On Wednesday afternoon, MPs debated and voted on amendments suggested by the House of Lords to the Transparency Of Lobbying, Non-Party Campaigning And Trade Union Administration Bill, known by opponents as the “gagging bill”.
The new Bill, due to come info force in May 2014, would prevent non-politicians, such as campaign groups, lobbyists and charities such as Oxfam, the RPSB and the Royal British Legion from being able to speak out on major issues affecting the country.
There was much discussion by MPs on Wednesday about the proposed amendments – put forward by the Lords and seen by campaign groups as an improvement to the Bill – with many MPs expressing their concern at how quickly this was being pushed through Parliament.
How Andrew Turner voted
The motion debated was to reject amendments suggested by the Lords to the Bill.
They comprised
Amendment 108: How much staff costs count towards total spending limits. 310 MPs voted to reject the changes, whilst 278 MPs voted to accept them.
Andrew Turner voted to reject the amendment.
Amendments 26 and 27: Changes to the scope of what activity counts towards constituency spending limits. 314 MPs voted to reject the changes, whilst 274 MPs to accept.
Andrew Turner was absent for this vote.
Why he voted against the amendments
Prior to the Hansard transcript being issued (revealing how he’d voted), we wrote to Andrew Turner’s office first thing on Thursday morning, asking how he’d voted and for a comment.
We received no reply Thursday, no reply Friday, but we did receive an email on Saturday from Carole Dennett saying Andrew may write a press release over the weekend.
This detail was also tweeted by whoever is running Andrew Turner’s Twitter account, ‘TheIslandsMP’ this morning (Sunday).
Still chance to reverse
The Bill does go back to the House of Lords, who have the option to override the MPs’ vote and ensure their recommendations are included in the Bill.
The full discussion on Hansard can be viewed here.
Comment: Attempting to controlling the press
We’ve been in this business long enough to know that if someone receives a media enquiry, doesn’t respond for a number of days and then seeks to respond with a press release (even more days later) – rather than answer the questions at the time – it’s often because they are seeking to control the story and attempting to frustrate the Press from doing their proper job.
Let’s hope that this isn’t what’s happening here.
Andrew Turner’s office issued this press release at 3.41pm on Monday 27th January.
‘Lobbying Bill’ – Much Improved says MP
Island 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, whose spokesman said, ‘The bill now provides a much more sensible balance than it did to begin with between creating accountability and transparency in elections while still allowing for charities and others to speak up on issues of concern’.
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.
“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.”
