My Lords, I begin by welcoming the clarification in election law that necessary security costs for candidates must not be constrained by being included as part of their campaign spending that is set against election expense limits. On 28 January 2000, a friend of mine, Andrew Pennington, was working for an MP when he was murdered by an attacker who came to the advice centre of my late friend Lord Jones of Cheltenham when he serving as the town’s MP. In the 1980s, well before there were any funds for security at MPs’ offices, I used to run the campaign HQ for my friend the noble Lord, Lord Alton of Liverpool, which was where he held many advice centres as an MP. Anyone could walk in at any time. It was not safe. We need to protect Members of Parliament and all their staff, in this place and wherever they work, and we are thankful to all those who help to protect us in these dangerous times.

I also acknowledge that there is a case for uprating the mayoral election expense limits, and those for candidates for the Greater London Authority. But no case has been made for doing so by 81%, thereby increasing the unhealthy influence of big donors that has caused such problems and been so clearly exposed in recent weeks. Inflation, as measured by CPI, in the three years since the last London mayoral election has been about 18%. If we go back to the last London mayoral election in 2021, the three leading candidates each spent around £400,000, or 95% of the available election expense limit at the time. An increase now from £420,000 to £760,000 must be considered to be excessive. This is especially so when it means that the candidates are suddenly being allowed to spend an additional £340,000 in just the last six weeks of the campaign. Many of us here have experience of election planning and will know that parties will have budgeted perhaps a year ago to spend no more than the £420,000 limit in place until now.

It is not, however, just an extra £340,000 that is suddenly being pumped in for each of the London mayoral candidates. There are 14 constituency members of the Greater London Authority and, as the Minister said, the expense limit for each of those 14 candidates is suddenly being increased by the sum of £28,360. This means that each party with 14 candidates can now legally spend an extra £397,000 supporting them.

Then there are the party list candidates. A party will now be able to spend an extra £267,000 supporting its list. What does this mean for a party with a mayoral candidate and a full slate of candidates for the Greater London Assembly? It means that the total permitted expenditure for those parties will rise, at the drop of a hat, from £1,240,000 to £2,244,080. In London alone, a party will now be able to spend more than £1million extra in just six weeks before polling day on 2 May.

The expense limits are being raised not just for the London elections but for 11 more metro mayor elections across England covering almost half the country. Perhaps the Minister will be able to tell us what the combined increase will be in election expense limits for a party with a candidate in each of these 11 metro mayoral elections. What is the combined total of permitted election expenditure for these candidates under the present rules, and what will it be under these new ones? Perhaps the combined increase may be more than £1million, and this comes in all of a sudden, long after campaign budgets will have been set. A party with sufficient funds will be able to spend an extra £1million in London, and, if the figure is £1 million elsewhere, it will be spending over the next six weeks at the rate of a third of a million pounds per week, over and above existing plans. To be able to spend to the maximum of these new limits, it appears that the Conservative Party needs the donations of its disgraced donor, Frank Hester. Or are these increases simply being made because it has his donations? I think we should be told.

Last December, the Times reported that the Conservative Party is well on track to raise £50 million in a year. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in the very same month the Conservatives dramatically raised the expenditure limit for national parties in general elections from around £19.5 million to around £36 million. Is it not the truth of all these huge increases in election expense limits that the Conservative Party is feeling desperate? It lacks support, but it has money. It thinks that it needs to spend the £15 million believed to have been given by Frank Hester, the £5 million from Mohamed Mansour and all of the money from billionaire tax exiles whom it has just allowed to donate, and with as little scrutiny as possible, even if they have not lived here for several decades?

This is all about desperate spending to seek re-election, and not about the democratic principle of a level playing field in politics, which was established in law during Gladstone’s time. This principle was also agreed by all the parties in the legislation governing party expenditure in 2000. More recently, it has been supported by the words of the noble Lord, Lord True, in our debates on the Elections Act. However, action speaks louder than words, as they say, and it seems a very long time since the noble Lord, Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, became Prime Minister, and pledged to “take the big money out of politics”.

It is most regrettable that the excellent report of the Committee on Standards in Public Life of 2011, when my noble friend Lord Alderdice served on the CSPL, was not implemented by the coalition Government. This report proposed a cap of £10,000 on all donations. These new, extremely high election expense limits mean that, more than ever, all parties must go begging to major donors.

It is also clear that those who can make great profits from doing business with the current Government feel able to afford exceptionally large donations to the party in office. The increases proposed are enormous. They are being made very suddenly in close proximity to the elections. This is despite the convention, and the advice of the Electoral Commission, that, if significant changes are to be made to electoral law, they should be made at least six months in advance of any election.

There are only six weeks to go to polling day. The commission says that this is a significant change to the UK’s political finance controls. I have accepted that there is some evidence of the need for a modest increase in expense limits, as inflation has been around 10% over the last year, but changes could have been made a year ago, or after the last mayoral elections, so why are they being made now?

The Electoral Commission confirmed that the Government have not provided evidence of the need for such huge and disproportionate increases in election expense limits. It says that, for there to be increases in election expense limits, there should be evidence that parties and candidates are being constrained in their ability to reach voters by the current expense limits. The commission says:

“We did not see any evidence of this”.

I beg to move the amendment in my name because we must regret what the Government are doing as, once again, they abuse their power and bend the election rules quite grotesquely in their favour.