My Lords, we have talked about taking money out of politics. If I heard the noble Lord, Lord Horam, correctly, he received a donation from the noble Lord, Lord Ashcroft, of £6,000. It is Labour Party policy that donations should be limited to £5,000, so perhaps the most important thing that we could do to get money out of politics—not under the Bill—would be for him and other members of his party to sign up to a maximum donation of £5,000.
Whatever the intention of constituency limits, we have heard that they are unworkable for campaigning organisations and certainly unenforceable by the Electoral Commission. As the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, and the noble and learned Lord, Lord Hardie, said, political parties do not have these rules for national campaigning, let alone for a whole 12-month period. They do not have to account for staff costs nor try to parcel up their national spending by ward or constituency boundaries. However, political parties at least have a very good reason to organise by constituency; campaigning organisations do not. They campaign against wind farms, for a new zebra crossing, against payday lenders, or in favour of badgers. As we know, badgers move, as does HS2, which will run through
hills and dales, counties and boroughs. Such campaigning does not fall into neat little constituency boundaries, which of course the Government anyway want to change for every election under their new law.
The new limit is £9,750 per constituency spread over a full year. That must cover costs of staff, hire of halls, adverts for meetings, posters and publicity. It will cause difficulty for small organisations which run a campaign limited to a geographical area but also for national campaigns with a federated structure. The boundaries for national and even local organisations rarely follow the constituency boundaries that we in politics know well.
Those organisations will need to estimate whether their campaigning costs relate to activity in particular constituencies and ensure that their planned spending will then stay within the new limit for each activity in each constituency. That will be problematic. First, they will have to find what the constituencies are. Many of them will not know—they are not political anoraks and they do not know the boundaries of those constituencies. They will then have to see which bit of spending lies where. It will be different for local organisations, but it will also be, as has been mentioned, virtually unenforceable within the time limit of this election by the Electoral Commission, particularly where breaches occur in the last few weeks of a campaign. It will require real-time monitoring; it will require the commission to respond to allegations across 650 constituencies during a whole 12-month period—that is, starting in May. I defy anyone who, like me, has run an organisation to be up and able to do by then something of that nature.
As has been said, this clause is incomprehensible, unworkable and unnecessary. The Conservatives, of course, have form on Clause 28. I suggest that they get rid of this one so that they do not have the same trouble as they did with the last one.