My Lords, I take seriously what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has said and what earlier on the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, said. Clearly, if there is a possibility of abuse, that must be guarded against. The commission takes that seriously. However, we must also take into account a number of other factors, not least that the Electoral Commission regards constituency limits as they are in the Bill at the moment as unworkable and unenforceable. It states:
“In our previous briefings on Part 2 of the Bill we have noted that except in extreme cases, the new year-long constituency controls may be unenforceable within the regulated period, given the difficulty of obtaining robust evidence to determine and sanction breaches”.
That seems to be a key point. If the Electoral Commission believes that these controls cannot be enforced, there must be something fundamentally wrong with the law.
It should also be noted that political parties’ national campaigning during the year before a UK general election is not subject to limits on spending at constituency level. Why is there one rule on this for political parties? Perhaps I can ask the Minister to reply to this. Why, when according to the Bill there is to be a limit on what third-party campaigners can spend, should the political parties have a rule that says that there is no limit on what they can spend in a particular constituency? Furthermore, PPERA did not contain the provision for constituency limits. We have heard a lot about the threat of abuse at constituency level, but there was no clear evidence of abuse at the 2010 general election.
The Electoral Commission states:
“The existing controls for constituency level campaigning are set out in separate rules under the Representation of the People Act 1983 (RPA)”.
These controls cover constituency campaigning by candidates who are standing for election and spending by non-party campaigners who campaign for and against those candidates, as, for example, in “vote for this candidate”. Earlier on the noble Baroness, Lady Mallalieu, made a point of this. Any potential abuses of the kind that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, and the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, have pointed out are the responsibility of the police to investigate. The Electoral Commission does not have any enforcement powers in relation to these rules.
The main burden of the commission’s report, backed up by a number of vivid case examples, is that it would be impossible to comply with this law because a fair amount of campaigning crosses a number of different constituencies. For instance, the Save Lewisham Hospital campaign operates across three parliamentary constituencies. So far, the campaign has collected and spent around £36,000. The hospital serves a number of different constituencies. How on earth would the campaigning groups involved in the campaign allocate the different amounts of expenditure per particular constituency?
A similar problem arises in relation to Stop HS2. As well as the national organisation, there are 120 local action groups. In the Kenilworth and Southam constituency alone, there are 11 separate action groups. Stop HS2 goes through a whole range of different constituencies. How are the groups that are part of this campaign to allocate their expenditure to the different constituencies? Even if they were able to do that, how would the Electoral Commission be able to enforce it?
I shall not repeat other examples because of the shortage of time. They are all set out at the back of the report. One example relates to stopping climate change. We must take seriously what the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has said. It may be possible for the Government to bring forward a very sharply focused amendment to deal with that problem. As it stands at the moment, for the reasons I have given, it would be difficult if not impossible for campaigning groups to comply with the law and the Electoral Commission would have great difficulty in enforcing it.