Political Parties and Elections Bill

I am coming to that, my Lords. As the noble Lord points out, there is also a communications allowance of £10,000 per year. Over the lifetime of a Parliament, that builds up to £50,000 spent in a particular constituency on promoting the case of the incumbent Member. It is therefore not surprising that the non-governing party, the non-incumbent, would seek to raise funds to try to match the firepower that has been ranged against it in a democratic process. I wish only to put that point on the record. I am not saying that I have an answer for it, nor am I saying what we ought to do about those allowances. That needs to be addressed as part of the Kelly review that is taking place, along with the questions of whether they are inadvertently funding big money donations and encouraging reliance on those big donations. The interparty talks were an important part of the process and all parties have engaged in them. The argument was that if we were going to have meaningful reform, all the political parties needed to get around the table, have their heads metaphorically banged together and sort this out, realising that there is a problem. The trade unions are perceived to have an influence on the Government. It causes concern from time to time when you see questions in debates about public sector funding cuts, and then you have a party in government faced with the prospect of a union that represents members in the public sector threatening to withhold a £1 million donation, which was announced this week, unless it gets some movement. The fact that three out of every four pounds that the Labour Party receives is from the trade unions has a disproportionate influence on the process. I listened carefully to the expertise in the House regarding how trade union membership works. One of our principal disagreements about the proposed amendment on the donation cap, apart from the implications for public funding, is that it says that a member should be afforded an opportunity during the 12 months following the relevant expenditure to be exempted from contributing to the political fund of the union. Our party believes that it needs to go further. There ought to be an opportunity for an individual member to indicate whether they consent to having their fund given to a political party. In most cases such funding goes to the Labour Party, but I believe that the Liberal Democrats also get funding from UNISON. If this is a political levy, individual members of the union should have the right to express their preference regarding which political party it ought to go to. They should be able to do so by opting in to the political fund, rather than having it assumed and having to go through the process of contracting out. The last meeting of the inter-party talks on the funding of political parties, chaired by Sir Hayden Phillips, took place on 31 October 2007. It was suggested that these had somehow broken down and been brought to an undue end because of the Conservative Party’s attitude to funding. That is not the case, as the minutes show. On the second of the three pages of the minutes of the final meeting held on 31 October 2007, Sir Hayden Phillips said: ""As far as trade union affiliation fees the Conservative Party argued that the changes on affiliation fees contained in the draft agreement would only take people to where they believed the situation was at the current time regarding individual choice. Their view was that individual trade unionists should be able to make clearly voluntary donations to any party of the individual’s choice. They hoped the Labour Party would be willing to continue the Talks on the basis of further proposals which could be developed"" on this point. He continued: ""The Conservative Party saw no necessity for further controls on party spending, but would continue to discuss them as part of a package"" of reforms. This is Sir Hayden’s concluding point in the final meeting. It is worth getting on the record because the point of breakdown in the inter-party talks is something that has been discussed quite often. On page 3 of the minutes of the same meeting, Sir Hayden said that, ""if the other two parties were willing to accept the Conservatives’ proposals made in this meeting as the basis for further work, then it would be worthwhile asking the Secretariat to prepare further papers. Third, if there was no realistic prospect of an agreement at the present time on either basis, then the Talks should be suspended"." That is the final entry in the minutes because talks were suspended. It shows that there was clearly a breakdown in the inter-party talks on this central issue. I return to that principle to say that a holistic approach was absolutely necessary on this. I do not think that the public have the stomach for the significant increases that would be the consequence of the amendment being agreed. On the public funding of political parties, the need is very much for the inter-party talks to be reconvened to reintroduce and put everything on the table, including the developments that occurred before that time. This is a wide-ranging group of amendments and I apologise for taking so long to speak to them. However, they are very significant in terms of people’s future confidence in democracy. The amendment before us does not go nearly far enough; we need to go further. The cross-party talks need to be in place and there needs to be a holistic approach which embraces all these issues and recognises public attitudes and timing as regards current economic conditions.