Political Parties and Elections Bill

That is a fair question. The Bill has two essential elements. One is to give far more focus to the Electoral Commission. That is the right thing to do; everyone has rightly said that that is needed. I am inserting in the margin, as it were, the point that in doing that we should not forget the principle of proportionality, and that we will need to attend to it as the Bill progresses. However, the points about the need for more focus and better powers and enforcement are essentially correct. The Bill is also essentially correct in wanting to put people with recent political experience on the Electoral Commission. That would be an outrageous suggestion if anybody thought that the politicians were going to run the thing, but they are not. As the right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire (Sir George Young) said, the arrangement works perfectly well in many other bodies. It works in the Committee on Standards in Public Life, in our own Committees in this place and in the Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, and the idea of a regulatory body not including in its membership representatives of the world that is represented would be seen as bizarre and eccentric in any other regulatory realm. Therefore, I think the Electoral Commission is quite wrong to object to this proposition. It would help to remedy in part the problem that the commission has been seen to have by those engaged in politics: that it does not understand this world. It is a very good idea to put people with political experience, although not direct, active and contemporary political experience, on to the commission. That element of the Bill is to be welcomed, and the Electoral Commission is wrong on this matter. The Bill also addresses the control of local party spending, on which I have made my views clear. There is a case in principle for seeking to exert a continuous control on local political spending for the reasons I have described, which are the same reasons we now apply to national spending. My reservation is simply about which is the best technical way to do that. I am not sure whether the suggestion that we should reintroduce the trigger mechanism is right, because we all know that that came with difficulties—it was a source of much confusion. I was quite heartened by the comment of right hon. Member for Horsham on behalf of the Opposition that he thought he could get around to agreeing to a proposal that would achieve the same objective. I hope that he can do so, and despite what I said about consensus earlier, I hope we might even reach some consensus. The Bill is clearly not the last word on this issue. The right hon. Member for North-West Hampshire talked about it as running repairs. I think that is the case, but I also think we can justify each element of those repairs, and it is our job to make sure that we get these measures into as good a shape as possible.