My Lords, I shall also speak to Amendments 54 and 56. Amendments 49 and 54 are paving amendments, and the bulk of what I want to say relates to Amendment 56.
The role of a Back-Bencher moving amendments is to spend a great deal of one’s time pushing on doors that are firmly shut and remain so. But every now and then a door opens and one staggers into the room off-balance with surprise, and so it is today. It is therefore right that I should begin by thanking the Minister and the Bill team for the way they have responded to Amendment 54, which I tabled in Committee and has now expanded to this group of amendments. I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, who is not in his place, for again putting his name to an amendment in this revised group.
I do not intend to repeat my remarks except to say that the amendment is intended to address head-on the so-called chilling effect on third-party campaigning resulting from the provisions of the 2014 Act. At the heart of that problem is what is known as the “intent test”. The wording in the Act catches for regulatory purpose any activity that
“can reasonably be regarded as intended to promote or procure electoral success at any relevant election”.
The decision on which actions or activities cross the line lies with the Electoral Commission. I make it clear that the commission has gone out of its way since the passage of the 2014 Act to reassure third-party campaigners about how it intends to implement these provisions, but we are here today scrutinising primary legislation and we want to future-proof it as far as
possible. That includes future-proofing it from a future Electoral Commission that may adopt a less collaborative approach than the current one.
The answer is to introduce a series of statutory codes that have the following advantages: first, they require the Electoral Commission to undertake the intellectual heavy lifting needed to produce a code giving clarity and certainty to third-party campaigners; secondly, they give Parliament the opportunity to scrutinise and approve the initial codes and any revisions thereto; and, thirdly, they give third-party campaigners the knowledge that compliance with the code provides a statutory defence.
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Although the intent test is by some distance the most important aspect of third-party campaigning in need of a statutory code, other areas would usefully benefit from similar treatment. The amendment as drafted provides for that. The new amendment differs from the earlier one in only three ways. Two areas arise from the conventions of parliamentary drafting—that to identify specific issues or bodies risks diminishing the importance of others. So, the references in the earlier amendment to a code to define “the public” and to include civil society groups among those who have to be consulted are omitted. However, I hope that my noble friend the Minister will shortly be able to say on the Floor of the House that those omissions do not reflect any diminution in their relevance or importance. The only other change in drafting is to deal with the particular position of the devolved Administrations.
I end by thanking all those who have thrown their weight behind making these changes and, last but not least, my noble friend the Minister and the Bill team. I beg to move.