I rise to speak to my new clause 18, and I declare an interest as a member of the all-party parliamentary group on electoral campaigning transparency.
The Bill has almost nothing to say about the acute issue of secretive campaign finance filtering into British politics. The use of unincorporated associations reveals loopholes that are being used to funnel dirty and dark money into the UK electoral system. As the Committee on Standards in Public Life has warned, these groups can offer a route for foreign money to influence UK elections.
The purpose of the new clause is explicit in not placing an extra burden on the many thousands of small UAs such as sports clubs, which for various reasons want to maintain structures that have no legal existence separate from their members. Equally, I am not arguing that UAs should be banned altogether from donating to political parties; rather, the issue is about addressing the loophole that allows UAs registered with the Electoral Commission to make political donations without conducting adequate permissibility checks on their original donors.
Unincorporated associations are associations of two or more people that do not fall into any of the other categories for permissible donors; the two or more people do not necessarily need to be resident in the UK, only on the electoral roll. The Electoral Commission identified two key vulnerabilities in its submission to the Committee on Standards in Public Life. The first was that although UAs are included in the list of permissible donors, as long as they are UK-based and carry on business or other activities in the UK, those who give money to them are not required to be permissible donors. A UA could, in fact, legitimately receive money from overseas sources and donate it to political parties. If a donation is over the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 threshold of £25,000 in a calendar year, the UA will have to disclose whatever details it knows of the name and address of the person who made the gift, but it would not be prevented from receiving and then donating that gift. Secondly, no transparency is required from UAs when they provide donations to candidates rather than to parties.
The UK Government insist that the current checks are comprehensive and offer sufficient transparency, but the entire public register of donations to UAs amounts to just half a dozen gifts. All were made to the same Conservative association, the Trevelyan Campaign Fund, with the most recent gift recorded in November 2014. That means that it is more than seven years since a donation to an unincorporated association was registered.
To provide greater confidence in the original sources of donations, the permissibility requirements for UAs need to be strengthened. As investigative journalists such as Peter Geoghegan have helped uncover, UAs can be set up with the sole purpose of siphoning money to political campaigns. Perhaps the most infamous example is the Democratic Unionist party’s £435,000 donation to Vote Leave, which was channelled via a UA, the Constitutional Research Council. It was consequently fined just £6,000—a penalty totalling little more than 1% of its donations, which could well simply be seen as the cost of doing business. We still do not know who provided that money originally.
It is clear that such punishment offers little deterrent. The Association of Conservative Clubs, which connects affiliated private clubs around the country, explicitly advises members to set up as UAs rather than limited companies. Those clubs have given well over £1 million to the Conservatives. New clause 18 would quite simply require unincorporated associations that meet the threshold for registration with the Electoral Commission to conduct checks to establish whether a person donating for political purposes is a permissible donor and, if not, to reject that donation as the Committee on Standards in Public Life has recommended. I will have to leave it there.