Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

I shall not comment one way or the other on extraneous interventions like that, for goodness’ sake. The noble Lord, Lord Lipsey, gave me a slap about getting irritated, but the point is that these election rules and regulations—most of the schedules to the Bill—are straight lifts from existing legislation put in place by the last Labour Government, so it comes as a surprise that people who were Ministers in that Government suddenly find all kind of loopholes and dangers in that legislation. We have transposed into the schedules existing legislation, bringing it as up to date as we can with this amendment and this clause. I am not a lawyer but, as far as I understand it, the civil sanctions have been brought in because, as I said earlier—and this is not in my brief but from my understanding of it, so perhaps if I am wrong one of the experts behind me can correct me—the criminal sanctions in the existing legislation were felt to be far too heavy-handed, particularly as they applied to volunteer officers in political parties. A range of civil sanctions were brought in that allowed the Electoral Commission a degree of flexibility, from giving a little advice to an errant officer to applying heavy sanctions. That flexibility was intended in bringing in civil sanctions. The decision on how to apply them is one for the Electoral Commission. As noble Lords know from briefings sent to them, the Electoral Commission is following very closely these deliberations and listening very closely to the points made by noble Lords on all sides. I have every confidence that, if a point is made that the Electoral Commission thinks is of substance and needs to be dealt with, it will not hesitate to bring this to the attention of Ministers and Members of the Opposition, just as it has done in the past. The clause is a fairly narrow one to make provisions regarding the regulation of loans and bring the regulations under the referendum up to date with the legislation already introduced on 1 December.