My noble friend is right. He and I have relatively recent experience of these things. The normal figure is around £12,000 during the election period. As I will come to in a moment, that could be swamped under these proposals, and therefore this is an absurd anomaly. I understand why the Government have arrived at their position. Their formula sounds simple, but it may be so simple as to be unequal to the task in hand. Equally, the move in Amendment 53 to do away with different limits for constituency spending seven months before an election, and constituency spending seven days before, seems to me to lose what is an important and not particularly complex distinction in the name of simplicity—and I am not sure the Government have got this right.
I ask the Minister to consider carefully the horror story that could emerge. Imagine: a campaigning group could come into a constituency and spend £19,999.99 in the last seven days of the campaign with the aim of affecting the outcome in that constituency, and it would not need to register. A second group, unrelated to the first, could, during those seven days, do the same. It would not register. A third group, unrelated to the other two—not a coalition, not working together— could do the same. In the last few days of a campaign
in a marginal constituency, just under £60,000 could be spent, completely swamping the amount permitted for a candidate and a party, which is around £12,000, in one constituency. The candidates are, as I say, limited in those final four to six weeks.
Because this spending would not be registered, it might not be revealed until after polling day. Think of the mess that that would cause to our electoral law. Because such groups, though technically in breach of the law, would not need to register, no one would be any the wiser about what they had been up to. My noble and learned friend has said that he is looking at this section with a view to some clarification, and I think he will have to agree that there is a major loophole looming in front of us. I therefore request that he look carefully at Amendment 46ZA. He may find a better solution but a solution must be found, otherwise political parties and those who will be looking at this legislation when it goes back to the other place will not have seen this particular problem, because until now the registration threshold has not been so high. It is only under the present Government’s changes in this House that it has been raised to this height.
I hope that my noble and learned friend will be able to give some reassurance to those of us on all sides of the House who are concerned about such spending that the Government are not prepared to accept this loophole.