This extract is from the Lords Committee stage of the Political Parties and Elections Bill. My constituent, Lord Greaves, tells the House of Lords that the Conservatives' spending in Pendle could reach £250,000 by the time of the General Election.  

Grand Committee

Wednesday, 6 May 2009.

Political Parties and Elections Bill

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Committee (4th Day)

Lord Campbell-Savours:   ...My amendment would bring to an end the ludicrous proposition that there should be a 55-month deregulated period during which some people would be able to spend an absolute fortune in their constituencies when others could spend very little. I want to speak at some length on this important matter. The amendment deals with what Martin Linton has called—I am sorry to have to refer to it in this way, but it is exactly what it is—the “Ashcroft loophole”. The noble Lord, Lord Ashcroft, is a very clever, shrewd and able man. He has seen a loophole in the law, which he has fully exploited. The loophole has led to wholesale abuse of the system. Money talks in elections and it affects the results. In my view, what is going on in various parts of the country is an affront to democracy. It distorts election results.

It is not as if the noble Lord, Lord Ashcroft, denies this. In his book, Dirty Politics, Dirty Times—clearly I have not read it, because I do not read literature like that—he says:

“Of the 33 candidates who won seats from Labour or the Liberal Democrats, no fewer than 25 had received support from the fund that I had set up with”,

the noble Lord, Lord Steinberg, and the Midlands Industrial Council. There is the evidence of the effect of his money.

One person who has been most vocal in his objection to the use of the money of the noble Lord, Lord Ashcroft, in this way is Peter Bradley, who lost his seat, The Wrekin, in 2005. He submitted evidence to the House of Commons Constitutional Affairs Committee in March 2006. I shall read a small part of that evidence, as he carried out research into the impact of Ashcroft money in marginal constituencies in various parts of the United Kingdom. He said:

“My findings show how expenditure on local campaigning prior to the regulated short campaign can decisively influence election results in favour of the party with the greatest resources. They illustrate how a targeted funding strategy was a key if not the determining factor in the results in a large number of marginal seats which changed hands at the 2005 general election ... My sample is drawn from those 93 constituencies in which, according to the Electoral Commission’s records, the local Conservative Association benefited from donations from a consortium which comprised Lord Ashcroft’s Bearwood Corporate Services Ltd, Lord Leonard Steinberg and an organisation known as the Midlands Industrial Council with which Mr Robert Edmiston is associated. The consortium had earlier made public its intention to target funding on what it considered to be key battleground seats. I have sought to establish whether its strategy proved effective and, if so, what conclusions should be drawn ... The consortium’s clear premise was that in marginal seats the party with the most money to spend on campaigning ought to have a decisive advantage at elections and its strategy was designed to ensure that they did ... 24 of the 36 Conservative gains had been targeted by the three donors, including 23 of 31 from Labour and one of five from the Liberal Democrats ... The Conservatives exceeded the national swing in 20 of those 24 gains ... The Wrekin: the Conservative candidate was able to outspend me”—

that is, Mr Bradley—

“by a factor of 11 to 1 and secured a swing of 5.4%. That meant that on a regular basis over a protracted period before the short campaign, he was able to take out paid for advertorials in a series of weekly local papers with a wide local readership. Of perhaps greater significance, at a time when I could afford to print just one constituency-wide newsletter which my local party activists and volunteers struggled to hand-deliver to as much of a large constituency as they could reach, my opponent was able to produce campaign material on almost a weekly basis which was frequently posted to every household in the constituency ... In many of the sample seats hard cash helped to compensate for and mask the lack of local political organisation or active support on which candidates and parties ought, in my view, to rely if they are to be genuinely engaged with and accountable to the communities they seek to represent”.

“is to cap annual expenditure on campaigning throughout the cycle. Local parties would be free to raise funds in excess of the cap and either bank them or pass them on to their national party. But they would not be able to spend above the annual limit established for any given constituency on any activity associated with party political campaigning”.

I agree with every single word of that, as do most Labour and Liberal Members of Parliament, who in many areas have been victims of this kind of campaigning based wholly on the largest pocket being able to buy the seat.

In response to these concerns, the Government originally said in their White Paper that they would consider returning to the principle in the regulations on candidate spending that existed before 2000, whereby the purpose for which expenditure was used would determine whether it counted against the spending limits. That is why in the original Bill they tabled Clause 10, which is my amendment. My amendment would need to be accompanied by a further amendment, setting out a different approach to the control of expenditure during the whole of a Parliament, which was the substance of the amendment moved yesterday from the Liberal Democrat Benches.

Furthermore, I would argue that the appointment of a prospective candidate at whatever point during the period of a Parliament indicates the commencement of a campaign. Some form of further control should exist from that date onwards; during that period, there should be a clear indication of expenditure, defined in regulation to describe the maximum permissible cost of employing staff for the purpose of promoting candidates, the use of publicity and printing and the publishing costs of literature connected with the promotion of candidates for Parliament. In other words, we need ceilings on expenditure.

These proposals bring into question the running sore of the communications allowance, which I have always opposed personally. In my day, an MP was known from the effort that they made and not from the well spun material circulated to his or her constituents. I am sympathetic to proposals for its abolition. However, I had a long conversation the other day with Martin Linton, to whom I have referred on previous occasions and who knows a lot about these matters. He points to a recent development in the newspaper industry, whereby the fact that the local paper has disappeared makes it very difficult in some seats to get publicity. Multimedia, the internet, television and all kinds of new forms of media penetrating the market have left local newspapers in many areas running at a loss and they are closing down. He maintains that in parts of the country you need some kind of additional money to ensure that the work of Members of Parliament is adequately brought before their constituents for consideration.

I support what Angus Maude said in Hansard on 6 June 2008. He said that it would be,

“an atrocious abuse of power for the Government to force through restrictions on what parliamentary candidates can spend from money they have raised privately, while sitting MPs can spend ever-more taxpayers’ money on promoting themselves”.—[Official Report, Commons, 6/6/08; col. 694.]

In my amendment, which I am using this debate on the clause to discuss, I am saying that we should review the allowance system. We should tighten up on the regime and return to the principle of the trigger, which worked perfectly well in the old days when I was in the House of Commons. It was only when people started abusing the trigger with these trunksful of cash, which they could pour on individual marginal seats, that it all went wrong. We should concentrate on controlling that and go back to the principle of the trigger, which worked perfectly well.

Later........

Lord Greaves: I apologise for missing the first part of this debate, but I understand very well what the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, wants in his amendment. I regret that I have not so far been able to take part in the Committee stage due to commitments on the Marine and Coastal Access Bill and my family. There may well be people here who are quite pleased that I have not been able to take part previously, but we are now coming to areas that I am really interested in. Since this is the first time that I have spoken in Committee, I declare my interests as a lifelong election campaigner on behalf of the Liberal Party and the Liberal Democrats, as an elected local councillor in Lancashire and as a declared agent in five county council elections now taking place—or at least I hope so, if all the nomination papers have gone in properly, which was something that I was not able to do myself because I have been here.

I want to follow up on what the noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, said by reporting to the Committee what is happening in relation to the next general election in the Pendle constituency, where I live. In doing so, I am not criticising the Conservatives for taking advantage of the existing law. I criticise the law as it stands because it allows them to do it. Equally, it is generally believed that the noble Lord, Lord Ashcroft, is behind everything. I have no detailed knowledge beyond the report that states that that is thought to be the case in one way or the other, and certainly our Member of Parliament, Mr Gordon Prentice, takes a close interest in the noble Lord, Lord Ashcroft, and his activities. As I say, I do not particularly want to criticise the Conservatives; I want merely to report what is happening, because it seems to go beyond what is reasonable if we are looking for a level playing field. Level playing fields may be hard to find in our hilly area, but nevertheless they ought to be there for electoral purposes.

Since the Conservatives adopted a new candidate around 18 months ago, every month the good people of Pendle have been receiving a regular tabloid-sized leaflet made up sometimes of four pages and sometimes of eight. It is delivered by Royal Mail, presumably because there are no local deliverers because nowadays political parties are short of such helpers. As I say, pretty well every month for the past 18 months, everyone has received through the Royal Mail a full-colour four or eight page tabloid leaflet, sometimes promoting Mr Cameron and the Conservative Party nationally, but usually promoting Mr Stephenson, the new Conservative candidate, and his views and activities locally.

Again, I do not complain about any of that in the normal course of events. I point out that it is being targeted very specifically at the election of a particular person at the next parliamentary election at a date that could still be 12 months away. If it is, it will have been two and a half years for which a level of activity normally associated with the four or five weeks, or even less, of an election campaign will have been sustained. It remains to be seen what effect that will have had on how people vote when the votes are finally cast and counted, but if we are looking for a level playing field, we certainly have not got one.

How much all that is costing I do not know. I did a rule-of-thumb calculation that the amount of money that appears to be being pumped into the local Conservative Party compared with what it had been spending previously within living memory, if this period lasts for two and a half years, might well be of the order of a quarter of a million pounds. That is my guess. I have no evidence for that; it is just based on what I know things cost. After costing the activity that is taking place—the use of central telephone polling organisations and everything else—that is my guess at the real value of what is being done.

Well, the rest of us have to take account of what is happening and try to do our best in the face of it. Again, I am not whingeing or complaining. If our opponents or anyone else’s are capable of intensive political activity, that is entirely legitimate and desirable, but it should be based on local resources and people power, not on a party’s ability to pump in large amounts of money to one constituency to try to win it. I am not suggesting that it is only the Conservatives who are doing that; I am suggesting that the system that allows it to happen is wrong.