My Lords, it must be apparent to the Committee already that a number of amendments in this group have similar objectives. I am very sympathetic to those which have already been mentioned, but I want to concentrate, before my voice gives out, on Amendments 160J, 165A and 165D. These all result directly from discussions I have had with a wide range of organisations.
The group deals with Schedule 3 and how particular activities might be excluded from the list of those which come under controlled expenditure. There is a principle in current electoral law that communication with one’s own members is not “election material”, and therefore it is excluded from the sort of controls and transparency that is being looked at here. However, membership is becoming—sadly, many of us feel—an almost outmoded concept. Organisations do not need members in order to have clear, regular supporters. Many prefer to seek funding through periodic contributions rather than through the straitjacket of an annual membership subscription. The concept may well have been more appropriate, more formidable and more general at the time of the 2000 Act, but it is surely disappearing rather quickly now. It is in that context that I believe there should be some degree of flexibility in relation to Schedule 3.
It is particularly in the nature of a non-party campaign that you can be on board on one issue, but not on another. You simply lend your support as you see fit from time to time, but you are still a committed supporter of that organisation or campaign. This idea of a committed supporter is one which the Electoral Commission itself has recognised, so it seems sensible that the Bill should pick that up and define it more clearly. Our Amendment 160J does just that. It defines a committed supporter as someone who has made a donation, or who in the past 12 months has either communicated directly with the organisation or expressly consented to receive the organisation’s communications.
The noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and his colleagues, have tried to deal with that problem in their Amendment 165B—so we are on the same track. My difficulty with their amendment is that it sets a very low bar for becoming a committed supporter. Anyone who uses e-mail knows how much correspondence we all get from people to whom we have given permission under the Data Protection Act for contact to be made. It is very easy—too easy—to give that consent. So I am afraid that the Data Protection Act is, in this context, insubstantial and insufficient. Our amendment sets the bar a little higher, so that a supporter is not just the passive recipient over decades of many quickly deleted e-mails, as might be the case with that so-called protection.
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Campaigners nowadays usually e-mail asking that you click a link to sign a petition, or that you donate. That requires an active participation and active support rather than just a reactive response. These activities would count toward making someone a committed supporter of the organisation under our amendment. Simply receiving the e-mail and ignoring it would not make you a supporter, just as receiving a cold call from a salesperson and not buying their
product does not make you a customer of the salesperson’s company. We think this is a fair level at which to draw the bar for who counts as a supporter, since otherwise communications to millions of quite passive non-supporters could be excluded from counting as election material. That would not be transparency, and we do not think it would be right. Our amendment provides a fairer, more effective and balanced approach.
Amendment 165A deals with the staff issue, which is a matter of considerable concern to organisations large and small. The Electoral Commission supports counting staff costs for political parties’ election expenses, as the noble Baroness said. That is something to which another Parliament will doubtless return—I hope very soon. Our amendment again seeks a balance on this issue. We do not think a blanket exemption on all staff costs is right, because staff costs can be very important. They already have to be recorded by non-party organisations for the production and distribution of election material, and rightly so, for the simple reason that they could otherwise directly employ people to run around constituencies delivering leaflets, and it would not count against the expenses limits. Likewise, we think it right to include staff costs for paid canvassers. If someone employs people to canvass on their behalf, in an attempt to promote or procure electoral success, that is surely significant and should be recorded—it should be transparent. However, we do not believe that it makes sense to include the internal staff costs associated with booking a venue for a press conference or rally, or travel time to attend it, for example—a few half hours in the day, or whatever it might be, which would not normally be recorded, particularly by smaller organisations. These are things of a kind that are very unlikely to matter in the end to the likely electoral outcome, but they add a level of bureaucracy that a lot of organisations would regret. Charities would not like to pay yet more administrative costs against the main purpose of their charitable enterprise. All of us involved in charities are well aware of their sensitivity in trying to avoid additional bureaucracy and administration.
It is unnecessary to ask organisations to try to account for a half hour here or there spent booking a room, by someone whose annual salary is perhaps £30,000 and who is paid all the rest of the year for doing something totally unrelated to elections. Our amendment seeks to exclude staff costs from the activities relating to press conferences, public meetings and transport. We believe that this would remove unnecessary burdens on organisations that would otherwise have to open up great loopholes for multimillionaires.
Finally, Amendment 165D echoes something that has already been suggested in dealing with future amendments to Schedule 3. I need hardly draw the Committee’s attention to the controversy that this legislation has caused. We need to be very careful about the potential to amend this crucial schedule without due process; at the very least, it should be with consensus between Parliament and the Electoral Commission.