Political Parties and Elections Bill

My Lords, I have a reservation that the noble Lord might wish to consider. I sat on the Members’ Interests Committee in the House of Commons from 1982 until 1994 and on the Privileges Committee in the House of Commons from 1996 until 2001, so I sat through a number of inquiries. The problem with inquiries is that they have to make a judgment and such judgments can be fine and on the margin. In the event that a finding was on the margin, members of the standards authority might have in mind the possibility that an elector might choose that judgment as a way of triggering a referendum, and that might distort the judgment of those Members who sit on the standards authority. While I recognise that electors often strongly want to remove people who breach the rules, the cases on the margin would worry me and to what extent the fact that they might trigger that referendum at a local level could influence the judgment of the standards authority. I suspect that on the margin judgments could be diluted because of the authority’s concerns.