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Lord Greaves: That is absolutely true. I should also report that in the case of Pendle—I must be careful what I say; I do not want to breach the protocols of
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4.15 pm
Lord Bates: In considering this, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, that some of us have been involved in by-elections where the Liberal Democrats tend to pride themselves on fighting vigorous and extremely well resourced campaigns, which are sometimes successful in exploiting a situation and are sometimes—as in Crewe and Nantwich—staggeringly unsuccessful. The resources that are deployed and co-ordinated nationally by the Liberal Democrats are immense. I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, will have heard the remarks of the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, about local resources. Perhaps they will be followed in future by-elections.
Lord Greaves: Does the noble Lord not understand the huge difference in the short period when a parliamentary by-election is taking place and all parties pump in enormous resources? In the past, when expense limits were very restricted, all parties knew how to avoid the limits. Let us be frank about that. All parties did it in a legitimate and legal, but nevertheless slightly dodgy, way. The fact that parliamentary by-election expense limits have been increased so substantially is therefore a good thing. There is all the difference in the world between a party—or two or three parties—going all-out during the four, six or eight weeks of a parliamentary by-election campaign and that level of spending being sustained over a number of years.
Lord Bates: I hear what the noble Lord says in defence. That leads me to my second point about the problem, which concerns the extent of the allowances, as my noble friend Lord Marland has mentioned. Allowances are available to an incumbent Member of Parliament not directly for campaigning purposes. The noble Lord was clear in saying that he did not accept the communications allowance. From our side, David Cameron has also it made very clear that we will remove it. There is a scale of allowances for a kind of soft campaigning. I recall in 1997, when I served in the other place, staff allowances were around £30,000 per year; they are now £90,000 per year. There are additional staff and other cost allowances of £37,000 per year. In addition, there is a communications allowance of £10,000 per year.
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In many ways, what we have to debate is the extent to which there ought to be a built-in bias in our system. The noble Baroness, Lady Gould, made absolutely the right point: we ought to seek a level playing field. My argument is that, when someone is contesting a seat with an incumbent, there is not a level playing field in the resources or opportunities that are available.
Lord Campbell-Savours: Let us take, for instance, a constituency where a Conservative Member of Parliament has £90,000 in allowances and a £10,000 communications allowance, the Labour candidate has a few thousand pounds and the Liberal Democrat candidate has even less. What will happen in those seats? Is that a level playing field? If the noble Lord is considering level playing fields, how will we make up this money? How can we have a level playing field while there is that inequality?
Lord Bates: That is the point that I am making. There needs to be some additional support, which many parties receive through their central funding. The Labour Party receives it very substantially, as I outlined yesterday at col. 190, when funds come from the trade unions into local associations where they are contesting particular key marginal seats.
Lord Campbell-Savours: The noble Lord seems to be saying that the trade unions should give the Labour Party more money. He is also arguing that the state should give the Labour Party more money. Is that what he is actually arguing?
Lord Bates: I am not arguing that; I am simply stating the facts. I shall come to the argument in a minute. The facts are simply that at the moment significant resources are going into particular seats from particular parties. The notion being presented is that somehow it is an outrage that people are targeting. I cannot believe that any political operation worthy of its name does not target its resources on the seats that it needs to win. That is what people have done since time immemorial. I cannot see what the issue is there.
Lord Campbell-Savours: I do not remember that when I was a candidate in Workington we targeted with vast sums of money on this scale. I asked a friend in the Pendle constituency to send me some of these documents. I have here the front pages of a publication that comes out monthly, Pendle Matters. The headlines include, “Tackling the credit crunch”, “Freeze council tax for two years” and “Labour’s war on the motorist”. Every month this material that I have here is circulating like a—
The Deputy Chairman of Committees: The noble Lord is out of order.
Lord Campbell-Savours: Every month material such as that in front of me is being circulated in the constituency. Does the noble Lord really believe that in those conditions there is a level playing field?
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Lord Bates: I am saying that there is a candidate who is, yes, getting some resources to contest a system that is weighted in favour of the incumbent. That is the point that I am making. I have been a Member of Parliament and many people in this Room have been parliamentary candidates. We know very well that the incumbent Member of Parliament gets many advantages in addition to the allowances. When you are the Member of Parliament you can go to places, you can be invited to factories, schools and hospitals, you have the opportunity through your advice surgery to meet the electorate and to serve them well, you have the opportunity to answer the 50 to 60 letters that you get per day and take up those cases, and you can use the media. Huge resources are deployed in that direction. I simply question the whole issue of what delivers fair elections. I noted the comment of the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, that the deepest pocket buys the seat. That is a very dangerous way of referring to the electorate.
I offer this view. It is not my noble friend Lord Ashcroft who will win the election, brilliant though he is as a strategist; it is Gordon Brown’s staggering mismanagement of the economy that will actually cost the Labour Government the next election when it is called. That is the point that we need to bear in mind. The point was made previously that people spent large sums of money, such as the £90,000 which was spent on the posters to which the noble Baroness referred but which failed to win the election. The electorate have made up their mind, although their mind is influenced. The quality of the organisation and the communication is very important for getting out the vote in an election, but the electorate can see through these things.
Baroness Gould of Potternewton: The noble Lord said that he agreed with my comment about having a level playing field. Does he therefore think that it is right—I get the impression that he is saying that it is perfectly okay—for someone to spend £90,000 on an election and for that not to be recorded as an election expense? Is that what the noble Lord is saying?
Lord Bates: The noble Baroness is very experienced. I do not mean to trespass on or demean her point. I was going to come to what she said about triggering, which is a key point. I remember from the campaigns in which I have been involved at local and national level that the way in which people got around the triggering was simply by becoming the editor of the local newsletter. Rather than having their names presented on the newsletters—
Baroness Gould of Potternewton: That is one of the nonsense arguments that I have heard against triggering over a number of years. The candidate may well have become the editor of the newsletter, but they did not put under it, “I am your candidate”. Those are the important words. It was an aim, but not one that was identified at that point with the candidature.
Lord Bates: But the noble Baroness knows that, if a leaflet goes out on a regular basis, with a picture on it of the person who happens to be in line to be the
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What I am struggling for is that from our point of view we are saying that we are open to this issue. We have accepted the issue that has come forward about the 55 months and the attempt to limit the amount spent in the pre-election period and we welcome the point made very clearly that there would be a commitment that the use of the communications allowance by incumbent members during that pre-election period would similarly be restricted and curtailed. That is making progress in the right direction, but I do not think that the wording of the noble Lord’s amendment or the stand clause debate that we are having takes us one step in the direction that I think in time we will all have to move.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Justice (Lord Bach): This has been a fascinating debate. Who said that the House of Lords was not a political House? I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, in particular for moving so briefly that this clause should not stand part. Of course, he did not repeat the arguments that he used yesterday, but I know where he is coming from on this issue. Some impressive speeches and powerful points have been made.
It is a long-standing and well supported principle that the amount of money that can be spent in pursuit of election should be limited. We must seek to achieve effective regulation of expenditure without introducing intolerable levels of uncertainty for those who are expected to abide by the regulations. We must also ensure at all times that the legislation in this area is not allowed to become a partisan tool. Any changes should command a reasonably broad consensus. As the Committee has heard on countless occasions, this has been an overriding objective for the Government throughout the passage of this Bill.
The current candidate spending limit ensures that there can be no uncertainty for those standing for election as, in practice, it applies only from the date of dissolution of Parliament, or the date of a person’s formal declaration as a candidate if that comes later, to the date of the election itself. After dissolution, there is certainty that an election will be taking place shortly and there is certainty as to what is and is not to be regarded as an election expense. However, expenditure outside of this short period is effectively unregulated. As a result, unregulated campaigning by candidates can and does occur to a significant extent. I think that there is agreement on all sides of the Committee, as there was in the other place, that this is a real problem which needs to be looked at.
As my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours gently reminded me, when the Bill was first introduced in the other place it included proposals to return to a form of the system that existed before the passage of the 2000 Act. My noble friend Lady Gould reminded us of this,
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It soon became clear that the proposals did not command widespread support. By way of example, the right honourable Member, Mr Maude, said:
“The proposal to return to triggering was universally condemned as a return to an unworkable, unwieldy rule that had long outlived its usefulness”.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/2/09; col. 1222.]
Lord Campbell-Savours: Where is that quote from?
Lord Bach: That was from Commons Report; I can give my noble friend the date in due course.
Lord Campbell-Savours: Is not the point that he made those comments after the abuse by the noble Lord, Lord Ashcroft, had begun, so he said that with the experience of the substantial amounts of money that can go to individual constituencies?
4.30 pm
Lord Bach: I am not going to comment on his state of mind at the time; I am trying to make the point that there was not widespread support for what was in the government Bill in the first place. By the way, the date was 9 February 2009.
I now quote from the shadow Secretary of State for Justice on the Liberal Democrat Benches, who, in the same debate, said:
“The mechanism now being proposed in place of triggering is certainly better than triggering, which never really worked. It simply resulted in a lot of angry letters being exchanged between agents, with one accusing another of having started election expenses and then getting a letter back”.
There was then an interruption, after which the honourable Member, Mr Howarth, continued:
“The hon. Member for Thurrock (Andrew Mackinlay) says that it did work. It worked in one sense, in that it represented a kind of background threat, but people who were brazen just got away with it anyway”.—[Official Report, Commons, 9/2/09; cols. 1225-26.]
I do not use those quotations to say that I agree with them; I mention them because they were said in another place about this matter. In those circumstances, it is hardly surprising, given that the Government are looking for consensus, that they did not find it on returning to some sort of triggering in the Bill. Both major opposition parties’ Front Benches clearly disagreed with triggering.
Lord Campbell-Savours: But does my noble friend not accept that, under the new arrangements, it will be possible for someone to describe themselves as the candidate for Parliament for a particular party within a month of a general election and then spend £100,000 per annum in that constituency with a view to winning the seat at the next general election for the first 55 months
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Lord Bach: All that I can say is that we are looking for consensus in this field, having recognised that there is a considerable problem that Parliament must deal with at some stage.
Lord Campbell-Savours: But this consensus is, I presume, arrived at between Mr Jack Straw and the opposition spokesmen in the House of Commons. Members of Parliament, including Labour Back-Benchers, have not approved the principle.
Lord Bach: I have to say that strictly speaking it was approved at Report in another place and I have to go on that.
It soon became clear that our proposals did not command widespread support—that is putting it mildly. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State therefore responded to the questions and concerns raised and brought forward amendments to the Bill at Report in the other place. Those amendments, which have become Clause 14, were made in another place without a Division. Clearly there is no broad consensus here today about those provisions.
Clause 14 takes a fresh approach to the problem of unregulated candidate spending before dissolution. It seeks to recognise certainty where it exists and, where possible, to provide for more effective regulation of candidate spending without raising uncertainty for those campaigning.
It is not right that pre-election spending at local level that is targeted at promoting the election of a candidate should be regulated only after the point when a person formally becomes a candidate under the law. However, in recognition of the very serious concerns about certainty and fairness relating to our original proposal, we think that the better approach is to apply this principle during a closely defined period.
Under our parliamentary system, the one thing that we know with certainty is the maximum possible length of a Parliament, which is set at 60 months. Clause 14 will therefore introduce a clear and certain start point for regulating candidate expenses, which is counted forwards from the date when a Parliament is first appointed to meet. It will introduce an additional limit on “pre-candidacy” election expenses, which begins at that clear start point and ends on the date of dissolution or the date, if later, when a person is formally declared to be a candidate. As previously mentioned, that is when one becomes formally regarded as a candidate under the 1983 Act, as amended by PPERA 2000. At that point, the existing controls on candidate spending will take effect, with the result that the existing limit will come into play at the same time and in the same way as it would under the present system.
We have considered carefully when to fix the start point for the new limit. We are clear that expenses should be regulated only when it is known with certainty that a general election is reasonably imminent. We have
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The proposed new limit would not apply for shorter Parliaments. In those cases, we consider that the uncertainty about whether and when an election might take place makes specifying a longer regulated period more difficult. It should be noted that the Electoral Commission supports the proposals in Clause 14. It did not support an amendment tabled in the other place that sought to shift the start point to 50 months. The commission considered that this would create,
We need to consider that important point. The new limit will regulate the same types of expenditure as the existing limit. The new limit will regulate all spending on these matters that is used,
mirroring how the existing limit applies.
It will not be possible for individuals to avoid the limit by stockpiling expenditure. The new limit will regulate all expenditure that is used during the regulated period, even where that expenditure is incurred beforehand. This mirrors how the existing limit treats expenditure. However, let me be clear that the new limit will not have retrospective effect, in that it will not apply to any expenses that are incurred before commencement of the clause and then used at a time when the new limit applies. That is to prevent the clause from applying to expenses that may already have been incurred before it became known by the person who incurred them that the new pre-candidacy limit was to be brought into existence.
The level of the spending limit itself will vary from constituency to constituency, according to the number of electors and the density of population. This, too, mirrors the approach taken to calculating the existing spending limit. For a typical constituency, the new limit will amount to around £30,000. Where a Parliament runs for more than 55 months but is dissolved before the statutory maximum length, the level of the spending limit will be reduced accordingly. This pro-rating is staggered to take account of fixed costs that may be involved in campaigning.
The 55-month point for the present Parliament is 11 December 2009. However, in the interests of clarity and simplicity, should the new limit be needed for the current Parliament, it would only begin to regulate expenses used after 1 January 2010. To be clear, expenses incurred before this date but used after it will be caught. It is only expenses that are incurred and used beforehand that will not be.
Clause 14, if carried, will be commenced by order following Royal Assent. It is the Government’s intention that the date of commencement will depend on the timetabling of the debate in the other place to consider the appropriate use of parliamentary allowances during the longer regulated period. That is a matter for the other place.
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I freely acknowledge that this clause does not represent a perfect solution to the problem of unregulated pre-dissolution candidate expenditure. It will not alter the present arrangements in the case of shorter Parliaments and, sadly, it has not proved possible to find a solution for such circumstances that all parties can support. But we believe that it represents an advance over the current position and, crucially, the measure commands broad support among the parties in another place.
My noble friend Lady Gould asked what is to happen next. My reply is that the 55-month provision will regulate candidate spending for a longer period in Parliaments that run either to or close to full term. That is an improvement, however minor she and other noble Lords may consider, on the status quo. If we can secure cross-party agreement to candidate spending restrictions which apply in more elections and which do not imply excessive uncertainty, we will look to bring measures forward. However, in 2005-06, the Government’s proposal for a standard four-month regulated period was rejected, as was triggering. That is why we now propose in Clause 14 a system that counts forward from the last general election.
I have one last point to make. The communications allowance has been brought up on a number of occasions during the debate. I remind the Committee that parliamentary allowances, including of course the House of Commons communications allowance, exist to enable Members of the other place to fulfil their parliamentary duties. The proposals for the House of Commons communications allowance came not from Her Majesty’s Government but from the Members Estimate Committee and the House of Commons Commission. Any decisions in relation to that allowance are for the other place to take collectively. I would expect the Members Estimate Committee to consider whether any changes to the rules on the use of allowances might be appropriate as a result of the changes made by this Bill.
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