My Lords, I shall speak to Amendments 167A and 167B. The Government have indicated quite clearly that they will raise the registration threshold, so the question at issue is what the sum should be. We have had various alternatives put before us already today. The recommendation of the commission that I have the privilege of chairing is £20,000 for England and £10,000 for the other three nations.
The noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, reminded us of the Neill committee’s recommendation in 1998 that the limit should be £25,000 and that that should be the figure also for Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. He posed a very sharp question: why should the registration thresholds be lower for those nations? Although our commission eventually plumped for the figure of £10,000 for those three nations, we were very tempted to put it higher, particularly because of all the difficulties in Northern Ireland, the key role that charities are playing there and their great desire not to be identified with any particular political party at this time of emergence from conflict to democracy. There is therefore a very strong case for Northern Ireland’s registration threshold to be higher.
The reasons for the raising the thresholds are obvious. The Electoral Commission says that they should be raised to at least the present PPERA levels. The argument
for raising them higher than that is, first, the increased range of activities—even if you take out staff time, as we hope the Government will, there is still an increased range of activities which will cost more money. The second is inflation. Perhaps most important of all is the stated aim of the Government to give smaller charities in particular more freedom of manoeuvre without the fear that they might overstep the line.
In our report, we summed up what all smaller charities were saying. They had said that,
“they limited or stopped altogether some campaigning activity in order to ensure they did not get close to the registration threshold. For many organisations, the perceived issue of reputational risk associated with registering as a third party was important in addition to the administrative burden. The reputational risk was a particular concern to some NGOs”.
This was the case with Oxfam. Evidence gathered for the report stated that:
“Oxfam deliberately chose to ensure their spending was capped under £10,000 so they didn’t have to register, because for charities, they see it as a real brand reputational risk, they have to register as a third party because we are meant to be really apolitical NGOs. But yes they do have large budgets but have chosen not to spend them on election campaigns”.
That question of reputational risk for charities in particular is an important consideration.
So much of this legislation, and the lowering of the thresholds in particular that we are talking about now, represents an attempt to escape the influence of the super-PACs in this country. It is as though a huge net has been thrown in order to catch some great fish which might swim across the Atlantic, but the only effect of which is to trap smaller fish quite legitimately swimming freely in the waters of democracy. I hope that the Government will raise the threshold very high indeed in order that their stated aim might be achieved; that is, that smaller charities can get on with their legitimate business of campaigning on policies without fear of being caught.
On Monday, the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, referred to his 15 years working with the Countryside Alliance. He said that,
“we were punctilious about not promoting or procuring the electoral advantage of a party or candidate”.
I am sure that they were. He continued:
“We were punctilious about these matters”.—[Official Report, 16/12/13; col. 1097.]
In fact, we understand that the Countryside Alliance had specific legal advice that its activities would be subject to PPERA regulations if it spent enough on materials to breach the registration threshold. It did not register, but that is only because it did not spend enough on printed materials. As the case study in the second commission report shows, it would clearly have needed to register under the Bill because of the new activities subject to registration. Its activities were not just to become transparent through regulation but would have been restricted because of the lower spending cap and the very low constituency limits.
In our report we set out the particular case of the Countryside Alliance and the difficulties that it would find itself in as a result of the Bill, and I wonder whether the Minister was aware of that legal advice at the time. The Government have given lots of reassurances to charities that they are not in the business of promoting
or procuring the electoral advantages of a particular party, but that reassurance does not work because the sting is in not that sentence but the qualifications. A charity campaigning on policy can suddenly find that inadvertently, even if it has not mentioned a political party, and even if its primary purpose is something else altogether, it is coming up to the line where it might be caught by this regulation. It is this in particular that the commission wishes to draw to the attention of the Minister as we debate this amendment on thresholds; they need to be as high as possible in order to allow the maximum freedom that should properly be allowed in a democratic society.