My Lords, I shall speak also to Amendment 172. It is with some relief that I reassure the Committee that this is not, for the moment, about charities. It is about the position of royal chartered bodies. At present, royal chartered bodies cannot register with the Electoral Commission, but nor are they charities. They are floating in the electoral ether, so to speak. These amendments attempt to regularise their position.
Amendment 171 amends Section 88 of PPERA, which is concerned with recognised third parties, by adding royal chartered bodies to the list in subsection (2) of those who may make returns to the Electoral Commission. Amendment 172, which is consequential, adds the officers of the relevant chartered body to the list of relevant participators at the end of Clause 31(3). I have tabled these amendments on behalf of the Law Society. Sections 94(3) and 94(4) of PPERA set out that where a third party is not a recognised third party and exceeds the limit of expenditure, which under the
Bill will be £5,000, it will be guilty of an offence if it knew or ought reasonably to have known that the expenditure would be incurred in excess of that limit.
The fact that the Law Society cannot register as a third party, together with the Electoral Commission’s clear guidance that campaigning on policy issues could be deemed to be controlled expenditure, leave the society vulnerable to possible criminal sanctions for any campaigning it does on issues which arguably have a political dimension. Without the ability to register, the Law Society may have to cease such activity to avoid such sanctions.
There is inevitably a human rights argument that the position of chartered corporations breaches Article 10 of the ECHR, which is on freedom of expression, combined with Article 14, which covers discrimination. As these bodies do not have the options available to other bodies to come under the Act’s system of proportionate control subject to transparency, their freedom of expression is stifled. This is nothing to do with party political activity. Chartered corporations such as charities must not be party political. The exclusion of chartered corporations from being donors in Part 4 of PPERA is right, and is not touched by the amendment.
Until now, the Law Society has been able to live with the low level of uncertainty as to its precise legal position. Two developments have altered this. The first is the provisions and implications of the Bill we are discussing today. The Electoral Commission noted in its briefing of 22 October 2013 that:
“The combination of lower registration thresholds and spending limits, new constituency limits, and the wider scope of regulated activity, is likely to create a much higher level of allegations of breaches of the rules by non-party campaigners than at previous elections”.
Further, the detailed guidance on the width of controlled expenditure given by the Electoral Commission at a 22 October briefing is new. Whether it is right or wrong, it represents the regulatory enforcement approach it proposes to take. The second issue is developments in public policy—for example, the already referred to European Convention on Human Rights—which have an increasingly political dimension. They bring organisations such as the Law Society, which represents a substantial body of membership, increasingly close to the complex line between policy research and campaigning.
The Electoral Commission is sympathetic to this. Its briefing states:
“We support the principle of this amendment and agree that this is an issue that should be considered and note that any organisation that does not fall within one of the categories listed in PPERA as having appropriate links to the UK will not be able to register. This effectively means that their spending on matters covered by this Bill is capped at the registration threshold”.
It goes on to make a further point, which I had not focused on and which is an issue the Government will have to consider:
“There are other organisations that are currently ineligible to register, including Charitable Incorporated Organisations (CIOs)”.
Of course, that came into force only in the past 18 months and was not in existence in a corporate form at the time when PPERA was passed. It will be an
increasingly important corporate form, because of course it offers the trustees of charitable trusts limited liability. We will therefore need to address this issue at some point during the passage of the Bill, but I had not come across it until this moment.
I have tabled these amendments on behalf of the Law Society, but it will not just be the Law Society that is affected. Other relevant bodies which may or may not be aware of the fate that awaits them include the Chartered Institute of Taxation, the Institution of Civil Engineers, the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales and the Royal College of Surgeons. The full list of royal chartered bodies contains no fewer than 1,002 corporate bodies—whose names I shall not read out—but it may interest the Committee to know that the list of establishment, which is set out in date order, begins at No. 1 with the University of Cambridge, established in 1231, and ends with No. 1,002, the Marylebone Cricket Club, or MCC, established by royal charter on 12 December 2012. That is not a bad pair of bookends for this amendment, so I hope that the Government can be persuaded to look sympathetically at the plight of this important and widespread set of bodies. I beg to move.
5.45 pm