My Lords, I was going to say that I was aware that the noble and learned Lord had also tabled an amendment in that group to raise the threshold to provide an equalisation—at, I think, £25,000 if my information serves me correctly.
It is a fair question as to why there is such a difference. I think one of the reasons, which I gave at the outset, is that there is a difference in the number of voters and number of constituencies. It is also the case that spending of less than £20,000 could have a more significant impact in, say, Northern Ireland, which is a very compact area with a very focused media. Spending of less than £20,000 could have a much more significant impact there than in England, and I suspect that the different political and media circumstances was one of the considerations as to why the difference came about in the first place.
There are one or two points made by the noble and learned Lord that I could not quite follow. He said that if there was a hospital closure in a particular constituency, a pressure group could spend up to £20,000 in England but just under £10,000 in Scotland. Of course, following on from the debate that we have just had about constituency limits, they would be restricted to £9,750 in Scotland, Wales, England and Northern Ireland regarding the kind of example that
he gave. He suggested—I apologise if I misheard him—that someone could be prosecuted for spending £6,000 in campaign expenditure in Edinburgh but not in, for example, Birmingham. I think that he will accept that, with a £10,000 threshold, that would not happen in either Birmingham or Edinburgh. I do not think that I misheard him, but sometimes people get that impression and suddenly there are concerns.