My Lords, I think that it might be my turn now. First, I apologise for not being in the House for the session before lunch. I was attending the Committee on Standards in Public Life, of which I am a member. That committee, as I have reminded the House before, has on it a representative of the Labour Party, Margaret Beckett, a representative of the Conservative Party, Jeremy Wright, and a representative of the Liberal Democrats. It is under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Evans of Weardale, who is of course a Cross-Bench Member of this House, and it has a majority of independent members.
As the noble Lord, Lord Harris, just reminded the House, the committee produced a report, Regulating Election Finance, which is quite thick and I would like to say quite substantial. It makes the case eloquently and clearly, based on evidence, about the things that need to be improved in our electoral regime, the things that need to be protected and the things that need to be prevented. It does not contain a recommendation that coincides with Clause 27.
I have asked the Minister before whether he would be prepared to give us some kind of ministerial or departmental list in which the 47 recommendations that appear in the report cross-reference with the Elections Bill. His answer last time was that the Government gave their reply to this report last October. I took advantage of the committee meeting this morning just to make sure that I was not mistaken and took another careful look at what the Minister said about the report, specifically what his response said about recommendation 21. The answer that he gave in his letter was that, broadly speaking, the Government were thinking about it.
A slightly more detailed annexe brings together five or six of the recommendations in the report, including recommendation 21. I will not reproduce exactly the reasons given for not proceeding with any of them because I assume that that will be part of the Minister’s wind-up speech in a few minutes’ time. Broadly speaking, it says, “It is all complex, it could easily make it much more difficult for people, it is not proportionate and really we were taking into account a lot of other views and consideration and it needs detail”, et cetera. Noble Lords will obviously be able to hear it in a more refined form when the Minister winds up.
What the response does not do at all is to answer why recommendation 21 should not form part of this Bill. Paragraph 8.29 of the report says:
“The Electoral Commission explained in their 2015 General Election spending report that it is difficult to identify in the spending returns how much targeted spending has been incurred and if it has been correctly attributed to the relevant limits.”
So the Electoral Commission identified a specific problem of third-party spending targeted but not properly attributed to the relevant limits. The same paragraph goes on to say:
“The Hodgson report later made a similar recommendation. We agree that this change should be made to increase the transparency around campaigning that is carried out on behalf of political parties.”
Recommendation 21 is very similar to the explanatory note attached to the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Collins:
“Parties should be required to identify what is spent by third parties as targeted spending on their behalf. The government should introduce a specific reporting category for targeted expenditure that non-party campaigners have spent in relation to an authorisation given by a political party.”
3.45 pm
That recommendation seemed to the committee at the time to be soundly based on the intelligence and evidence available, first, from the Electoral Commission in its 2015 general election report and, secondly, from what we referred to, rather offhandedly. as the Hodgson report—the noble Lord is in his place—which made a similar recommendation, as well as from other evidence that we took both verbally and in writing and which is published and available on the committee’s website. In paragraph 8.30, we went on to say:
“We also agree with Lord Hodgson’s proposal that non-party campaigners should have to disclose more information about themselves.”
Amendments to that effect have come before this House as part of this process.
Even if the Minister does not change his winding-up speech, what I hope he will hear is that the people who have looked at this with an objective and serious eye—I put the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and the Electoral Commission in that category and I am brave enough to put the Committee on Standards in Public Life in that category—have seen that there is a weakness that needs to be fixed. The issue is not whether there are no weaknesses; it is what on earth Clause 27 is supposed to fix, because it does not fix that issue. What it does, as we have heard eloquently expressed by a number of noble Lords who take the Labour Whip, is have a potentially severe and adverse effect on them and on the trade union movement.
I put in parentheses that I think that it is extremely unlikely that the Liberal Democrat Christian fellowship, which I happen to be a member of, would be in a position to put any money into anything. However, I recognise the point made eloquently by the noble Lord, Lord Mann, that maybe those of us who have Liberal clubs in our constituencies should be looking at this. In the constituency in which I live and which I represented for 18 years at the other end of the building, I think that we have three Conservative clubs and, sadly, only one Liberal club, so it could be that my Conservative colleagues are at even more risk than we might be as a result of the unintended consequences of this clause.
The clause fails to address the issue that was identified, but it does address some other issue that nobody can quite put their finger on—at least, it does not seem to be a reputable thing that it puts its finger on. Perhaps there is some solution or purpose that all of us other than the Minister have completely overlooked, but we shall find that out in a moment or two. Not only does the clause fail to answer a question but it has unintended consequences that are quite likely to finish up backfiring, much to the detriment of the Conservative supporters of the clause as it stands.
I make the point as strongly as I can that when we legislate in this House, that legislation is supposed to improve things and not make them worse. It is supposed to improve things in the eyes of those of us who make the legislation and in terms of the people who are the subjects or the victims, as the case may be, of our legislative efforts. One thing that we ought to improve by way of this Bill is the overall fairness of our electoral process. We ought to continue to make it something to which ordinary folk have access. In so far as we inhibit third parties contributing to our democratic process, whether they are recognised components of civic society such as trade unions, informal components such as Liberal clubs and Conservative clubs or special interest groups, all those people ought to be able to play an active part.
The problem that has emerged, which this clause does not tackle, is how targeted spending by one or other or more of those bodies should be accounted for in local and national campaigning. In national campaigning it is an irrelevant consideration, but in local campaigning it is highly relevant and surely it must be the case that ordinary folk ought to be able to contribute to those campaigns and that the candidates and agents of those campaigns ought to have a duty to say how much help they received. Some of the regulations we have at the moment succeed in doing that, but there was a specific gap, which was appreciated and notified by the Committee on Standards in Public Life in recommendation 21. I very much hope, not with a tremendous amount of expectation, that the Minister may be able to adapt his pro-forma wind-up speech to take some account of the concerns that have been raised in the debate so far.