Examination of Witnesses (Questions 230-239)
FRANK HINDLE,
COLLEEN FLETCHER
AND DAVID
SIMPSON
16 MAY 2006
Q230 Chairman: Colleen Fletcher and David
Simpson, we welcome you back because you have been before us before.
Frank Hindle, thank you very much for coming. I am sorry you have
had a long wait although I hope it has been a reasonably interesting
one. You may have noticed us asking some fairly tough questions
of the people we have had in already who have responsibility for
things. That is really not our purpose in inviting you here today.
We wanted to get some local flavour of how these things are seen
by people each of whom has recent practical experience at the
level of constituency operation, agenting and all of that. Just
very briefly, and you understand that because there are three
of you the more succinct you can be the more we can get out of
you, have you found it increasingly difficult—and I am not
trying to put you in any kind of partisan situation here—in
general to recruit people into active membership and participation?
You do not have to try to say, "We are doing better than
the others". We are after the truth.
David Simpson: I think all voluntary
organisations, Chairman, have found engaging people in community
activity at any level more and more difficult over the years and,
of course, that truism follows with political parties. All I can
say is that we have plateau'd as a party overall and have started
to go up a little bit since we had another leadership change recently,
and I think that things are moving forward, but it is difficult
to engage people overall in community activity, and local politics
is still, I think and believe, a community activity.
Frank Hindle: I would agree with
that. Also, the reputation we as politicians generate for ourselves
does not help encourage people to join us.
Colleen Fletcher: I would agree
with most of those comments. I really do not have anything to
add to that.
Q231 Chairman: That was very consensual,
so from here on in—
Colleen Fletcher: Oh, no!
Chairman: I was going to say that from
here on in all you need to do is chip in when you feel you have
something to add and we will assume not total agreement but that
it is unnecessary to challenge if you do not agree.
Q232 Dr Whitehead: What is the financial
relationship you find between your local associations and your
national parties, both in terms of what comes down to the local
party from national financing and also, in terms of fundraising,
do you find yourselves as local parties under any sort of pressure
to raise money which essentially goes nationally rather than is
raised and used locally?
Colleen Fletcher: In my party
we do not raise money locally that goes nationally anyway. All
money that we raise locally we spend locally. The money that we
get from the national party is through membership subscriptions
which we get a proportion of, and the other proportion goes towards
staff, premises, et cetera.
David Simpson: From our party's
point of view our local associations are very distinct and separate
and they do their own fund raising. This is highlighted, if I
can give you brief stats, in terms of the number of local accounting
units or constituency associations that have to make returns to
the Electoral Commission for having a turnover of more than £25,000.
If you look back over the three years since that came into force,
in each of those last three years the Conservative Party has made
a return of something in excess of 300 accounting units. The Liberal
Democrats have been between 63 and now 103 this year, I think
it is.
Q233 Chairman: That is units you
have declared with more than £25,000 turnover?
David Simpson: That is right,
and the Labour Party are now at the figure of 38. That deals with
the way they are funded. You have just explained, Colleen, that
all your membership money goes nationally. Ours goes locally.
Colleen Fletcher: No; I said a
proportion of it goes locally.
Q234 Chairman: Do you have a quota
system?
David Simpson: We have a quota
system, a sort of campaign subscription, that we encourage our
local constituencies to raise towards our central costs, so we
do have money coming up from the local fundraising effort. The
most important thing as far as I am concerned as a local practitioner
as well as being a national party official is that in my local
constituency in Wimbledon we are expected to seek to raise enough
money to cover our own costs and make some contribution towards
the central funds of our party organisation.
Q235 Chairman: Frank Hindle?
Frank Hindle: We are different
again. Most of our subscription goes to the central party. A small
amount comes down to the regions and local party but the local
parties do their own fundraising and keep their funds and the
national party does its fundraising and keeps its funds, although
sometimes the national party will provide funds for particular
seats.
Mr Tyrie: I am thoroughly confused now.
Sorry; I really am.
Chairman: That is because there are three
different parties doing things three different ways.
Q236 Dr Whitehead: In the light of
what you said about local fundraising and how that works have
you found that the public have particular concerns about what
is known about the large sums of money that are raised for particular
political parties from wealthy donors? How does that resound in
terms of what you said about local fundraising efforts?
Frank Hindle: It is not an issue
which comes up on the doorstep. As I said, first of all in terms
of the fundraising, the fundraising by and large is not from members
of the public; it is from members, but in terms of, say, canvassing
for local elections I do not think anybody has stopped us and
said, "What is up?", in commenting on national funding
issues which we were talking about at the time. On the other hand
I go into work and I get ribbed about "What was the cost
of a peerage today?" or whatever, and so clearly it is an
issue in people's minds but perhaps they do not bring it to us
at the local level.
David Simpson: I would not disagree
with that. It is not something which I have found recently hitting
me on the doorstep when canvassing for my own local elections.
Q237 Dr Whitehead: What you could
say in terms of the funding that goes to the national campaigns
is that in a sense that is where money from large donations largely
goes. How do you perceive voters at local level engage with those
national campaigns as they roll out? I think it has been said
that there are in a sense two worlds of campaigning, are there
not? There is the national campaign and the local campaign which
is largely funded in the way you have described.
David Simpson: National campaigning
quite clearly is a separate issue. It is to deal with the projection
of a party across the piece. Locally, when it comes to campaigning
and the three or four weeks of an election campaign, you are trying
to get the views of that individual candidate (or local candidate
if it is local elections) across to a very localised community,
so life is totally different in that respect, and I think it is
important that that differentiation remains.
Q238 Chairman: Is there really a
differentiation?
David Simpson: There is.
Q239 Chairman: Is there a genuine
differentiation given that a lot of national campaigning now takes
the form, for example, of mailings sent to target seats from the
centre, not mentioning the name of the local candidate because
that would put them into the wrong balance sheet, but obviously
intended to give a lot of support to the election of that candidate
in that area?
Frank Hindle: There is a legal
differentiation certainly. We can put posters up that say "Liberal
Democrats" or "Conservative" or whatever, and that
is national expenditure. The fact that all 10,000 of them are
in one constituency is neither here nor there, but there is a
practical effect as well. More and more we are noticing a practical
effect of major campaign resources being deployed in particular
seats. It might be that a party uses a call centre extensively
in one particular constituency. It might be literature and target
letters. It might be billboards. Those are national things but
you cannot separate them from the local and it does have an impact
and it is something we have to deal with.
Colleen Fletcher: I would agree
with that.
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