Political Parties and Elections Bill

My Lords, the noble Lord’s concern is not necessarily with me but with Sir Hayden Phillips’s principle number one. If he dissents from that, he is entitled to make the point. I happen to disagree with him. There is an argument that piecemeal reform sometimes lacks overarching principles. However, good legislation has overarching principles that should be followed through in the process of getting everyone to the table in order to reach some agreement. That leads me to a key point on the donations cap. There is a certain unstated element—I shall say no more than that—on which I hope the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, might comment. I should be grateful for some clarity lest I inadvertently cast some aspersion on the motives here. There is an implication of a donations cap, as envisaged by the Hayden Phillips review. To plug the gap, there would be an introduction of public funding. The noble Lord is shaking his head, so I will be happy to take that away. However, the White Paper, Party Finance and Expenditure in the United Kingdom, says: ""The public funding schemes he proposed"—" that is, Sir Hayden Phillips— ""based on a donations cap of £50,000, would have an overall cost of around £20-£25m per year"." Four million pounds here, £20 million to £25 million there—we are beginning to build up to some significant sums of money. That comes on top of a concern that some people may be seeking tactical advantage, rather than a principled point of seeing a decline in income or a concern over future income streams, and hoping to replace it with public funding as a whole. When we talk about party funding, in many ways the arms race has been triggered by a dramatic increase in the amount of funding that is available to Members of Parliament in their constituencies—the incumbency factor. When I was serving in the other place, the office cost allowance, as it was called then, was in the region of £30,000. It was effectively enough to have an assistant, perhaps a part-time caseworker in the constituency, and then to pay for your printing, postage and telephones. Now that figure is up to £90,000 just for staff, and there is an additional element, the incidental expenses provision, which is another £21,000.