Home Affairs and Justice

The hon. Gentleman is on to a very important point. Our system does not locate in one place, either nationally or locally, decisions about how money is spent. The decisions are taken by different people: some take decisions that result in more prisons, but others are taking decisions on where the money is spent—on youth work, early intervention or community sentences in particular areas, for example. The structure of financial decision making is an absolutely essential issue and the Committee is taking a close interest in it. Some things are, of course, missing from the Queen's Speech: some I am sorry are not in it; others I am pleased are not in it. I shall take an example of each. The Queen's Speech lacks the announcement of an effective Bill on party funding. What we have instead is a trundling on with the wholly inadequate Bill that we started considering in the previous Session. What we need is a Bill based on the lines of the Hayden Phillips report and the work of the Select Committee in bringing Members of all parties together to reach a common conclusion that we must get the big money out of politics and accept that all parties would have to make some sacrifices to reach that point. We would then need to create a system to incentivise the giving of money to political parties in small amounts by larger numbers of people as part of their ownership of the political system. That is, of course, precisely what Barack Obama succeeded in doing in the United States. Much of the vast amount of money raised for his campaign came in small donations from very large numbers of people. Unless we do that, we will not be able to deliver what we said was necessary: to offer the taxpayer visibly cleaner and healthier politics. That will not even be begun by the Government's proposed legislation. The Government have surrendered to a veto by one party, and the Bill that was reintroduced this week will do nothing to change the dependence of the system on big donors.