Electoral Administration Bill

My Lords, like most speakers in the debate, I, too, welcome large parts of the Bill. Like my noble distant kinsman, Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville, I have trudged the inner areas of the Cities of London and Westminster—hoping to stand, in those days, for the LCC—and I know the difficulties involved in such areas. The Bill tackles none of the major problems that it should probably tackle. It is, so to speak, a holding Bill, but my party and I would very much welcome the involvement of the issues of proportional representation and voting at age 16 . The problem that I wish to raise today is state funding of political parties, which is relatively limited in the United Kingdom. Parliamentary groupings of representatives receive funds—for example, Short or Cranborne moneys or equivalents—to support work within parliaments or assemblies. At election times there is support in kind, most notably the provision of free postal facilities. Policy development grants were introduced by the 2000 Act and are administered by the Electoral Commission. Their genesis lay in the Neill committee report of 1998. Their aim is to support policy development within political parties. Grants are made annually from an overall pot of £2 million. The three largest parties in the House of Commons each receive a grant of more than £400,000, with the remainder shared by smaller groups. The grants are restricted to parties with two or more Members in the House of Commons, in line with the Neill committee recommendation. However, since that report was produced in 1998, there has been devolution in each of the three smaller countries in the UK and the European elections have been conducted by proportional representation. This has resulted in parties with no representation in the House of Commons now securing representation at other tiers of government. For example, the Scottish Green Party has seven MSPs in the Scottish Parliament, while the Green Party of England and Wales has two MEPs to complement dozens of local authority councillors. I today entertained to lunch in one of the restaurants in this building a representative of the Green Party of England and Wales on the Greater London Assembly. On all these bodies we have two representatives to complement dozens of local authority councillors. However, representation in a legislature other than the House of Commons is not recognised by the policy development grant scheme. The Electoral Commission has recognised that the qualifying criteria set out by the Neill committee have been overtaken by events. In its report The Funding of Political Partiesin the United Kingdom in December 2004, the Electoral Commission recommended that,"““the eligibility criteria for the policy development grant scheme””—" should be broadened—"““so that parties with at least two members elected to either the House of Commons, European Parliament, Scottish Parliament, National Assembly for Wales or Northern Ireland Assembly would be eligible to receive a share of such funding””." It also recommended that to ensure no loss of grant to the current recipients, the overall pot should be increased to £3 million each year. It stated:"““This would ensure that the six new eligible parties would also receive a basic payment of £125,000 and a variable amount based on electoral success””." The Electoral Commission expressed its disappointment and surprise that this recommendation was not reflected in the Bill. The process of devolution and introduction of new voting systems has brought new political diversity to the UK. That diversity reflects increasing plurality of choices made by voters. If state funding is to be provided in a limited form—as with policy development grants—it should support that diversity. Continuation of the status quo might be construed as suffocating that diversity, which will do little to enhance the already tarnished reputation of political institutions and parties. In particular, it would be unseemly for the UK Houses of Parliament to support a status quo that benefited only Members who sat in the House of Commons. Conversely, an initiative that showed that the UK Parliament could look beyond immediate party interests and take account of the role to be played by new voices in UK politics would be one small step along the long road of restoring faith in the idea of politics for the wider good. I regret very much that the Committee stage of the Bill will not take place on the Floor of the House. I will therefore put down an amendment and argue for that situation to be rectified. Apart from that, I wish the Bill success in its passage through your Lordships’ House.