My Lords, the scars are still on my back from having taken the transparency of lobbying Bill, now an Act, through this House. I remind the Minister that we paused it when we ran into waves of criticism from all sides and arguments that we had not entirely got our own arguments in line. It was not quite as messy as this Bill, but we did at least manage to sort out something which did not displease everyone too much.
I have read the very useful report by the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, which I compliment him on. It does its best to strike the balance between a number of very difficult and different priorities. All of us who have been involved in politics know that there are many civil society organisations. Some are easily politically neutral—as the Church is, most of the time—while others are inherently a bit on the right. Those of us who are old enough to have fought campaigns that the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children was active in will remember how vigorous, to say the least, it could be in its campaigns and how biased it was. Development NGOs and poverty NGOs, being in favour of greater public sector spending and greater equality, tend naturally to be more on the left. The balance between advocacy and electoral campaigning, as the noble Lord has said, is a difficult one, which we must all strike. In debating this issue with some of the organisations concerned, there were those who felt that they were entitled to campaign entirely as they liked because they were morally right and therefore should not in any sense be controlled in an election campaign.
I agree strongly with the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, that 120 days is much better than 365 days. We no longer know when the election will be. It is one of the many bits of incoherence of this Government that putting through the abolition of the Fixed-term Parliaments Act in the Dissolution and Calling of Parliament Bill has not sorted out entirely the knock-on effects of that for this Bill. If I recall correctly, in his report, the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, said that looking back on how various NGOs and civil society groups have spent on their advocacy and campaigning, the spending does come very much in the last few weeks and months before the election, rather than being spread evenly over the previous year.
Therefore, I strongly support Amendment 39 and hope that the Minister will accept that this is a reasonable adjustment in the Bill which the Government could accept, and which makes life simpler for those civil society groups which we all want to see engaging in campaigns and public debate. This tidying up would be a help to all concerned.