Political Parties and Elections Bill

Those are important points, but if I may I shall conclude the point I was making about the value of the Opposition amendment. I look forward to hearing what Opposition Members have to say and I have no doubt they will correct me if they think I have misunderstood the purpose of their proposal. I am merely setting out why I am persuaded that we should accept the principle behind it. The hon. Gentleman raises an important point about how we can do that and I shall deal with it in a moment. To return to my earlier point, it is important to entrench the principle of indexation; we do not want to find that the thresholds fall a long way behind inflation and that we have to come back to the House. Every time we come back to the House for these sorts of discussions, we hear contributions such as those from the hon. Members for Castle Point and for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart). They are quite properly scrutinising what the Government propose and our approach to Opposition amendments. That is what they should be doing. They scrutinise us vigorously and I am grateful for it, because it will enable the Bill to be more muscular and to achieve its effect. I have no doubt whatever about that. However, in doing so they call into question public trust not just in the Government, the Opposition or any of the minority parties, but in the whole political process. That is not necessarily helpful. We need to be scrutinised and we must be accountable, but constantly having to revisit subjects such as these feeds a pervasive cynicism in the political process, which is not always justified. We have to be careful about that. Indexation seems a practical and sensible way forward, subject to the important point made by the hon. Member for Rochford and Southend, East (James Duddridge), to which I shall return shortly. In the meantime, I hope the hon. Member for Castle Point is reassured by my understanding of the point behind the proposal—that we entrench the principle of a threshold. Once the House has collectively agreed what it should be, it will be entrenched and can be uprated in line with an appropriate measure of inflation. The hon. Member for Rochford and Southend, East made an important point. The measure of indexation should command public confidence, which is what I think the hon. Member for Castle Point wants to achieve. We all agree that we want a measure that commands public confidence. The hon. Member for Rochford and Southend, East was alluding to the fact that we could use a variety of indexes—with or without housing costs or earnings. In the past, those matters have been of great contention in the House in relation to other areas of public policy, so we have to be careful about which measure we choose. We also have to be careful about how exactly it will translate into practice. We do not want to put an excessive burden on volunteers; nor do we want to put an excessive compliance burden on the Electoral Commission, which has other valuable missions to perform. As I said, I propose to resist the Opposition amendments for the reasons I have given, but I shall consult statisticians and Members to see if we can come to an agreement about the measure of inflation that would command the broadest possible consensus and then introduce amendments in the Lords.