Clause 10
Political Parties and Elections Bill
3:30 pm
David Howarth (Shadow Solicitor General, Ministry of Justice; Cambridge, Liberal Democrat)
The Committee has only 24 minutes left, and I feel not only that will we not have a chance to discuss the matters later in the list, but that we do not have enough time to discuss this matter in the depth that it requires. I am sure that the Committee will agree that this is a matter to which we ought to return, in detail, on Report.
The hon. Member for Battersea has moved an amendment that assumes that triggering is not the right thing to do. I will not to spend the Committee’s time explaining why I think that he is right to make that assumption. That leaves only two other solutions to the problem of when local spending limits should kick in. One is the fixed-month solution that he suggested; the other is to say that permanent local spending limits should be there all the time.
I think that the permanent local spending limit should be the solution. The problem with the fixed-month solution that the hon. Gentleman has proposed is that we do not have fixed-term Parliaments. His proposal is certainly better than the suggestion made by the Electoral Commission, which said that the limit should apply a certain number of months before the election. One would have to be a mind reader to work out when that would apply.
Nevertheless, there is a different problem with the hon. Gentleman’s solution, which would apply a certain number of months after the previous one. It is obviously clearer, but it still gives an advantage to the incumbent party, because the leaders of the incumbent party—not necessarily the people who are standing for Parliament for that party—will have a much better idea about when the election will happen than the Opposition parties, and they can give signals to their candidates to spend. [Interruption.] We know what happened last year. Those were unusual circumstances, where the signals got confused on all sides.
The advantages of incumbency are great, and they include, on the whole, being in a better position to predict or understand the timing of elections than the Opposition. Therefore, Government candidates will be in a position to spend more earlier; they will not have to delay their spending to get it into the first regulated period. That would not be the case if the regulated period started so soon after the previous election that no one would plausibly call an election at that point. The trouble is that even the hon. Gentleman’s permanent suggestion—not the one that would apply to the five-year part—will not really achieve that end. As we have seen, it is still quite possible for Prime Ministers to think that they should call an election after two and a half years.
The only way to solve the problem properly is to ignore a fixed starting point and go to a third solution. Admittedly, it is one that the Electoral Commission says is difficult to administer and everyone says would raise problems with enforcement, but it is nevertheless clearer. It is to have a permanent local cap on spending. There are various ways to do that—some are proposed on today’s amendment paper—but the principle is clear.