Political Parties and Elections Bill

A set of figures available from the Electoral Commission and on the parties' websites gives us a clue as to what might happen if there were a £50,000 cap. We have to make certain assumptions. One of them is that a donation of more than £50,000 would become a donation of £50,000—that is, that the whole donation would not be lost, and that only anything above £50,000 would be lost. We also have to make assumptions about how a scheme like that in new clause 8 would apply, because there is a distinction between affiliation, which would continue to be allowed, and donations to which the cap would apply. With all those caveats, I suggest that the situation would be as follows. The three main English parties, if I may put it that way in the presence of the hon. Member for Perth and North Perthshire (Pete Wishart)—the British parties, or, as the First Minister of Scotland says, the London parties—spend about £62 million in a typical non-election year, if we take 2008 as a typical year. However, it is worth saying that in a non-election year, they often have, between them, a surplus of about £10 million, so they actually raise about £72 million. If a £50,000 cap or something similar were in place—I think that this goes some way towards answering the question that the Secretary of State posed—it would have the effect of reducing the total income of the parties by some £10 million. Of course, that £10 million would not be distributed evenly among the three parties, but then the Labour party spends about £25 million a year, and the Conservatives about £32 million. The Liberal Democrats spend about £3 million or £4 million a year. The losses for the Liberal Democrats would be proportionately small, but at about the same sort of level as the losses of the other parties. To come back to the point that the Secretary of State raised, the question is whether that would be such a devastating loss for the political parties that they would have to go cap in hand to the Government and ask for state funding. For a number of reasons, I do not think that they would necessarily be in that bad a position. The first reason is the surplus. The loss is about the same as the annual surplus, although the counter-argument is that the surplus is accumulated in non-election years and spent in election years. Even if we put the surplus to one side, a reduction of 15 or 16 per cent., although difficult to make in one go, is not, in my view, entirely out of the question for the political parties, especially the two bigger parties.