The Island’s MP, Andrew Turner has welcomed improvements to the Transparency of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning and Trade Union Administration Bill (the ‘Lobbying Bill’) made in the House of Lords.
The Bill is designed to bring greater transparency to politics and how third parties interact with the political system, but it attracted severe criticism from a number of charities for some of the measures it contained. A major fear was that it would cover charities simply campaigning on policy issues, it has now been made clear that the legislation will only affect organisations campaigning for the electoral success of a particular political party or candidate – not those who campaign on policy alone.
The changes have been welcomed by charities and other groups including the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.
The cross-party Political and Constitutional Reform Select Committee (of which Mr Turner is a member) scrutinised the Bill and took evidence from interested parties before it passed through the House of Commons and made a number of recommendations. They sat in an emergency session last Tuesday evening prior to the Bill being discussed again in the Commons on Wednesday. The Committee were pleased that many of their recommendations had been accepted by the Government and reported, ‘Significant changes have been made to the Bill during its passage through Parliament. It is far from perfect, but it is undoubtedly better than it was’.
However the Committee also criticised the Government for the way in which the Bill had been rushed through Parliament.
There was a total of 97 amendments to the Lobbying Bill from the Lords when it returned to the House of Commons, 94 of those were accepted on Wednesday. There are two major areas that are still to be resolved, which are whether staff costs should be excluded from the costs of political campaigning and what expenditure should be included in the limits that can be spent in individual constituencies. The Bill will now go back to the House of Lords for the issues to be debated further.
Mr Turner said :
“Almost 400 Islanders have contacted me about this Bill. I thought it was originally very badly drafted and it is never a good idea to rush legislation. However, the principles behind the Bill are sound; that there should be transparency on who is lobbying the Government of the day, and third parties should not be able to engage in political campaigning without being transparent and accountable. Without such controls we would be in a similar situation to some other countries, where unregulated spending by vested interests means the candidate with the richest supporters wins the election. This Bill is now much improved.
Article continues below this advertisement “I voted for staffing costs to be included in the calculation of how much is spent. I think that excluding such costs for third party organisations would be inconsistent, as political parties themselves must include them when calculating expenditure. I abstained on the amendments that dealt with what should be included in expenditure limits in individual constituencies – as the way the subsections were worded would introduce a great deal of bureaucracy and make the measures unworkable. I will consider the details again when the Bill comes back from the Lords.
“Charities play a vital role in the democratic process and the Bill as it is now will allow them to continue doing that, whilst ensuring that party political campaigning (which charities are prevented from doing by law) is transparent and everybody will know how much money is being spent.”
