Elections Bill

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Thursday 10th March 2022 Lords Chamber

Parliament has agreed to a regulatory body such as the ICO being able to regulate organisations through the imposition of penalties on this scale. I believe the political parties must also be respectful of election law rules and, in particular, those concerning donations and election spending. The present limit of £20,000 for a regulatory body is clearly woefully inadequate. Amendment 19 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, proposes what I consider a modest increase, to £50,000, in the level of fines that can be imposed by the commission. Amendment 18 in the name of my noble friend Lord Wallace of Saltaire would put the regulation of political parties more in line with that imposed by other regulatory bodies such as the Information Commissioner’s Office. I beg to move.

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I wish to speak to Amendment 19 in my name, which has been grouped with Amendment 18. When I tabled my amendment, I did not realise I had been gazumped by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who had the same objective as me but had put a significantly higher price on it, of £500,000 instead of £50,000. I will add a brief footnote to the case made by the noble Lord, Lord Rennard.

I have two interests in this. The first is that I was the opposition spokesman on the original legislation to set up the Electoral Commission over 20 years ago. My party fully supported the establishment of an independent body to monitor elections in this country and, as a corollary, the need to give it powers to carry out its functions and to deter behaviour that undermined the integrity of the electoral process. My view is the same and, although the Electoral Commission has not got everything right, I do not join those who seek to undermine its independence, as we heard in earlier debates.

My second interest is as the immediate predecessor to my noble friend as Minister with responsibility for the Cabinet Office in your Lordships’ House and, in particular, responsibility for answering questions from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, and others, about the powers of the Electoral Commission. Indeed, my DNA may still be on the folder in front of my noble friend.

Both experiences lead me to the view that the original powers to fine, untouched since the Act was passed, need updating to reflect what has happened in the intervening period, not least the erosion in the value of money.

Looking through the exchanges on which I took part on this very subject, I see that on 28 March 2018, in response to a Question from the noble Lord, Lord Hunt of Kings Heath, I said:

“On the specific question of the £20,000 fine, the noble Lord is correct that the Electoral Commission has expressed concern in the past that this might be regarded as simply the cost of doing business, and it is making representations that it should be enhanced to a higher level. The Government are considering those representations and, alongside any other recommendations that come out of the investigation currently under way, we will then consider what further action to take.”—[Official Report, 28/3/18; col. 833.]


On 28 June that year in response to a Question from my noble friend Lord Cormack I replied:

“My noble friend will know that the Electoral Commission has made requests for legislation, particularly to increase the sanctions that are available to it.”—[Official Report, 28/6/18; col. 240.]


Also, on 17 July that year in response to Lord Tyler—whose participation in these debates we all miss—I said:

“On the question of legislation, as I have said, we are currently considering whether the Electoral Commission should have more powers; we know that the commission wants the maximum fine to be increased from £20,000 to a higher level”. —[Official Report, 17/6/18; col. 1141.]


I am now free to express views that were at the time constrained by the rules of collective responsibility—which I stretched from time to time but I hope never broke. I fully expected on the briefing I had received that, when we legislated on the Electoral Commission, we would increase the maximum fine available.

The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, reflects the recommendation of the CSPL. We should attach weight to that body because its first report led to the establishment of the Electoral Commission, and it has a paternal interest in its well-being. It recommended a maximum fine of £500,000 or 4%, which the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, has generously rounded up to 5%. My amendment is more modest, seeking simply to retain the value of £20,000 to take account of inflation and rounded up modestly.

It is worth digging into the CSPL report to find out why it came to this decision. The Electoral Commission itself gave written evidence, saying:

“Recent research indicates that the public believe that fines for breaking political finance laws are too lenient, given the amount of money that could be spent on campaigning. More than half of the respondents (52%) in our regular tracking research carried out in early 2020 said that a £20,000 maximum fine was not high enough. Only 27% felt that it was about the right amount”.


Although my party gave evidence the other way, the Committee on Standards in Public Life was robust in its conclusion.

My noble friend quoted with approbation the views of the CSPL in an earlier debate, and I will quote what it said on this subject, at paragraph 9.79:

“We consider that an effective regulatory system must be backed by strong sanctions. The prospect of significantly greater fines will act as an incentive to ensure that parties and campaigners put in place robust systems to ensure that the requirements of electoral law are complied with. For anyone contemplating deliberately breaching the law, it should give pause for thought. It seems that the Commission’s powers have fallen behind equivalent regulators such as the Information Commissioner’s Office and we have concluded that this should be redressed”.


I agree. Finally, it went on to say:

“We support the recommendation made by the House of Lords Democracy and Digital Technology Committee that the maximum fine the Electoral Commission may impose should be increased to 4% of a campaign’s total spend or £500,000, whichever is higher”.


I do not want to hark back to earlier debates, but it seems that this is further evidence of government antipathy towards the Electoral Commission. I hope my noble friend will be able to persuade me that this is not the case.

[Baroness Jones of Moulsecoomb (GP)]

My Lords, it is quite sweet to have these two amendments in the same group. I am sure the noble Lord, Lord Young of Cookham, knows which one I prefer.

Clearly, you have to make the political parties pay attention. At the moment political parties face higher fines for data protection breaches than they do for breaking election law, which is really inappropriate. The risk is that fines for breaking election law just become part of the cost of doing business for political parties, especially those with the deepest pockets and richest donors. That is clearly not the Green Party, but it could be other political parties represented in this Chamber.

Amendment 18 would mean that the penalties for breaking election law would actually hurt the law-breakers. It follows the same logic as the general data protection regulations by implementing proportional fines so that big organisations have to pay attention.

Elections Bill

Lord Young of Cookham Excerpts

Report stage
Monday 25th April 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Young of Cookham (Con)]

My Lords, I will make three brief points in support of the amendments of the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge. The first follows a point made by the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who has just made a forceful speech. As my noble friend Lord Cormack mentioned in an earlier debate, I was my party’s spokesman and I was in the shadow Cabinet of William Hague, now my noble friend Lord Hague, when the Bill establishing the Electoral Commission went through. As the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge, implied, had the Blair Government sought to include these two clauses in that Bill, my party would have strongly opposed that. They conflict with the recommendation of the Neill commission’s report that

“An Election Commission in a democracy like ours could not function properly, or indeed at all, unless it were scrupulously impartial and believed to be so by everyone seriously involved and by the public at large.”


If it was right for my party to oppose those clauses then, it is right to oppose them today.

Secondly, I respectfully disagree with the argument in defence of the Government’s position put forward by my noble friend the Minister on March 10:

“It is entirely appropriate for the Government and Parliament to provide a steer on electoral policy … By increasing policy emphasis on electoral integrity … the Government are seeking to prevent interference in our democracy from fraud, foreign money and hostile state actors.”—[Official Report, 10/3/22; col. 1643.]


It is not the Electoral Commission that requires a steer, for example, on the importance of protecting our democracy from foreign money; it is the Government. The steer that my noble friend described—the statutory requirement to

“have regard to the statement”—

should be in precisely the opposite direction to the one in the Bill.

My third and final reason is related to the first. I have left the Government five times, which is more than anyone else in the Chamber—even the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett. Once was at the request of the electorate in 1997 and three times were, sadly, at the request of the then Prime Minister, but the last was of my own volition, one month after the current Prime Minister took office, when he illegally prorogued Parliament. That was the first of a number of steps that injure out democratic institutions—in that case the House of Commons. It was followed by the failure to defend the judiciary from the “Enemies of the People” attack by the Daily Mail, the attempted interference with the verdict on Owen Paterson, the resignation of the Prime Minister’s independent adviser Alex Allan—instead of the Home Secretary—and the evident disregard, shown from time to time, for the role of your Lordships’ House and the Ministerial Code. These clauses are another step in the same direction; they are disrespectful of the ground rules of our constitution, and they should not be in the Bill.

[Lord Grocott (Lab)]

My Lords, we have heard three splendid speeches, and I intend to be very brief. I will pick up on a comment made by my noble friend Lord Blunkett, who is of course quite right that the public will not be interested or involved in the details of this legislation. But I have no doubt whatever that they have an acute sense of fairness. In Committee, I suggested that, for the Government to give instructions to the Electoral Commission is akin to a party in a football match—one of the two teams—giving instructions and guidance to the referee prior to the match. I do not think that anyone in Britain would think that that was a fair situation. I do not think that anyone could seriously contend that that is not what would happen if these two clauses become law.

What I find particularly persuasive is that this letter from the Electoral Commission, which many of us have, is, unsurprisingly, signed by every single member bar the Conservative nominee—I make no criticism of the fact that he did not sign it, but it was signed by everyone else. It argues against these two clauses. As they say,

“It is our firm and shared view that the introduction of a Strategy and Policy Statement – enabling the Government to guide the work of the Commission – is inconsistent with the role”


of an “independent electoral commission”. If anyone is wavering on this, just substitute the words “Conservative Party” for “Government”. It is nothing to be ashamed of, and I strongly support political parties; I have been in one all my life and I would go as far as to say that they are the lifeblood of our democracy. I do not regard as superior human beings those people who have not joined political parties. If we substitute the word “Government” with “Conservative Party”—because of course Governments consist, in the main, of one political party—it reads as follows: “It is our firm and shared view that the introduction of a Strategy and Policy Statement – enabling the Conservative Party to guide the work of the Commission – is inconsistent with the role of an independent electoral commission.” Is there anyone here who could possibly dispute that statement? Forgetting about the Government for a moment, for one political party in a contested situation—which is precisely what elections are, which is why they can get fraught and need adjudicators—to give an instruction to the referee, or the Electoral Commission in this case, is clearly inconsistent and unacceptable as part of our electoral procedures. I urge everyone to see the fairness of that argument and to support the amendment from the noble and learned Lord, Lord Judge.