. For example, Lubov Chernukhin has given the Conservative Party over £2 million, £1.9 million of which was given after her husband, Vladimir, received money from Suleiman Kerimov, a man who was later sanctioned by the United States Treasury, not only for being a Russian government official: he was arrested in France for smuggling in hundreds of millions of euros in suitcases.

Then there is Mr Temerko, who has donated £1.2 million to the Conservative Party. The problem is that he used to operate at the very top of the Russian arms industry, with connections high up in the Kremlin. He works with Mr Fedotov, who is a key shareholder in Aquind Ltd, which the Guardian reports has donated £700,000 to the Conservative Party, along with another firm. This is unfortunately the same Mr Fedotov who, according to the Pandora papers, has revealed that his fortune was made through an offshore financial structure in the mid-2000s, at about the time that he was allegedly siphoning funds from the Russian state pipeline company, Transneft.

Another big Tory donor in the Johnson era is the businessman Mohamed Amersi, who has given £258,000 over the period. He advised on a lucrative telecom deal in Russia in 2005, with a company that a Swiss tribunal subsequently found to be controlled by an associate of Russian President Vladimir Putin. We consider this extremely concerning. One reason for this is that the Sunday Times recently reported that high-value Conservative donors were invited to participate in an “advisory” group, during which they were allowed to bend the ear of the Prime Minister, senior Ministers and officials.

Members of the public have a pretty low opinion of politicians much of the time. Reports of outside influence that threatens to undermine our democracy serve only to further drive down trust. The Bill provides an opportunity to increase trust in our political system, but, unless this loophole is closed and political donations are cleaned up and given proper scrutiny, trust will continue to fall. If we are to open up our system by allowing far more overseas electors to vote, we must at the same time ban them from making donations to individual politicians and parties. That is the only way to ensure that our system does not receive unwarranted donations and influence from outside. I beg to move.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, my name is on several of the amendments in this group, and I will therefore speak to some of them.

Amendment 197 would tighten the rules on permissible donors and incorporated associations. Amendments 198 and 199 would limit permissible donations to companies and individuals resident in the UK, as would Amendments 204, 212D and 212E. Amendments 200 and 212G, the longest in this group, offer different language on the need for much more careful scrutiny of donations. Amendments 212A, 212B and 212DA, with the reference to the CSPL, would put caps on donations. The Minister will have noticed that, among other things, we are concerned that people who do not live in the United Kingdom should not be allowed to donate to political parties, even if they are on the electoral register.

In a facetious moment, I wondered whether I might table a separate amendment banning British citizens who live in Monaco or the Channel Islands from donating to political parties. Since the major motive of British citizens moving to those places is to avoid tax, that would be a way of saying that we do not want people who are deliberately avoiding paying tax in Britain to be funding political parties here, which we know happens. Some people believe that the main factor in extending overseas voting in the slipshod way it is being done is to make it easier for tax exiles to make major donations to the Conservative Party. “Perish the thought”, the Minister may say—but not everyone in the Conservative Party is as honest as he is.

I will talk mainly about Amendment 200, which some noble Lords may have noticed makes a reference to the ISC report on Russia. I remind the Minister that the Intelligence and Security Committee specifically recommended that the evidence it had collected on foreign interference in British politics should be published as fully as possible, and that the Government have said that they see no need to do so because, in their opinion, foreign interference has not been successful. That seems to be a mistake, and I hope that the Government will come to their senses and publish that evidence. So long as it remains unpublished, it will look as though the Government have something embarrassing that they are trying to hide.

The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman, mentioned a number of major donors. One has to say in passing that it is astounding that we are now six years after the 2016 referendum and we still do not know where the largest single donation to the Brexit campaign came from. I was told by a senior figure in the City that everyone in the City knew exactly where it came from and that it had come from a foreign state. I do not know that—but we ought to be informed and we ought to have had some ability to discover where that £8 million came from.

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Simply put, if you think as I do—let us leave all the specific allegations about specific donors at specific times—there is surely no argument but that these two issues of ability to vote and ability to donate are closely related issues that, in their different ways, can distort the outcome of a general election. I certainly, for one, think that something needs to be done about it.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, before the noble Lord sits down, I remind him of the third link in this, which is that campaigning for overseas voters is going to be very expensive and the advantage will go to the party that has the most money, in terms of contacting them and soliciting their vote. So, in terms of a level playing field, the addition of another 2.5 million overseas voters tips the balance even further in favour of the richest party.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

I absolutely agree with that.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

Would that be without any cap on the size of the donation offered? Would the Minister consider that a cap on the size of a donation offered by, for example, Sir Philip Green might be appropriate?

[Earl Howe (Con)]

I will come to the subject of caps on donations in a moment.

On Amendment 212E, the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, recently tabled a Question for Written Answer about the uncommenced provision in the 2009 Act. This provision, Section 10, refers to residence and domicile for income tax purposes as a criterion for permissible political donations. Although a response was issued to him by my noble friend Lord Greenhalgh on 14 March, I hope that it will be helpful if I repeat it briefly for the benefit of the Committee.

The Government have no current plans to bring into force the uncommenced provision, Section 10 of the Political Parties and Elections Act 2009, regarding donations from non-resident donors. There is a very good reason for this: the provision is not workable given that an individual’s tax status is subject to confidentiality. It may therefore be difficult or even impossible for the Electoral Commission, political parties and other campaigners to accurately determine whether a donor meets the test set out in Section 10.

Furthermore, as a matter of principle, taxation is not connected to enfranchisement in the UK. If a British citizen is able to vote in an election for a political party, they should be able to donate to that political party subject to the requirements for transparency on donations. There is clear precedent here. Full-time students are legally exempt from paying council tax but still have the right to vote. Likewise, those who do not pay income tax rightly remain entitled to vote. For these reasons, the Government cannot support these amendments.

The other key theme that this debate has focused on is that of donations made by companies or other entities such as unincorporated associations. I will address Amendments 197, 198, 200, 210, 212 and 212G in the remarks that follow. As I have said before, only those with a legitimate interest in UK elections can make political donations, such as UK-registered companies which are carrying out business in the UK, trade unions and other UK-based entities. There is only a very limited exception to this, whereby, as I indicated earlier, for political parties registered in Northern Ireland permissible donors are a wider category.

The law is already clear that, if a company wants to donate to a party or fund a campaign, it must be a permissible donor. The recipient of a donation is responsible for checking that the donor is eligible; that is to say that it is registered in the UK and carrying out business in the UK. The recipient must also report the relevant donations to the Electoral Commission quarterly, and weekly during election periods. To ensure transparency about party funding, donation reports are published by the Electoral Commission on its online database.

Unincorporated associations are permissible donors only where they carry on business or other activities wholly or mainly in the United Kingdom and where their main office is in the UK. Further to this, any unincorporated associations making political contributions of more than £25,000 in a calendar year must notify the Electoral Commission and are subsequently subject to various reporting requirements relating to their own funding. Members’ associations, many of which are unincorporated associations, are separately regulated as regulated donees and must report on donations and loans that they receive.

Amendment 197 would introduce a new obligation on unincorporated associations to take all reasonable steps to check whether donations they receive intended for political purposes come from a permissible donor. At first glance, “all reasonable steps” appears perfectly reasonable. However, this would represent a significant change for unincorporated associations which, as I outlined previously, are already subject to significant reporting requirements. It singles them out from other types of donors and puts them instead closer to the level of political parties in their due diligence obligations. This could mean many voluntary groups and local sports clubs and societies all facing a significant extra due diligence cost simply because they fall into an unlucky category. That does not strike me as fair, and I would be concerned about the possible chilling effect on democratic participation of those groups.

Amendment 198 is an attempt to restrict donations from organisations. As drafted, it would exclude UK-based companies with fewer than five employees from making donations. Furthermore, it is unclear how one would determine who has “significant control” of an unincorporated association, as their governance structures are not regulated in the same way as other legal entities. Although I am sure this was not the intention, it demonstrates quite well the risk of serious unintended consequences if amendments which place restrictions on who can participate in our democracy are made with haste and without consultation. Furthermore, Amendment 198 would make it an offence for an ineligible company to even offer a donation, regardless of whether it is accepted and regardless of whether it was aware the donation it was offering is impermissible. This is unnecessary.

Donations from impermissible donors are already illegal, and it is the political parties and campaign groups receiving the money, the ones which better know and understand this area of law, which are accountable and responsible for checking, returning and reporting impermissible donations. In addition—this point has been highlighted previously—it is an offence for a donor knowingly to facilitate the making of an impermissible donation.

I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Hodgson for his Amendment 210, which would prohibit donations from individuals or companies that hold public contracts with a value equal to or exceeding £100,000. The complexities of procurement frameworks are slightly beyond the scope of this debate, but let me say that, while well-intentioned, it is not clear how this amendment would operate in practice. Seemingly, there is no limitation on a person making a donation to a party prior to entering into a contract with a public body, and it is unclear whether the prohibition extends beyond the lifetime of the contract and, if so, for how long. It is important to note that the existing legislation already provides for publication of donations to political parties, regulated donees and recognised third-party campaigners, therefore enabling any discerning citizen and our free press to scrutinise any large donations.

I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Sikka, for his Amendment 212. As he explained, the intention of this amendment is to prevent shell companies being used to make large donations. Similar concerns on source of donations underpin Amendment 200 and the substantial Amendment 212G from the noble Lords, Lord Rooker and Lord Butler, which would introduce requirements for registered parties to carry out risk assessments and due diligence checks on donations.

However, as I have already outlined, there are strict rules requiring companies making donations to be incorporated and carrying out business in the UK. Existing rules also prohibit circumventing the rules through proxy donors. That is on top of a legal requirement for political parties and other recipients to conduct permissibility checks and report to the Electoral Commission.

The principle of strengthening the system to provide greater levels of assurance on the sources of donations to ensure they are permissible and legitimate is important. We take seriously the risk of donors seeking to evade the rules. Indeed, the Government recently set out their final position on the reforms to the corporate registration framework, ahead of introducing legislation, in the Corporate Transparency and Register Reform White Paper.

The introduction of mandatory identity verification for those incorporating and filing with Companies House will be essential for making information on the companies register more reliable. It will mean that those with the intention of fraudulently misusing the UK corporate registration framework will have their activities traced and challenged. For example, all directors of UK limited companies will be required to verify their identity in order to be registered, and overseas companies will be required to verify the identity of all their directors. This, in combination with a new power for the Companies House registrar to proactively pass on relevant information to law enforcement and other public and regulatory bodies, including the Electoral Commission, will help ensure that any company making political donations is properly trading in the United Kingdom.

However, we do not want to impose disproportionate legal obligations that hinder the ability of parties and other campaigners to generate funds against the cost of carrying out checks on donations to ensure that they come from permissible sources. To do so would risk it not being cost effective for parties to accept smaller donations and therefore exclude some people from being able to participate in our democracy in this way. The current rules are proportionate and achieve this balance.

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[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, in this overfull House at this late hour, I will be extremely brief. I note that the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, who said to me earlier that he thought that this is one of the more important groups to which we had yet to come, has felt it necessary to go. So I will simply say that it is important that we come back to this issue given that this Bill is such a mess and has failed to do so many of the things which several committees recommended it should do. It has also been sharply criticised by a Commons committee.

I would choose Amendment 205; if the Labour Front Benches were minded to bring that back at Report stage, I would certainly give it support and there would be others around the House who would too. Having missed—or refused to take—this opportunity, we had better try to get it right again soon. The integrity of British elections is a very important principle. The questions of how our elections are regulated are fundamental. This is a very unsatisfactory Bill, and Amendment 205 would ensure that we have another go to deal with many of the things which it has been suggested that we need but which this Bill does not provide.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

My Lords, these amendments seek to require the Government to commit to a timetable for wholesale review and consolidation of electoral law and to further consultations to be conducted on the Bill. The Government remain committed to ensuring that our electoral law is fit for purpose, now and into the future. We agree that electoral law should be revised and improved, but a wholesale review takes significant consideration and policy development is not something that we should rush at and potentially get wrong. The Government’s immediate priority will be the implementation of our manifesto commitments, which this Elections Bill delivers. This would allow us to update our electoral law in important ways, strengthening our current framework by addressing known vulnerabilities in our systems.

Amendment 206 would oblige the Secretary of State to establish a committee consisting of members of both Houses of Parliament to conduct post-legislative scrutiny of this Bill within five years of its passing. I have heard the arguments at Second Reading, and in previous Committee sessions, over perceived potential future impacts, and I understand the desire to ensure that any such legislation has the impact intended. It is already the settled will of noble Members that significant pieces of primary legislation should be subject to post-legislative scrutiny. Indeed, it was only a couple of years ago that the Government published a post-legislative assessment of the Electoral Registration and Administration Act 2013. Things would not be any different when it comes to the legislation before us today. It is the Government’s view that to include an obligation in the legislation is not necessary in light of our plans to conduct scrutiny and evaluation of the measures in the Bill in due course.

I note the purpose of Amendments 214 and 215: to require the Secretary of State to publish a consultation and an impact assessment before measures are commenced. The measures in this Bill deliver not only on recommendations by parliamentarians, Select Committees, international observers and electoral stakeholders but also on a range of consultations. This includes the overseas electors policy statement issued in October 2016, the Government’s 2017 call for evidence on the accessibility of elections and the Protecting the Debate: Intimidation, Influence and Information consultation of July 2018. My officials have consulted with administrators and civil society groups throughout the policy development, and they are continuing to do so in our implementation planning. We have also published both an equality impact assessment and an economic impact assessment before introducing these measures, and we will continue to monitor impacts, as I have said. I can assure the noble Baroness that the Government are listening but, at this time, do not consider these amendments necessary.

Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 25th April 2022 Lords Chamber

The only part of the comments I made when we debated this matter previously that I want to repeat is that I have had the pleasure—or difficulty, for that matter —of being on a panel abroad looking at international elections. That is a process which many Members of this House have participated in. I want the honour— I use “honour” deliberately—of being able to say to other countries, “Look at what we do. Follow that as closely as possible, because that is the best way to run your elections”. However, with these two clauses in the Bill, I am afraid that I could not do that.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, my name is on these amendments. We have had a very powerful debate from all sides of the House, and I suggest that we now ought to move towards the Minister’s response.

I remind the Minister of the constitutional context we are in and of his responsibilities as, in effect, the only member of the Government with responsibility for the constitution and constitutional propriety. Noble Lords may not be fully aware that, since the last reshuffle, there is no longer any Minister within the Government who has been given the specific responsibility of being Minister for the Constitution. The responsibility for this Bill has been moved from the Cabinet Office to the department for levelling up, communities, local government and various other things which provide a very extensive portfolio for Michael Gove. That leaves the Minister in some ways stranded, but in other ways he is the only member of the Government—apart from the Prime Minister himself—who specifically has responsibility for constitutional propriety among his major responsibilities.

The Minister will be well aware that the noble Lord, Lord Wolfson of Tredegar, referred to issues of constitutional principle in his resignation letter and that, before him, the noble Lord, Lord Faulks, also resigned on a matter of constitutional principle. I hope that the Minister will address the constitutional propriety of these two clauses in winding up. After all, we are in a wider constitutional crisis, both domestically—I have referred to the context of that—and internationally, given what is happening in Ukraine and the growth of autocracies around the world.

The noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, who sadly is not in his place, addressed Britain’s constitutional crisis in his article in the Times last Wednesday. He reminded his readers:

“The British constitution, because it is unwritten, is particularly vulnerable to its limitations being resisted at the top of government … It is the responsibility of parliamentarians, and in particular Conservative ones, to insist”


that constitutional rules and conventions are followed. I welcome the reaffirmation made by the noble Lord, Lord Finkelstein, of the Conservative Party’s proud tradition as the constitutional party—from Burke through successive Salisburys to the noble Viscount’s father, Lord Hailsham—and I regret our current Government’s failure to maintain fully that tradition.

I invite the Minister to explain to the House how he considers these proposals to be compatible with Conservative principles of limited government and parliamentary sovereignty. If he cannot reconcile the tried and tested principles of Conservatism—about which he has often spoken eloquently—with these proposals, he should accept that they should be removed.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, we very much welcome these amendments. We thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, for tabling them and for his excellent and clear introduction on his concerns about the implications of leaving these clauses in the Bill. I will be brief, as he and many other noble Lords made excellent speeches today.

We have made it extremely clear on previous stages of the Bill’s consideration that we are extremely concerned about its intention to make provisions for a power to designate a strategy and policy statement for the Electoral Commission, drafted by government. As other noble Lords have said, this would allow political interference in the regulation of our elections and calls into question the independence of the Electoral Commission from government and political control. This simply cannot be allowed to happen. It is a dangerous precedent. If we look at similar democracies such as Canada, New Zealand or Australia, there is always a complete separation between government and the electoral commission. It is essential that our regulatory framework strikes the right balance between upholding the independence of the Electoral Commission and ensuring it is properly scrutinised and held to account. The noble Lord, Lord Hayward, made some good points about the fact that we need to look at how it operates, but this is absolutely not the way to go about it.

I remind those noble Lords who have said that this is not of any concern that new Section 4B(2) in Clause 15 says that:

“The Commission must have regard to the statement when carrying out their functions”—


“must”, not “may”. That is what really concerns us. We have had many excellent speeches, so I urge the Minister to listen very carefully to what has been said in the defence of our democracy. That is what we are talking about. We fully support these amendments and urge other noble Lords to do the same when this is put to the House.

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[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, for their support. This amendment would prevent overseas electors donating to political parties in the UK. We had quite a debate about this in Committee so I will not go over all the points, but I want to talk about the reasons behind our concerns and to raise a few key things.

We are concerned that the change to remove the 15-year limit on registering overseas electors creates a loophole in donation law that would allow wealthy donors unlimited access to our democracy and the opportunity for unprecedentedly large donations. We do not believe that foreign donors should be allowed to financially influence our democratic processes; that right should be reserved for citizens who actually live in this country. The Electoral Commission recommended introducing new duties on parties to enhance due diligence and risk assessment of donations based on existing money laundering regulations, which would protect parties and build confidence among voters, so that sources of party funding would be thoroughly and properly scrutinised.

We are therefore disappointed that the Bill does nothing about this and does not bring in what is urgently needed—an effective regulatory and enforcement regime to ensure that foreign money and dark money cannot enter our political system through donations to political parties. We have tabled Amendment 63 to protect our democracy from this foreign money, which we know is already impacting our politics. Concerns about how our democracy is being influenced by malign foreign influences has been highlighted already in the Russia report. That was debated at length in Committee, so I will not go into that any further, but it provides a clear example and concern.

Our fear is that the Government have, potentially inadvertently, created a system vulnerable to overseas interference. It allows a person to call up any or every local authority to say they were resident in the area 30 or 40 years ago with pretty flimsy proof and then be able to be registered and donate enormous sums of money. That is our key concern. When this was debated in Committee, the Minister said that if you have the right to vote, you should have the right to donate. Although I understand entirely the principle behind this, it does not address our very real concerns. If I am not satisfied by the Minister’s response that there is genuine recognition of this concern and that action will be taken by the Government to stop this potential foreign influence on our elections and political parties, I will wish to divide the House.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, my name is on Amendment 63. I strongly support it and I trust the House will give it its support. The absence of any detail from the Government on how they will implement the idea of overseas votes for life is quite remarkable. There is nothing on how they would check the bona fides of expatriates claiming to be citizens and to have lived in particular UK constituencies, perhaps half a century ago, in contrast to the proposals to tighten domestic identity checks. There is nothing on new measures for getting ballots out to these new voters and returning them in the span of our short campaigns. From the hundreds of messages I have had from expatriate voters, that is one of the issues about which they are most concerned: how difficult it is to get the ballots out or get them back. There is nothing on the current distribution of overseas voters in constituencies or how the expansion might affect the current balance of our constituencies in terms of size and the equalisation of the numbers of voters in each. The Government do not know what the current distribution of voters by constituency is—at least, the Minister did not when I submitted the Written Question to him—or how overseas voters are distributed by overseas countries or how many would be likely to register.

In these circumstances, one has to conclude that the Government’s main objective in extending expatriate votes for life is to tap wealthy donors who long ago moved abroad to avoid paying UK tax to increase the structural advantages from which the Conservatives already benefit in funding electoral campaigns. All the amendments in this group address the huge question of how to maintain a level playing field in the financing of political campaigns. This is one of the many issues on which the Bill falls short. Noble Lords will recall that the Committee on Standards in Public Life published a substantial report on political finance last summer, just two days after the Government had published the Elections Bill. The Government have made no effort since then to incorporate its proposals into the Bill, in spite of introducing a number of other significant amendments.

We all recognise that uncontrolled flows of money into political campaigns can unbalance and corrupt democratic politics. We see the extent to which American politics has become the plaything of the super-rich. Noble Lords may have noted that in the last three months of 2019, in the run-up to our last general election, two-thirds of the money reported by the Electoral Commission to have been contributed to UK parties flowed to the Conservatives. Quite possibly, as much again flowed to the think tanks of the right, including from non-UK citizens in the USA and non-democratic states. We are drifting closer to the American situation, with the difference that only one of our major parties has easy access to large-scale donors.

As other amendments in this group suggest, we need a broader review of political funding than the Bill permits. Amendment 63 thus offers a stop-gap measure. Those who have moved to Monaco, the Channel Islands, the Isle of Man or Caribbean tax havens to avoid paying UK tax should not be permitted to bias our domestic politics by funding political campaigns. Yes, we should allow them to vote as citizens. But we have learned from flows of money from Russia and right-wing foundations in the USA that the buying of influence over British politics from overseas undermines the level playing field that democratic campaigns depend on and that I hope the Minister still supports. It also corrodes trust in the integrity of our democratic process. I regard Amendment 63 as an important stop-gap measure until, perhaps, a different Government tackle the question of political finance and its regulation. I hope the House will support it.

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[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, I simply say that I thought that that was a masterly exposition by the noble Lord, Lord Stunell. I would happily second all the questions that he is asking of the Minister on the absurd ramifications. The only thing that I would say by way of regret to the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, is that we do not need an inquiry or further consideration. The simple solution is invariably the best one, and it is not to extend the ability to vote from overseas beyond the 15 years very wisely and fairly established by the Labour Government. This acknowledged that people might quite legitimately be going abroad for a while, and it would be wrong to disenfranchise them, but, by the end of 15 years, it is pretty well established that someone is unlikely to return and their connection with the United Kingdom diminishes by the day—and they are living with the consequences. I will certainly not repeat the argument, but, when you have a problem, look for the simple solution. Let us all agree that this extension of the franchise for life, virtually irrespective of residence, as the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, has declared, is absurd.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I should declare an interest. I have two sisters, one of whom left Britain 60 years ago and the other 50 years ago. They would be entitled to vote under this provision. I also have a nephew and a niece who left in infancy. They too would be entitled to vote under this scheme.

I also declare an interest in that my party has been in favour of moving towards overseas voting and has thought some of it through. It has looked at practice in comparable countries such as France and Australia. It is clear that we need to involve embassies and consulates abroad if we are to make sure that votes are returned in time. It is also clear that we should be moving towards overseas constituencies, given the different requirements of those who vote from overseas. This happens in a number of other countries. It could be done here. The Minister seemed astonished when I first mentioned overseas constituencies, as if he had not heard of them before.

I have had hundreds of messages about this, from people in France in particular. First, the local MP where they are still registered tells them it is nothing to do with them and they are not going to take up their case because they do not live in the constituency. Secondly, they would like to have overseas constituencies with particular MPs, or Members of the second Chamber or whatever, who would take their interests into account. France has a small number of overseas constituencies, with a much larger number of voters per constituency, and their interests are taken into account.

I hope the Minister will not mind my saying that, when I first went to discuss with him and his team the way in which this extension might be implemented, I was staggered by the lack of detail and what seemed to me to be a lack of interest in the detail. We have very little information on its implementation. It is not quite as bad as the Government’s proposal to send asylum seekers to Rwanda, which appears to have had almost no thought as to how it might be implemented or costed.

There are a range of things that we need to consider. We know already that getting ballot papers out to foreign countries and back within the short time period is extremely difficult and very often fails. What do the Government propose to do about this if they are going to implement this expanded scheme? We have not yet heard anything on that. Will it involve embassies and consulates abroad? I asked a Question last summer and was told by the Foreign Office that it had not been consulted on this and did not expect to be involved to any degree. The Australians, the French and others clearly play a large role in managing and assisting with overseas voting. How therefore would this be carried out in practice when it comes? The Government also wish to shorten the campaigning period. At present, that proposal has been put off. If the campaigning period were any shorter, getting ballots out and back would be almost completely impossible.

This amendment says, “Tell us how you will do this. Demonstrate to Parliament that you have actually thought this through and that you have some way of identifying who are British citizens overseas, where they were residing in Britain beforehand and that, if they wish to vote, the means will be provided for them to receive ballot papers and to get them back—and do not implement it until you are able to answer those questions”. I have not yet heard the Minister or his officials be able to answer any of these questions, and therefore we have tabled this amendment.

[Viscount Stansgate (Lab)]

My Lords, we are nearing the end of this debate on Report. I cannot say that this Elections Bill is one of this Government’s finest constitutional measures. Although it is late in the day, we have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, a very clear exposition of some of the questions which have not been answered, and I think it is perfectly fair to ask the Government—even at this late stage on Monday night—to provide some answers.

I find myself sitting here thinking back to the time that John Stonehouse disappeared, which some noble Lords may remember. When he disappeared, it became clear that there was no provision under British electoral law to remove him from his position as a Member of Parliament. Even though he was arrested and imprisoned in Australia, his constituency went unrepresented, because there was no way of getting rid of him. So things that might appear to you to be unlikely, such as those outlined by the noble Lord, Lord Stunell, might still one day actually occur.

The only thing I would add is that, over the Easter Recess, I met a British citizen who left Britain 55 years ago. He has been living in an EU country. I can report to the House that he was astonished to discover that the Government were now planning to give him the vote. He asked me a number of questions, such as “Where would I cast my vote?”—which brings me to the questions mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. Some countries, France being one of them, have overseas constituencies. After decades of inaction, the Americans finally made it possible for Republicans and Democrats abroad to vote while living in the UK. I am sorry to say this at such a late stage, but this is an area that has not been as fully thought through as it should have been. That is exactly what this House is here for and I look forward to the Minister’s reply.

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In addition to potentially removing the rights of people who would never have been convicted under the UK justice system, creating a specific ban on British prisoners abroad would be unworkable and unenforceable. How could you ascertain with any degree of certainty whether someone living in any country in the world was in a prison? It is impossible. Some British prisoners imprisoned outside the UK may in theory qualify to vote, but there would be significant barriers to their participation, not least because they would have to manage to register to vote, apply for an absent vote and then cast that absent vote, all potentially from the confines of a prison cell.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

May I remind the Minister that it is part of the responsibilities of our consuls abroad to look after the interests of British citizens when they are in foreign prisons? So it is not the case that we will not have information on these. Our consular network should have the information relevant to this, but perhaps the Foreign Office has not been consulted.

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

Then we come to somebody who was born in the UK and has been here only a short time. The current system allows citizens who have left the UK while still too young to vote the ability to register based on their parents’ or guardians’ previous registration, but this is subject to an arbitrary 15-year limit from when they left the UK. The Government want to remove this arbitrary time limit placed on British citizens who have resided here, and we have no intention to replace one time limit with another arbitrary time limit requiring a British citizen to have been resident here for a certain amount of time before they can register.

The Bill will permit children who are UK citizens and who have resided in the UK to be eligible to vote based on their previous residency here. They would apply in respect of their last place of residency. This approach is consistent with the principle of individual responsibility, which underpins individual electoral registration and ensures that voting rights are not conditional on choices made by others in the past.

Additionally, British citizens born outside the UK must have previously resided in the UK to become eligible to register to vote. In practical terms, someone who left the UK at a very young age or who was present in the UK only for a short period will find it difficult to demonstrate their residency at a particular UK address to the satisfaction of a registration officer. I would also question whether anyone who lived in the UK only for a very short period would have any interest in voting in our elections. I hope that gives a little more substance to my letter.

I now turn to the amendment as tabled. The purpose of this amendment would be to delay the commencement of Clause 13 of the Bill for two years, and the extension of franchise for parliamentary election for British citizens overseas. The amendment would require three conditions to be met before regulations could be laid to bring into force the provisions. The Government have set out much detail on the intended registration and voting process in their policy statement Overseas Electors: Delivering ‘Votes for Life’ for British Expatriates. Referring to the condition whereby the Secretary of State must publish guidance for EROs on determining residentiary requirements of overseas electors, further detail on residency requirements will be set out in secondary legislation.

Electoral registration officers will require British citizens who have been resident, but not previously registered, to demonstrate to their satisfaction that they were resident at a specific address. Section 5 of the Representation of the People Act 1983 already lays down the general principles regarding residence for electoral purposes which a registration officer must consider and apply in deciding whether a person is resident at a particular address for those purposes. The same approach to residency must be applied within these boundaries and, as now, registration officers will be supported in this by guidance from the Electoral Commission, with whom the Government will work closely.

As for reporting on documentary evidence, the Government intend to align closely with the existing exceptions process for those domestic electors for whom an ERO considers that additional evidence is required to verify their identity. This is a system that administrators are already familiar with, and we will continue to work closely with stakeholders to develop this process. It will be set out in secondary legislation and be subject to parliamentary scrutiny and to parliamentary approval.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, brought up the issue of how we will help expatriates—the people who want to vote from abroad—to actually be able to vote. I think we had a discussion on overseas constituencies, and it was made very clear that the Government are not supporting that idea. However, the Government have already improved the delivery and return of ballots to overseas electors by working with Royal Mail and the British Forces Post Office, expediting dispatch abroad, and funding the use of the international business response licence that expedites the return of the ballot packs from overseas in a large number of countries, as well as covering any postage costs that might otherwise be incurred.

This Bill will also introduce an online absent vote application service that will allow overseas electors more easily apply for a postal vote.

Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

3rd reading
Monday 25th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord True (Con)]

I thought it was. I thank those noble Lords for their constructive interest in and engagement with these measures. We have not always agreed—sometimes we have—but I have been grateful for their willingness to work with this side and our Bill team on these matters. As a result of this willingness to reach compromises around the House, the Bill leaves your Lordships’ House improved and strengthened.

On our Benches, I thank my noble friends Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts, Lord Holmes of Richmond, Lord Hayward and Lady Noakes for their input, which has led to amendments that I also believe have enhanced the legislation. I am astonishingly grateful to my noble friend Lady Scott, who seems to step into every breach when I fall or, if you like, am not sufficient. She has such an impressive capacity to pick up the technical issues and work at pace, and I have been so grateful to her for her good humour and tireless work. It is much appreciated. I also thank my noble friend Lord Howe, who is not here, for stepping into the breach when I unfortunately had my lights punched out by a Covid headache and worse. I fell short then of a promise to all noble Lords that I would be here every hour of every debate. Of course, that could not be helped, but I assure your Lordships, as someone who likes to live up to his word, that it will be a source of annoyance when I look back on this.

Finally, we all want to go, but I cannot let anyone go—I know that people on all sides of the House understand this—without mentioning the extraordinary hard work of the Bill team and the policy officials behind the Bill, many of whom have worked for what may seem like half a lifetime to them on preparing it and putting it together. There are so many of them that it would be invidious to name them all, but many of your Lordships have had direct personal contact with them. They have been enormously professional, good humoured and patient—which you have to be if you work with me—and have lived up to the very highest standards of the UK Civil Service and the quality of public service that we all admire. So, my final thanks are to them.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, perhaps I may remark to my noble friend Lord Rennard and the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, that in the process of this Bill I have appreciated that it is possible to be quite astonishingly, nerdishly expert on the details of elections to the degree to which the two of them and one or two of our colleagues on the Labour Benches are. That goes far beyond my limited experience, having fought only five elections in my life. They really understand the details in all sorts of ways. I have done some of my electioneering in some of the more difficult parts of the United Kingdom.

I thank the many pro-democracy organisations that have helped and advised us and lobbied about the Bill as it has gone through: Best for Britain, Unlock Democracy, the Electoral Reform Society, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Democracy Defence Coalition. I particularly thank Elizabeth Plummer in our Whips’ Office, who has done superb work with others around the House to make sure that the amendments are there on time.

It is difficult to welcome this Bill. It came to the House accompanied by a number of very critical reports, including one from the constitutional affairs committee of the House of Commons, which said that the Bill in its current form was not fit for purpose. We have improved it a little—we now face ping-pong on some of those improvements—but it is still not entirely what is needed.

As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, said, rather powerfully, this is a constitutional Bill on which there was an absence of cross-party consultation or consensus on the fundamentals of our constitutional democracy—that is a worry. We will have to return to this. The next Parliament, whenever it comes, will have to undertake the job of simplifying and clarifying electoral law, which is what we should have been doing—and have failed to do—with this Bill. Perhaps there are some improvements, and there are certainly some necessary changes in this Bill. There are a number of other areas which we on these Benches bitterly regret and, for that, I can make only moderate thanks to the Minister and the Bill team for what has been achieved.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, I start by saying that I agree with the noble Lord the Minister that this Bill is improved and strengthened having gone through this House. This Bill is a clear demonstration that your Lordships’ House can really prove its worth when a Bill comes that is not really good enough. I thank the Government and the Minister for bringing forward some important changes and concessions which have improved the Bill considerably.

I also believe that your Lordships’ House has sent a very clear signal to the Government about concerns around, in particular, photographic ID and the independence of the Electoral Commission. I thank my colleagues, my noble friends Lord Collins and Lord Khan, for their support and all the work that they have done on this Bill. I also thank Ben Wood, in our office, who has worked like crazy on this Bill and others, providing really important support.

I thank the many noble Lords who have taken part in debates on this Bill and who have contributed to making it the better Bill that it is today. In particular, I thank the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, for his important work demonstrating our concerns around the Electoral Commission. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord True and the noble Baroness, Lady Scott, for their time and consideration of our concerns. They have given us a lot of time and some of the concessions that we have had are extremely gratefully received and have made the Bill much better. I also thank the officials, because they also gave us that time to try to improve things in this way. I join the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, in thanking the many organisations that have provided time, briefings and the detailed information that has helped us to understand some of the complicated areas of electoral law.

I just end by saying that I hope that we can continue to work together constructively to address the outstanding areas where we believe we can still make more progress.

Elections Bill

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Consideration of Commons amendments
Wednesday 27th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Altmann (Con)]

My Lords, I was not going to speak in this debate, but, having listened very carefully, I am deeply troubled at the idea that we would not try to see whether we can persuade the Minister and Conservative colleagues in the other place, right-thinking Conservatives, that there is a significant risk here of gerrymandering elections—something one would think was impossible to imagine in this country.

I think the House has been done a great service by the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, who has challenged us to stand up for what we can see is a significant risk. Indeed, when we think about what happens in the other place with the amendments that we are trying to point out are really important to insert in the Bills that are coming through in these final days, we see that they are not even being sufficiently debated. With a significant majority there is a risk that a Government can try to gather for themselves permanent or long-lasting powers that are not designed for the kinds of constitutional arrangements that we have in this country.

I therefore am finding myself deeply conflicted and troubled as to—in the words of the noble Lord, Lord Carlile—what we are here for if it is not consider, and ask the other place to consider, these matters.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, briefly, we on these Benches will vote for both amendments on matters of principle, because we believe in constitutional democracy and citizens’ rights. Sadly, throughout our discussions on this Bill, the Minister has resisted attempts to discuss this as a constitutional issue and as a matter of principle. Indeed, as the Bill has gone through the Government have removed this area from the Cabinet Office and put it in with housing and local government under the Department for Levelling Up, so that the Commons committee on constitutional affairs will no longer cover such things as this. I regret that, too; it seems to me entirely improper.

I recall the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, making a very powerful speech some while ago on the importance of process in politics. By “process” I take him to mean the way in which we conduct ourselves in the political world, including the rule of law and institutional checks and balances Those conventions of political life are a fundamental part of democracy. That is what this Bill has failed to reinforce. I think we all recognise that a future Prime Minister or a future Government will have to return to this issue and produce a much better Bill that can command more cross-party support.

The amendment in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, addresses the question of parliamentary sovereignty—not Executive sovereignty. My noble friend Lord Rennard’s amendment addresses the question of the right of every citizen to take part in the political life of the country and not to face unnecessary barriers. One of the many adverse effects of the Bill is that it makes it much easier and without barriers for overseas citizens to vote but more difficult for domestic citizens to vote. That is very odd, not entirely democratic and undesirable.

For those and other reasons, and on matters of constitutional principle, which the revising House should have particular concern for, we will vote for both amendments.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

My Lords, in his opening remarks, the Minister talked about the post-legislative scrutiny that is going to be on the face of the Bill and said that this would include reviewing and monitoring further forms of acceptable ID. He mentioned that the Bill includes the provision to add further acceptable forms. We welcome that. I hold the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, in the highest regard and thank him for pressing the Government in his previous amendment on the importance of furthering the number of IDs that can be used.

Having said all that, we believe, as the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said in introducing his amendment, that the Government have simply got it wrong on requiring voter ID to be presented at polling stations. We are disappointed and unhappy that there has been absolutely no movement whatever from the Government on this and that they have not wished to include any further accepted forms of ID in the Bill. If the Bill moves forward on ID as it stands, will the Minister provide assurances as to how the requirements for photo voter ID will be introduced, how local government will be supported, and what mitigations will be put in place to ensure that no elector will be disfranchised as a result of the Bill?

We very much welcome the amendments in the name of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, on the Electoral Commission. There is clear concern, right across this House, about the undermining of the independence of the Electoral Commission. I will not go into any detail because we need to move on. The noble and learned Lord clearly laid out why there are still deep concerns in this House. The small amendments that he has offered would resolve these issues and greatly strengthen the Bill before it reaches the statute book. We agree wholeheartedly with what the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, is trying to achieve and support his decision to ask the other place to think once again on what is a matter of extreme constitutional importance.