On 24 October, the Constitution Unit hosted an event asking whether the government’s electoral reforms go far enough. A common theme that emerged was that the government should go further than its current plans. Rowan Hall summarises the contributions, which are available in full on YouTube and as an episode of our podcast. 

In July, the UK government published an elections policy paper. This set out a range of proposals around elections and campaigning in the UK. The Unit’s Deputy Director, Professor Alan Renwick, summarised the measures in a blog post in September, in particular referring to the decision to retain a ‘strategy and policy statement’ written by the government, subject to parliamentary approval and which the Electoral Commission ‘must have regard to’, as a ‘surprising and serious error of judgement’.

A Constitution Unit event on 24 October examined the proposals further. Tom Hawthorn from the Electoral Commission, Rose Whiffen from Transparency International UK, Cat Smith MP and Professor David Howarth were asked whether the government’s electoral reforms go far enough? The consensus on the panel was that, much as the paper contained many good proposals, further steps are badly needed to maintain the UK’s healthy democracy. This blogpost summarises the contributions.

Tom Hawthorn

Tom Hawthorn – Head of Policy at the Electoral Commission – said that there was much ‘good’ in the policy paper, citing automatic voter registration, digital voter ID, a new ‘Know-Your-Donor’ requirement for political parties, a requirement for donors to declare sources of funding connected to their donations and stricter rules around donations from unincorporated associations. He suggested these measures would ‘help improve public confidence and improve the integrity of the political funding framework’. He also said that allowing the Commission to impose civil sanctions on candidates and others who can only currently be investigated by the police (as it currently can on political parties) would avoid criminal sanctions ‘for relatively straightforward administrative failures’ while hopefully providing ‘reassurance for voters’. At the same time, he emphasised that restrictions on political finance should not mean ‘reducing the opportunity for voters to receive the information that they need’.

Tom also mentioned the ‘bad’. He said that ‘we really want to see something more’ on the risk of foreign funding coming through company donations to political parties and was critical that overseas voters had been omitted from the paper. He added:

We remain opposed to the principle of a strategy and policy statement. The independence and impartiality of our Commission must be clear for voters and campaigners to see and this form of influence or even potential influence from a government is inconsistent with that role.

And then Tom turned to what he referred to as ‘the ugly’. He said that ‘electoral law is already complex, voluminous, fragmented’, which creates ‘real practical challenges for officials and ministers’. For instance, a Statutory Instrument made last year to make veterans cards an accepted form of voter ID was 72 pages long. He also noted that much electoral law is devolved to Scotland and Wales, suggesting that the UK government should engage in dialogue with its counterparts in both Edinburgh and Cardiff to minimise risks of incoherence, while at the same time respecting their autonomy.

Finally, on ‘votes at 16’, he argued that ‘we need to learn from the experience in Scotland and Wales, which is really about the importance of good quality Citizenship education and teaching for young people about elections’. He highlighted the Electoral Commission’s new resources and materials to support teachers.

Rose Whiffen

Rose Whiffen – Senior Research Officer at Transparency International UK – focused on aspects of the government’s proposals relating to campaign finance.

First, she emphasised the need for any new rules on company donations to be robust. She said that she hoped the requirement in the policy paper for ‘companies to have made sufficient UK (or Ireland) generated income in order to donate’ manifests itself as a ‘profit test’. She said that ‘we think it is a more watertight test rather than one say based on revenue’.

Second, Rose welcomed the proposal to raise the maximum fine that the Electoral Commission can impose from £20,000 to £500,000. She repeated that ‘we also obviously believe in the independence of the Electoral Commission’ and rebutted the argument that the strategy and policy statement is needed because the Commission will be given new powers: ‘the Electoral Commission is not unaccountable… It is accountable to parliament through the Speaker’s Committee… We do not need this additional layer of interference in order to make it accountable’.

And, third, Rose said that ‘big money in politics’ is ‘the elephant in the room of these proposals that went unaddressed and is absolutely key to the government’s own aims of restoring trust in our democracy’. She cited Transparency International UK research that, in 2023, 19 donors gave over £1 million each, accounting for two thirds of private donations, while 63% of the public believe the rich have too much influence in UK politics. She criticised the fact that the UK has no donation cap, unlike Australia’s $50,000, France’s €7,500 and Italy’s €100,000 and pointed out that the Committee on Standards in Public Life suggested a cap of £10,000 per donor per year in 2011. She proposed that a cap ‘could start higher and then come down’ and suggested that it could ‘create more of a widespread membership model’. She also argued that the threshold to publicly report a donation should be £500 no matter its source and that ‘there should be much more transparency over some think tanks and where they get their funding from, because they also have a role in influencing politics’.

Cat Smith MP

Cat Smith is the Labour MP for Lancaster and Wyre and chair of the House of Commons Procedure Committee. She served in the Shadow Cabinet between 2016 and 2021, where her brief included elections policy. She welcomed ‘votes at 16’, saying that ‘it is right that we take steps towards making the franchise more inclusive’. She also praised moves towards automatic voter registration, calling this ‘a basic administrative necessity in a modern democracy’.

To the question of whether the government’s plans go far enough, however, she answered with ‘regrettably a pretty emphatic no’. Her central criticism was of the decision to retain the strategy and policy statement for the Electoral Commission, which, she said, is ‘fundamentally corrosive to public trust’ and ‘the ultimate conflict of interest’. She added that, while the content of a new strategy and policy statement ‘will probably be more agreeable to me, the principle of it existing in the first place I think is just wrong’. The most persuasive argument to make to the government against the statement, she suggested, ‘would be to point out that they are not going to be in government forever’.

Next, Cat said that the government was failing to address political finance. She argued: ‘we need a system that ensures transparency and prevents the influence of dark money from foreign or unaccountable sources’, but ‘the current framework is archaic’. She explained: ‘we have chosen to regulate the regulator, but not to address the flow of anonymous cash that is going into political campaigns and that needs to change’. Later, she suggested that ‘I think too much money is going into elections and it becomes a race of the person who wins the election is the person who can raise/spend the most money and swamp the algorithms on people’s mobile phones’.

Cat also said that the government was failing to address problems with the truthfulness of public speech. She said that ‘the deliberate dissemination of falsehoods during campaigns is giving us an existential threat to informed consent and our democracy as a whole’. She explained that ‘the line between robust debate and outright lies is difficult to draw, but we have to make an attempt to do that’. Finally, she argued that changing the voting system used in general elections ‘would go a long way to addressing the trust issues that we have’, highlighting that this has support among both the public and Labour MPs.

Professor David Howarth

David Howarth is Professor of Law and Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. He was previously the Liberal Democrat MP for Cambridge between 2005 and 2010 and an Electoral Commissioner between 2010 and 2018. Following Cat Smith, he said that ‘you cannot leave out the question of electoral reform’ and ‘in a multi-party system with five, six parties in the field with the chance of winning, [First Past the Post] will just produce farcical results’.

David said that, without a donation cap, the most efficient way for parties to use their fundraising resources ‘is to go for a small number of gigantic donations’. He proposed a cap ‘set at a percentage of median income and a fairly low percentage at that’. He argued that corporate donations ‘are a way of driving coach and horses through the system of transparency’, but if they are not to be banned then all company directors, shadow directors and people with significant control should themselves be permissible donors for a donation to be legal. He suggested that ‘spending control at the national level should apply all the time’, not just during general election campaigns, because campaigning ‘is now permanent’ and there are currently no limits during local election campaigns. He also said that ‘third party campaigners who are affecting the outcomes of elections should be regulated in the same way as parties’.

Like the other contributors, David said that ‘it is simply outrageous’ to pretend that the Electoral Commission ‘is just like any other regulator that should be subject to the policy and strategy of the government’. He suggested that it makes ‘absolutely no sense’ for it to ‘be more accountable to people whose main interest is making elections unfair for their own benefit’. Separately, he suggested that no political party should have a majority on the Speaker’s Committee and that the chair of the Electoral Commission should ‘be someone of frightening stature’. He also said that ‘some kind of dedicated crown prosecutor’ should be able to bring criminal proceedings relating to serious electoral offences.

David characterised voter ID as ‘a solution to a problem that does not exist’. He finally highlighted the current mood of anti-politics, in which ‘spending money on representation’ is too often viewed as ‘a cost, not a benefit’ He contended that this would have to change for democratic health to be restored, saying, ‘I would rather like to live in a society where nearly everyone knew someone who was elected to something’.

This event took place on 24 October. A recording is available in full on YouTube and as an episode of our podcast.

About the author

Rowan Hall is the Impact Research Fellow at the Constitution Unit.

Featured image: Polling station (CC BY-SA 2.0) by secretlondon123.

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