Schedule 2
Political Parties and Elections Bill
2:45 pm
Michael Wills (Minister of State, Ministry of Justice; North Swindon, Labour)
I am slightly surprised by the grounds on which the hon. Member for Huntingdon moved the amendment. I thought he was going to suggest something else, such as the view that a court rather than the commission should consider the representations. The hon. Gentleman seems to have constructed rather a complicated rationale, which I am frankly baffled by. Deleting proposed new paragraph 2 would simply mean that the commission would not be able to take into account any representations against the imposition of the sanction, effectively rendering the representations process meaningless. I had hoped that all members of the Committee would have welcomed the opportunity to make such representations to the commission.
As the hon. Gentleman is aware, there is already an appeals process built into this sanction; should the commission reject representations, the recipient may appeal to a county court or, in Scotland, to the sheriff. That process is there not to protect the commission from having made a mistake, but because it is simply a matter of natural justice that people should be able to make representations against an imposition. That is set out in proposed new paragraph 6(7). I remind the hon. Gentleman that the additional representations stage was incorporated into the 2008 Act in the Lords, as it was felt that it would add an extra safeguard, not for the regulator but against wrongful imposition of the sanction. It does not replace the appeals process to the courts; it is meant to be an extra safeguard, which, I thought, the Committee were ardently seeking in every area. I hope we can all agree that the amendment should not proceed.