My Lords, I shall speak only on Part 2. I must first declare some non-pecuniary interests. I am a member of the Commission on Civil Society and Democratic Engagement, which was set
up under the chairmanship of the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries of Pentregarth, who spoke earlier. We will produce our report next Tuesday in time for the Committee stage of the Bill. I very much hope that all noble Lords will make a little time to have a look at it because during the past few weeks we have listened to a vast amount of evidence, including from the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and we have taken, as it were, views from all parts of the United Kingdom.
What I am going to say tonight is a personal view because the report is not yet finalised. However, having listened to and read all the evidence, there have been times when my reaction was very much that of Victor Meldrew in “One Foot in the Grave”: that is, “I don’t believe it!”. How could a Government, any Government, make such a hash of an issue on which we are almost entirely united—that of transparency at election time? None of us wants money to be able to buy votes. We agree that there should be clear limits on spending and the public should be told who spends what. If anything, we should be looking tonight at a short Bill with all-party support, which makes some amendments to the Political Parties Act to improve its clarity. That would have all-party support. Instead, undue haste has produced a quite dreadful piece of legislation which has managed not only to divide the political parties but has united charities and organisations of every kind against it. How do you manage to alienate the Women’s Institute, Mumsnet, the National Trust, Greenpeace, the British Legion, the Countryside Alliance, the nurses, the RSPB and so on against you so that they combine together? You could not do it if you tried, but this coalition has managed it. When listening to the evidence, I did at times wonder whether someone with a sense of humour had slipped Part 2 into this Bill to test whether anyone in this House was awake, but the 40-strong speakers list shows that we are. If there are notably few Back-Bench coalition speakers, I can attribute it only to a number of those who normally stand up for free speech having adopted the maxim, “If you can’t say anything good, then say nothing at all”.
Part 2 is not wholly useless. It could serve a professor of politics very well as an example to his students of how not to legislate. It contains just about every error that a Government could make. There is not time tonight to detail them all, so I will take a selection of the major ones. The first thing you do is legislate in haste. Part 2 seems to have its origins in a meeting between the Prime Minister and his deputy in July, when they realised that unless something was done pretty quickly this autumn, a Bill would not reach the statute book a year before the fixed date of the next general election. There was no real urgency whatever about Part 2. We have been told by Members in the other place that Members of Parliament were not clamouring it, and neither was anybody else.
Although the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 had its critics, and various improvements could have been made to it, it has worked reasonably well in two general elections. We were told that there has been no raft of complaints about it. There has been no formal investigation or inquiry and no prosecutions. It is not perfect: there is some lack of clarity and the Electoral Commission’s
review has suggested improvements, but it is workable. Nevertheless, Part 2 was shoved into this Bill and, as we have heard, it was put before the Commons just as the House rose for the Summer Recess—indeed, the very day before.
The second error the Government made was not to consult those directly affected. They did not consult charities or campaigning organisations. Indeed, they did not consult properly those with responsibility for setting up and policing the new legislation. The Electoral Commission were, it seems, told what to do, not asked. Of the 50 recommendations it made in its review, only one was put into the Bill, and that was done in the opposite way to that which it had suggested. The Electoral Commission advised that staff costs should come into the equation, but suggested that if it were done, the limits should be raised. The Government have, indeed, included staff costs but are now trying to lower the limits.
Others have commented on the next error, which is particularly strange coming from a coalition which speaks of making “a bonfire of regulation”: that is, a massive increase in the regulatory burden and, by lowering the limits, an increase in the number of those to whom it applies. We should not forget that criminal sanctions will be applied, which are wholly disproportionate given the sums involved in many cases.
A further error is to try to push through a Bill which is so badly drafted that a specialist lawyer giving evidence to us told us that she could not conceive that it had ever been seen by a parliamentary draftsman. Lack of clarity and the sheer incomprehensibility of its wording mean that any organisation without an in-house specialist will have to seek expensive legal advice simply to understand what it means. The noble Lord, Lord Greaves, referred to that issue. I treat your Lordships to a few lines by way of a sample. Clause 28 on constituency limits at page 17, line 5 of the Bill, says:
“Subject to sub-paragraphs (5) to (7), the limit applying to controlled expenditure which is incurred by or on behalf of the recognised third party in the relevant period in any particular parliamentary constituency is the relevant proportion of the limit mentioned in paragraph 3(2A) … For this purpose “the relevant proportion” means— A/B where— A is the number of days in the relevant period; B is the number of days in the period which is the relevant period for the purposes of paragraph 3”.
How is somebody sitting in a small charity to make head or tail of that? The result, of course, is that they will be frightened off—they will be terrified of doing anything that puts them over the limit—