Political Parties and Elections Bill

I beg to move, That the Bill be now read a Second time. Shortly after Labour's general election victory in 1997, to implement a key manifesto commitment, our then Prime Minister invited the Committee on Standards in Public Life, under its then chairman, Lord Neill of Bladen, to conduct a major inquiry into the funding of political parties. Lord Neill's report was published in 1998. It was followed by a White Paper and draft Bill that I published in 1999. The process of consultation on that draft Bill culminated with the passage of what became the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 in autumn that year. Lord Neill's report and the subsequent Act were based on some key and agreed principles that are fundamental to the health of any democratic system. They are that there should be clear limits on the amount that can be spent by political parties on election campaigns and that voters have a right to know who is funding those parties. To ensure that those principles were put into practice, PPERA—the 2000 Act—set out a new regulatory regime and established the independent Electoral Commission, to be answerable to the House, and not, I should add, to any Minister. Although there was, quite properly, careful scrutiny of the Government's proposals, and arguments about some of them in the 1999 Bill that became the 2000 Act, I was determined that there should be cross-party consensus on the new Act if it was at all achievable, and indeed it was. I was, and still am, in no doubt that the need for broad consensus in this area of policy is a third key principle. By any international standard British politics is fundamentally clean, because of spending limits, transparency and our political culture; but ultimately it is clean because there has been an understanding between the parties that changes made to secure partisan advantage would be impermanent and would serve only to undermine the public's faith in the democratic process. For a wide range of matters that come before the House, the knowledge of Members is necessarily at one remove. We articulate the experiences of our constituents, of business people, homeowners, the elderly and the young, and only sometimes will they be within the direct experience of individual Members and their families. However, in the area of party funding and control, Members articulate their experiences and, understandably, every Member claims expertise, so I make the following remarks with some trepidation. First, the reforms that the House agreed in the 2000 Act were, and are, fundamentally right. The historical system of controls on candidate spending was a necessary response in the days when election campaigns were fought entirely at local level, but those controls were not on their own sufficient for the circumstances in which we now find ourselves, when general election campaigns are co-ordinated at national level and often commence many months, or sometimes years, before the official starting gun is fired. Secondly, the old system, which was in essence one of self-regulation, had its advantages, as do all systems of self-regulation, especially for those being regulated, but over the past 20 years the House has increasingly insisted that one area of society's activities after another should be subject to external regulation. That is why a decade ago the House, led by my party, decided that we needed to prescribe for ourselves the remedies that we were prescribing for others. Thirdly, there is recognition that the new system of transparency and of more comprehensive regulation is what the public expect. However, as is almost inevitable with a new system of regulation, not every aspect of it has worked out as well as was intended, so 10 years on from Lord Neill's report it is right to take account of those experiences and revisit the 2000 Act framework to ensure that its key features—transparency, sensible control on spending and an effective Electoral Commission—are maintained, strengthened and, where necessary, reformed.