Lord Pack (LD)

My Lords, I too thank the Minister for opening such a long and detailed debate, one that has shown the broad range of expertise in this House, including that of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Lichfield, whose presence we will certainly miss. Even if it is not quite a one-for-one swap, it was very welcome to hear the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Macintosh, and I am sure he will contribute much to the Bill and other topics in the future. As someone with a PhD in the Great Reform Act, I am tempted by the reference made by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, to digress deep into the 19th century but, mindful of the time, I should perhaps rather concentrate on some of the common themes we have heard in the debate: the need to strengthen and protect our democracy, so that it is the voice of the ordinary citizen that is dominant, not that of the billionaire or the foreign Government and so that the necessary bureaucracy of elections serves the citizen and helps them exercise their democratic say, rather than obstructs or frustrates them. There are important measures to welcome in the Bill, such as the introduction of votes at 16, the progress on automatic voter registration and the strengthened independence for the Electoral Commission. But there are other areas where the Bill as it currently stands falls short, where it leaves too many loopholes or even creates some new ones, and where there will therefore be much to test out in Committee—when, let us hope, the Government will be open to persuasion. The Government themselves have acknowledged the need to do more. They tabled a very large number of amendments late in the House of Commons process for the Bill—a subject to which I suspect the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, may return shortly. The Government have also talked of the need for further amendments to help implement the Rycroft review, as well as requesting that the Electoral Commission review spending limits, and made that late commitment given by the Minister in the House of Commons to a new task and finish group looking at mega donors. Clearly, there is much more still to do. So often, reviews, proposals and good intentions run into the sand of “when legislative time will allow”, but we have a primary legislation vehicle available here and now, so it will be crucial that we make full use of Committee and Report to polish, fix and improve the Bill. There is a certain urgency about it as well, given the dangers and strains that our existing systems face. There are dangers from abroad, as set out by the new chief of MI6 in her first public speech just before Christmas, and those set out by the director-general of MI5 when briefing political parties earlier this year. There is also the unprecedented concentration of donations to political parties from just a handful of the super-rich, a trend accelerated in the last few days but present before then too. For example, more than 80% of all the declared donations ever received by Nigel Farage’s party have come from just two people. It goes wider than that. For example, as the noble Lord, Lord Wills, mentioned earlier, Transparency International has shown that the proportion of donations coming from those giving £1 million or more has surged thirtyfivefold in under a decade—and those figures are even before last week. We are moving rapidly from a broad-based, democratic system of financing parties to one of unprecedented sums coming from a tiny number of people. There is no one magic solution to solve that. Action on multiple fronts is required, which is why we need this Bill but also an improved version of it. For example, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, the noble Baronesses, Lady Royall and Lady Goudie, and others have mentioned, there is a question about the breadth of donations that need capturing by rules covering transparency. There are also some important loopholes in what the Bill proposes. I have mentioned before the Donald Trump loophole, as one could call it: the ability for him to split ownership of one of his firms with several members of his family, thus bringing each of them individually underneath the threshold at which the protections in the Bill in terms of foreign ownership of firms would kick in. The threshold set in the Bill is a much more generous one than the threshold set for controlling foreign ownership in our newspaper sector. I am not clear why our democracy should deserve lower protection than our media landscape. Although the measure to add transparency to donations direct to candidates is very welcome, it also creates a new loophole as the Government are not planning aggregation rules—so one large donation could be, completely legally, split into multiple small donations to candidates and kept secret. We will have to explore these and other examples further in Committee, along with toughening up the proposed corporate donation limits, where in particular the Electoral Commission has quite rightly warned that there is again scope to split multiple donations among multiple people and therefore have them become acceptable because they are not aggregated. But such closing of loopholes can get us only so far, and that is why we on these Benches welcome the many suggestions in the Commons, including from the Labour Benches, for progress towards a donor cap so that a small number of very rich people cannot drown out the democratic voices of millions of ordinary citizens. I hope the principle of protecting our democracy as one in which every individual gets their fair voice—but also, perhaps, the strong support we have heard from so many in the Labour Party in this debate today, as well as the support from many other parts of this House, including from the noble Lords, Lord Evans and Lord Carter, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, as well as many on the Labour Benches—will encourage the Government to have a very open mind on this topic as the Bill progresses. That, though, is just the “money in” part. We also need to do much better at regulating the “money out” part, as there are significant gaps in the controls on campaigning expenditure. The Government’s letter to the Electoral Commission asking it to review certain cap levels is certainly welcome, but we also need to move away from the Government being in the driving seat on setting the limits that will apply for their own re-election bid. It should be an independent regulator that is in the driving seat. We need to recognise that political campaigning is not a part-time activity. As we all know very well, it happens all year round, year after year. Yet expense limits are part-time. They do not apply all year round, year after year. That leaves a huge gap in our democratic defences, one that needs closing with year-round spending controls. As the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, mentioned, we also need to close that gap because we are now in a world where national mailshots at local election time, unless it is near to a general election when the general election limits apply, are in fact a completely uncapped, unlimited form of campaigning that can completely drown out the campaigning that takes place at a local level. I would not want to disappoint noble Lords by not mentioning the merits of electoral reform. First past the post is designed for a two-party system, yet we now have five and six-party systems around the country. While I commend the modesty of the noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, in feeling that an election system that results in his own election is flawed, it is possible to take a different view of that. So often, supporters of first past the post have talked about the stability and the clear mandates that it provides. I humbly suggest that the evidence of the last few years suggests that perhaps now is the time to look again, so I very much hope that talk of a national commission to draw up proposals to change our electoral system will turn into action. I turn to an area of much greater cross-party agreement: the need to tackle abuse and intimidation of those taking part in a democratic system. It is a topic that I know the Minister is committed to and that has rightly been mentioned as an important issue in this debate by the noble Baronesses, Lady Leaman, Lady Morgan and Lady Smith, and others. There are undoubtedly some welcome moves in the Bill on that topic, but they are pretty limited compared with the number of excellent reports and recommendations such as from the recent Speaker’s Conference or those set out by the Jo Cox Foundation or the Online Safety Network. There has been very little movement, in particular, in the online aspects of those problems, so I very much hope that is an area where we can make progress in Committee. I have one final area to mention. There is of course that question of electoral consolidation, as mentioned by the noble Lords, Lord Hayward, Lord Norton and Lord Shamash, and indeed by many other Peers in the other recent debate that the noble Earl, Lord Kinnoull, held in this House. The statute book is an overcomplicated mess; reviews and experts have consistently concluded that for decades, but the situation keeps on getting worse. That is a problem for returning officers and for the public sector staff working at the front line to try to make our elections function. It is a problem because of the risks of foreign influence that it opens us up to, as the Rycroft review has set out. It is bad for the ordinary citizen and for civil society because, far too often, to work out how you can use your democratic rights, you need to call on a lawyer. Lawyers are wonderful people in many ways, but the need to call on them should be safely limited. To give just one illustration of the complexity of election law, the Explanatory Notes to the Bill point out that it refers to and amends 20 Acts and 19 statutory instruments. To be fair, there is a very welcome piece of what one could call mini-consolidation in the heart of the Bill on the rules to do with election forms, and those would certainly help us avoid situations such as the ludicrously long 72-page statutory instrument that was required simply to add the veteran card as an acceptable form of ID. Having tempted the Government to one step of tidying up election law in this Bill, I hope that in Committee we may be able to tempt the Government to a little more. Why, for example, are the Parliamentary Elections Act 1695 and the European Parliamentary Elections Act 1993 not fully repealed? I give those as two simple examples of how there is tidying up that could be done that would make things clearer and would clear the road to full consolidation in due course. Our democracy is a precious thing. We have warnings from other countries of how quickly democracy can decay if it is not properly nurtured and protected. Much of the Bill is welcome, but much of it needs improvement to go further. There is an urgency about those improvements, because in legislative time the next general election is already near. What we do not fix in the Bill, we may well not be able to fix before the next election. I look forward to the Government continuing to engage with other parties and outside experts, and to Peers working collaboratively across the House so that the Bill ends up being a major milestone to improve our democracy rather than a missed opportunity that we all regret.