Political Parties and Elections Bill

My Lords, noble Lords may recognise the first part of this amendment as the same which the Conservative Party tabled to the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Bill in Committee in your Lordships' House on 12 October 2000, as reported at cols. 550 to 571 of the Official Report. This followed the recommendation of the report of the noble Lord, Lord Neill, which gave birth to that Bill, that a party should have been able to accept a donation from someone whom it knew to be eligible to be on the electoral roll, even if they were not in fact on it. Lord Mackay of Ardbrecknish, who moved the amendment, cited people who might not want to be on the electoral register for security reasons, students who failed to register or others who were moving round quite a bit who were inadvertently missed off for those and other reasons. He repeated, and I repeat now, that the object of that Bill, and this one, was and is to prevent foreign and anonymous donations, not to penalise innocent donors without good reason. The Government, in the shape of the noble Lord, Lord Bassam of Brighton, did not accept these arguments, saying: ""It would … be no easy matter for a registered party to establish whether a donor whose name did not appear on an electoral register was nevertheless entitled to register".—[Official Report, 21/11/00; col. 695.]" It might be or it might not be; that is what this amendment seeks to address. Lord Mackay pressed his amendment to a Division, and lost. This is, of course, inconvenient to my case, but I point out that the Division took place at about 7.15 pm and, going by the noble Lords who supported it, it does not appear to have been Whipped by the Conservatives. Since then, a case has occurred which I submit justifies the Neill report’s original recommendation, and therefore reconsideration of this amendment, especially with its proposed new subsection (3), to which I shall return. I alluded to the case in question at Second Reading and in Committee in the hope of eliciting a lighter and more reasonable touch from the Electoral Commission, but without success. The story is, briefly, this. The largest donor of UKIP—my party—gave some £370,000 in a year when he had let his house and been inadvertently left off the electoral register. He had been a bona fide resident taxpayer all his life, had donated as such in previous years, and has indeed done so since. So the party knew that he was a permissible donor but did not realise that he had been left off the electoral roll, without his or its knowledge, for one year only. I should have thought that that qualified as a reasonable excuse within the spirit of the Minister’s Amendment 97, which he so eloquently moved and spoke to in Committee on 5 May at cols. GC 167 to 171 of the Official Report. It was, after all, obviously an innocent mistake. In this respect, I note also the Minister’s latest circular on the Bill dated 12 June on the commission’s enforcement policy in which he says that it is suggested that, ""the Commission may decide to take no action at all if they were of the view that ‘the contravention was so trivial or inadvertent, and the risk of the regulated entity failing to meet the relevant obligation in future so slight, that it is not appropriate to take any action’"." The noble Lord went on to say that alternatively the commission might believe that an individual or organisation needed to improve its capacity to comply with the law and would then set up some form of training. I should have thought that either course of action was pretty obvious in this case. In its latest briefing on the Bill, the commission says that it does not support the amendment, because the proposal, ""to widen the scope for permissibility along eligibility to register would create additional burdens and present uncertainty for regulated entities in confirming permissibility of donors"." That is where proposed new subsection (3) of the amendment comes in. If a treasurer receives a donation from someone who is not on the electoral roll but whom he knows is eligible to be on it, then he may accept the donation but he must report it to the commission, together with the justification for his certainty. I think that I am right in saying that the donation is likely to be more than £7,500 and therefore worth taking just that little bit of trouble over. I have to say that the Electoral Commission has behaved in a completely different way. It took the United Kingdom Independence Party to court, where it lost. The judge found, all the same, that £18,000 of the donation which had to be repaid was bona fide and should have been allowed. Not content with having lost in court, the Electoral Commission has now gone for judicial review, and the case is being referred back to the court. Further than that, the commission has made it clear that, if necessary, it will take the case to the High Court, which is something that the donor in question and UKIP cannot possibly afford. I do not call that a light touch. However, I think that this amendment should help. If a treasurer knows that a donor is permissible, it is not difficult to justify that to the Electoral Commission. There is one other point that I should bring to your Lordships’ attention. I believe that I am right in saying that the Bill does not change the present Act’s provisions about legacies to political parties, so bequests can be accepted from anyone who was on the electoral register at any time within five years before death. Someone could live abroad in a tax haven for up to five years before he dies and still leave a large sum to a political party. This means that physical presence on the register in the year of donation does not always apply. I suggest that it should not apply, as the amendment proposes. I am not criticising the legacy provisions, but mention them in support of the amendment, which I trust your Lordships will be able to accept.