Political Parties and Elections Bill

My view is that those three elements stand together. I would never have separated new clause 1 from new clause 10 either. The spending cap goes along with the donation cap, because it would remove part of the problem of parties trying to outspend one another for the sake of it. It is right that the effect on the parties of a £50,000 cap should be seen in the context of having a spending cap as well. What could the parties do in the medium term to deal with the gap that would be created by such a cap? It seems to me that they could do a lot of things. First, the Conservative party employs several very highly paid people, whose salaries are said to be in the region of a quarter or a third of a million pounds a year. Certain economies are therefore quite easy. Secondly, we all know that parties waste a lot of money on campaign techniques whose efficacy is far from established. The best example is billboards, which are massively expensive and do not seem to shift any votes at all. Thirdly—I suppose I would say this, as a Liberal Democrat—the Government are fond of benchmarking public services. They say, "Let's look at an area of the country that provides a service the most cheaply and ask the other parts of the country, which supply the same thing more expensively, why they are so expensive." As a Liberal Democrat, all that I can say is that we manage to run a national political party with £3 million, and the other parties should be asked why they need 10 times that amount to run their parties.