Political Parties and Elections Bill

My Lords, I and my colleagues very strongly support these amendments, as we did in Grand Committee. Indeed, my noble friend Lord Oakeshott may refer to the specific issue of how the criteria for entry into this House now follows the pattern to which the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, has already referred. For goodness sake, if it is practically possible to identify the tax status of those entering this House, it must surely also be possible to do the very same thing for donors to political parties. I intend to speak only briefly on this issue, as I hope that we shall also hear from the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who has put his name to these amendments. As the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, has already said, this set of amendments had the support of an unusually large number of Members of Parliament, from the Back Benches of all parties. They were tabled by Mr Gordon Prentice but not put to the vote; by an accident of history, they were not passed there. However, unless we allow ourselves the privilege of putting this into the Bill, it will never be discussed in the House of Commons, despite the support of a very large number of Back Benchers. The effect is that it would require a permissible donor to be resident in the United Kingdom for the purposes of Part 14 of the Income Tax Act 2007, not simply to be a non-domiciled UK resident. When we discussed this in Committee, Ministers came up with a number of apparent practical difficulties. I suggest to them that where there is a will, there is a way. It is important that they should be forced to look carefully at the practicalities of this between now and Third Reading, and if they cannot accept that it is practical to do this at that stage, we should nevertheless demand that there is an opportunity for the other place to discuss this. There is an issue of principle here. Members of your Lordships' House who are steeped in history will recall that the rebels in the United States went under the great slogan, "No taxation without representation". In a sense, we are turning that upside down and saying, "No representation without taxation". That is the basic fact. It is surely right that no person who is not liable for tax in the United Kingdom should be permitted to influence the use of taxpayers’ money, money paid by those who do pay tax and are liable—you and me. That should be an intrinsic principle. There is a subsidiary issue that I would like to draw to the attention of the Minister at this stage because it arises out this. In his letter of 12 June, he wrote: ""I know that concerns have been expressed about the potential for making multiple donations just below the thresholds to avoid the recording and reporting requirements"." In the otherwise very comprehensive briefing that he has given at all stages, the Minister has been very conscientious in giving us a response to a query or a concern of that sort, but no such response appeared in this letter, at Second Reading or in Committee. A foreign donor could very easily avoid the restrictions of reporting or recording by simply making a payment every week of the year, but just below the threshold— £1 below the threshold every week of the year—so we have to be extremely careful. Even if this amendment is passed, and I hope it will be, we must be very careful that that other loophole is not still available to foreign donors who, because they keep just below the threshold, are not required to be recorded or reported to the commission. If we leave the Bill as it is, without a clear statement that these sorts of donations from foreign sources are not permissible, the Bill will not fulfil the requirements that the Government have placed upon it. Even since the Bill was in Grand Committee, there is greater awareness of the potential corruption of our political system by people with very large chequebooks who can buy their way into influencing a relatively small number of constituencies, the marginal seats. It takes us right the way back to the purchase of seats before the Reform Act 1832. As the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said, unless we stand up for the right of citizens of this country who pay taxes to be the people who decide how our political system works, the House of Commons will not get its opportunity, and the Bill will be weaker for it.