My Lords, I join the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, in thanking the Government for the sensible and welcome amendments that they have tabled. We have just heard from the noble Lord, Lord Horam. I wonder if when he used the word “harried” he meant someone who had been harried by the noble and right reverend Lord, Lord Harries, but I will leave that to one side.
However, we feel that more changes are needed to the Bill, which we have opposed from the start, for the very cogent reason spelt out by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack: it inhibits the expression of legitimate opinion. Amendment 34 goes to the heart of that. The noble Lord, Lord Horam, spoke about constituencies, which I think is a different issue, but we might be talking about something like the bedroom tax, which the National Housing Federation campaigned against, worried about the rents coming to it. Anyone who followed the Welfare Bill will know all the detail of that, so I will not go through it. Unless we can get rid of staff costs—which I hope we will within the next hour—had the bedroom tax been in the past 12 months, it is very unlikely that the National Housing Federation, which is not a charity, would have been able to campaign in the way that it is telling us its members wanted. That was not in the past 12 months but something like that could have been.
This is legitimate campaigning. Although we have heard statements from Ministers that it was never the intention of the Government that that type of activity would be within the scope of the Bill, I think all of us feel that despite good—or bad—intentions, that is not a sufficient safeguard and clarity should be provided in the Bill along the lines spelt out in Amendment 34.