That is the kind of issue that can be taken up with the Charity Commission and the Electoral Commission under existing legislation to establish whether that particular activity constituted electioneering. Nothing that we are proposing would affect that.
The amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Nottingham North seek, as previous amendments have done, to strike a balance between the reasonable intent of expanding the range of activities that incur controlled expenditure, and addressing concerns over the activities of charities and voluntary organisations being caught. Amendment 131 seeks to revise the definition of “for election purposes” as activity that can reasonably be regarded as promoting or procuring the success of a party or candidate. As the Government have indicated, we support the principle of that aim, and we will table amendments on Report which I hope will address that concern to the hon. Gentleman’s satisfaction.
A further amendment tabled by the hon. Gentleman proposes that donations by a third party to a third party coalition group should count towards the donor third party’s spending limits. That seems to suggest that such a grouping would register as a separate, new third party and be subject to the wider controls of the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000. The intention appears to be to repeal section 94(6) of PPERA. That provision stipulates that when two or more third parties work together as a group or coalition in pursuance of a common plan, the whole of the expenditure they incur as part of that coalition must count against each third party’s spending limit separately. However, the drafting of the amendment would not explicitly repeal section 94(6). The amendment also fails to consider that removing the existing provisions on acting in concert would remove a key anti-avoidance measure from PPERA. If total spending by a group of third parties acting as part of a common plan was not counted in full against each individual third party’s limits, it would allow third parties to form many coalitions on single issues in order to evade their spending limits. That would remove a vital safeguard from the integrity of the rules.