My Lords, I may be able to join up some of the dots in what has just been said, particularly to draw out the position of the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, said it would be really useful to know which of the CSPL recommendations the Government believed—or thought or imagined—they had ticked off: which boxes they have ticked and which they have not. Maybe the Minister in reply could undertake to write us a letter which sets out the recommendations and whether the Government have, have not or have partly fitted them into the Bill; I think that would be to the benefit of the debate. Of course, the very first recommendation of the CSPL in that report is that there should be a comprehensive Bill on all election law, as set out by the Law Commission. I know the Minister, in replying at Second Reading, explained that it was all too busy and too complex, so recommendation 1 is not going to happen at this time, but not doing recommendation 1 is causing problems with a whole lot of other things that are happening.
In defence of Amendment 25A, proposed by my noble friend Lord Rennard, the current position is as it was when the Electoral Commission drew up guidance in 2020. It submitted it to the Cabinet Office so that it could be published as a statutory instrument and, whatever the defects of statutory instruments, its guidance would in fact have come before the House. So, there is a downstream process—it may not be very effective, but it does to some extent, I hope, tick that particular box.
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There is an interconnecting, moving part here, which is the strategic statement by the Government about the direction in which the Electoral Commission should pursue its activities. For me, Amendment 25 is the wrong way to go. One person’s clarification can be another person’s finger on the scale, making the weighing machine show a faulty reading. There are far too many clarifications in this Bill which, funnily enough, on examination always turn out to have the same kind of impact on the level playing field. It would be right for the Electoral Commission to do what it was set up to do, which is to regulate elections. It should be for it to draw up the guidance, which should be submitted to the Government and published as a statutory instrument which would come before both Houses for proper examination.
The point that both amendments are making is that we must have that guidance published. Some of us have been making the point, through Parliamentary Questions, debates and so on, about why that guidance has sat undistributed for two years and is now being superseded, if this legislation goes through, by a further process with no timescale attached to it, which will presumably be published some time this year. Perhaps the Minister can comment on when the Government think that guidance will be published, by whoever brings it up.
The search for clarity, which seemed to be the only argument left in the Minister’s locker about Clause 18 as a whole has been deliberately held back for two years on this very issue and is about to be held back for a further year, or six or nine months, perhaps, before it comes into force. If there is really an argument that agents and candidates have been waiting for guidance, a good question to the Minister is: why has the Cabinet Office sat on some perfectly good guidance for all that time? It is not secret guidance—the content of that guidance has been known—but it has not come into force in any way.
Maybe this Bill does mean that some of the guidance must be brought up to date to take account of the new realities, although some of us wish it did not have to. However, given that, we need to hear the timetable as well as the mechanism for ensuring that the guidance happens. I would prefer it to be guidance where there was not a Secretary of State with a finger on the scales ensuring that the reading favoured one particular point of view.