Political Parties and Elections Bill

The amendments would slightly alter the language used to describe the circumstances in which the commission may leave information out of a report. I am sorry to disappoint the noble Lord in telling him that I will resist the amendments on the grounds that they are unnecessary and would hamper in one case the commission’s operational effectiveness. Amendment 72 would add the word "reasonable" to the provision relating to the application of the commission’s opinions. At the risk of repeating myself, the commission must already act in a reasonable way. Failure to do so risks judicial review. It is implicit in the drafting that any opinion that can be taken into account must be one that is reasonably held. It would not be open to the commission, as a body subject to the usual principles of public law, to form a manifestly unreasonable opinion and then act on that, so I do not think that we need to add this here. It might set a slightly unhelpful precedent and imply that other regulators in a similar position would be able to hold and act on "unreasonable" opinions. Amendment 73 causes us greater concern, because this could have an adverse effect on the commission’s operational effectiveness in some cases. The Bill states that the commission may leave out details from its report on sanctions if including them, ""might adversely affect any current investigation or proceedings"." Perhaps the word "might" is not specific enough for the noble Lord, but we use it with good reason. We use it because it allows the commission to apply its general judgment and knowledge of specific cases to make decisions about what "might" subsequently impact on an investigation. At the time that a judgment is required to be made about what to include in a report it may be very difficult or impossible to say whether something definitely would have an adverse effect on the potential outcome of an investigation or proceedings, particularly if the investigation or proceedings are at an early stage. In its latest briefing on the Bill, the Electoral Commission, in opposing Amendment 73, notes that it may not always be possible to be certain whether or not such information could affect a current case. Positively requiring the commission to identify whether information "would" have an adverse effect could be highly damaging. It is only right that the commission be given a reasonable degree of latitude in making potentially fine value judgments in these sorts of circumstance. Our proposal to retain "might" will achieve the correct result without fundamentally reducing the level of transparency that the reporting requirement is, of course, intended to provide.