The government’s long-awaited proposals for electoral reforms, published last month, will receive their first scrutiny in the House of Commons next Monday. Ahead of that debate, Alan Renwick analyses which of the bill’s proposals – and omissions – are likely to spark most contention. He suggests that pressure to strengthen the bill will be intense on multiple fronts.
The Representation of the People Bill – published by the UK government earlier this month and due to be debated in the House of Commons for the first time next Monday – proposes to overhaul many aspects of the conduct of elections. If passed, it will lower the voting age from 18 to 16 for all elections in the UK where that change has not already been made. It will open the way to automated voter registration, allow additional forms of voter ID, and tackle problems in postal voting. On campaigning, it will strengthen rules against foreign donations, extend requirements for ‘imprints’ specifying the origin of digital campaign materials, and enhance the powers of the Electoral Commission. It will take steps to tackle harassment and intimidation of candidates, campaigners, and election staff.
The bill has long been in preparation. Many of the measures were foreshadowed in Labour’s 2024 election manifesto. Last July, ministers published a policy paper setting out their plans – which was analysed on this blog. Much campaign effort to shape the bill – then expected to be called the Elections Bill – has already taken place.
Most of the proposals will widely be seen as steps in the right direction. The bill will, nevertheless, be hotly debated: partly for provisions that may be thought incomplete or unduly weak; and partly for measures that are missing entirely. Many Labour MPs and others are already mobilising to propose amendments. This post examines the areas where pressure for such changes seems likely to be greatest.
Political finance
The bill contains several measures designed to hinder foreign money from entering UK politics. Recipients of large donations will have to carry out ‘know your donor’ checks to ensure the money has a permissible source. Company donations will be capped at the company’s annual revenue in the UK. Oversight of donations from unincorporated associations will be tightened.
These changes will aid enforcement of long-accepted principles. But they are criticised on several fronts.
First, the Electoral Commission, in responding to the bill, has been strikingly forthright in saying the measures on company donations will not guarantee that such donations can genuinely be covered from UK activities. The donation limit is to be defined in terms of company revenues rather than profits – whereas, manifestly, only profits generate funds that can be used for donations. Furthermore, the new rule would cap a company’s donations to individual recipients, not its total donations. As the Commission puts it, ‘a company could donate an amount equal to their revenue to a party and then donate the same amount to each of the party’s MPs, councillors and candidates’. The Commission goes on, ‘Under the current proposals, company donations would effectively remain uncapped. … These provisions would not reduce the risk of foreign money entering British politics through companies.’
These are astonishing weaknesses in the current drafting. Whether ministers can offer any plausible defence remains to be seen. But amendments to tighten the measures up appear highly likely.
Second, the bill proposes no controls on cryptocurrency donations. The chair of parliament’s Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy – Labour MP Matt Western – responded to the bill by noting the Committee had ‘recently heard concerns about the risk of cryptocurrency enabling foreign donations, as well as the lack of scrutiny around campaign spending outside of election periods’, and saying that minsters would need to address such matters. Both he and ministers acknowledge that the bill has been published while a review of foreign financial interference in UK politics, led by the former civil servant Philip Rycroft, is ongoing. Further provisions are likely to be added in light of that review’s recommendations.
Third, the bill makes no attempt to address wider concerns about the role of ‘big money’ in politics. As I have argued previously, the idea that rich individuals – whether foreign or not – should be able to donate unlimited sums to political campaigns is indefensible in a democracy. Yet ministers are intent on maintaining that arrangement. As Western noted, there is also to be no attempt to limit campaign spending outside election periods, so parties and other campaigners will remain free to spend large sums across the election cycle to shift the terms of debate in their favour.
Parties and campaigners do need to be able to raise funds in order to communicate their message effectively to voters. But it is hard to argue against high donation caps – perhaps set, as Sam Power has suggested, at £1 million a year – which would at least tackle the most egregious current inequities. Labour MPs – including the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Anti-Corruption and Responsible Tax, Phil Brickell – are already making this case.
The role and independence of the Electoral Commission
The bill contains several welcome measures to strengthen the Electoral Commission. The maximum fine the Commission can levy will be raised from £20,000 to £500,000 per offence. Responsibility for some matters will transfer to the Commission from the police. Information sharing among regulators will be improved.
Yet there is also a glaring omission. The last government reduced the Electoral Commission’s independence by requiring it to take account of a ‘Strategy and Policy Statement’ written by ministers. Numerous elections experts pointed out the threat this poses to electoral integrity. So too did senior Labour figures when the party was in opposition. But the bill is silent on the matter, in line with last summer’s policy paper, which said the government would write a new statement rather than repeal the provision.
That the fair conduct of elections requires an impartial election management body is undisputed. That allowing one party, when in government, to write a strategy statement for the Electoral Commission violates this principle ought to be equally self-evident. That ministers are apparently unconcerned by the breach of such a basic democratic principle is deeply troubling. Multiple MPs, including Labour’s former Shadow Minister for Democracy Cat Smith, have expressed that discontent, and indicated their intention to push for change.
Harassment and intimidation
The bill likewise contains several widely welcomed measures in relation to the harassment or intimidation of candidates, campaigners, or election staff. Vestigial requirements for some candidates’ home addresses to be published will be removed. Courts will be empowered to given tougher sentences. Existing protections for candidates, campaigners, and elected office-holders will be extended to election staff.
Here again, however, there is pressure for further action. The Speaker’s Conference on the Security of Candidates, MPs, and Elections, which reported last autumn, recommended that government ‘should consider the merits of mandating Ofcom to produce an elections code of practice for social media platforms’. Organisations including the Online Safety Act Network, the Jo Cox Foundation, and Demos want the bill to provide for such a code. But a government response to the Speaker’s Conference’s conclusions is yet to be published. Other measures, such as requiring political parties to publish their internal codes, may also be considered.
Information and disinformation
Many observers fear that democracy is drowning in a sea of mis- and disinformation. Yet the bill contains almost nothing to address this. One measure appears intended to improve basic information provision: local election officials will have to share details of elections that are taking place, including who the candidates are, presumably so that a central website containing such information can be created. This is a welcome move – a step towards the ‘democracy information hub’ that Michela Palese and I argued for in a 2019 report, Doing Democracy Better, which was also backed by a Lords committee in 2020. But this is a small reform in the face of massive challenges to democracy.
Organisations such as Full Fact and Demos are pressing for additional measures. These include: a centralised, accessible library of all political advertisements (something that the Unit’s Independent Commission on Referendums argued for in 2018); regulation of misleading statements of fact in political advertising; the outlawing of harmful deepfakes of election candidates; and wider amendments to the Online Safety Act intended to address harms to democracy. Labour MP Emily Darlington has been quoted as planning to press for amendments on at least some of these matters.
Education for young voters
The bill (understandably) says nothing about changes in education provision that will be made to ensure newly enfranchised 16- and 17-year-olds are ready to vote. But the government’s policy paper accompanying the bill says that ministers are working on ‘a package of additional measures focusing on practical democratic and civic education and engagement’. It adds that, following last year’s Curriculum and Assessment Review, ‘the Department for Education has committed to make citizenship compulsory in primary schools and to publish revised programmes of study to ensure that all pupils receive an essential grounding in a range of topics including democracy, government and law’.
Yet implementation of changes following the curriculum review will begin only in 2028; and pupils who have taken the revised curriculum from primary school onwards will gain the vote only from the mid-2030s onwards. The Electoral Commission and others are developing resources for schools to be rolled out in time for the implementation of votes at 16 in 2028 or 2029, which is very welcome. But MPs will be well justified in seeking more detailed information from ministers during parliamentary debates on the bill to ensure that such activities are adequately resourced and available at all schools.
First Past the Post
One final area of debate looks set to concern the core of the electoral system itself. Many MPs now back a move from First Past the Post either to a proportional system or to a preferential system such as the Alternative Vote; and public opinion appears to have shifted in favour of such a change as well. When the government’s policy paper was debated last summer, multiple Labour MPs stood up to make the case.
The Labour leadership has consistently argued against abandoning First Past the Post, however, and the bill contains so such measure. With the frontbenches of both main parties apparently still firmly backing the status quo, concessions appear improbable. Campaigners for reform know this, and therefore look set to focus their efforts on securing not immediate reform, but rather a review of the system – as set out last year by the All-Party Parliamentary Group for Fair Elections. Even this, however, may be a demand whose time is yet to come.
Conclusion
There is little in the Representation of the People Bill that we should expect will struggle for majority support in either the Commons or the Lords. But numerous amendments to the government’s initial proposals do appear likely. There is much to play for in the months ahead as the bill is scrutinised in parliament.
About the author
Alan Renwick is Professor of Democratic Politics at UCL and Deputy Director of the Constitution Unit.
Featured image: Polling station (CC BY 2.0) by RachelH_.