Conservative constituency parties' Funding and spending in England and Wales, 2004-2005

Political Quarterly

Volumn 78, Issue 3, 2007, Pages 392-411

  Johnston, Ron ^a   Pattie, Charles ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 34547972202     PISSN: 00323179     EISSN: 1467923X     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-923X.2007.00868.x     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. A preliminary report available at (http://www.partyfundingreview.gov.uk/ htms/download.htm) was published in October 2006. The final report appeared in March 2007 and is available at the same website.
2. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmselect/cmconst/163/ 163i.pdf
3. On which, see D. J. Cutts Continuous campaigning and electoral outcomes: the Liberal Democrats in Bath Political Geography, vol. 26, 2006, pp. 72 88.
4. D. J. Cutts and N. Shrayne Did local activism really matter? Liberal Democrat campaigning and the 2001 British general election British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 8, 2006, pp. 427 44 see also R. J. Johnston and C. J. Pattie, 'Candidate quality and the impact of campaign expenditure: a British example', Journal of Elections, Public Opinion and Parties, vol. 2, 2006, pp. 283-304.
5. D. T. Denver and G. Hands, Modern Constituency Electioneering: Local Campaigning in the 1992 General Election, London, Frank Cass, 1997 see also D. T. Denver, G. Hands, J. Fisher and I. MacAllister, 'Constituency campaigning in Britain, 1992-2001: centralization and modernization', Party Politics, vol. 9, 2003, pp. 541-59.
6. C. J. Pattie and R. J. Johnston Still talking but is anyone listening? The changing face of constituency campaigning in Britain, 1997-2005 Party Politics, vol. 14, 2008.
7. R. J. Johnston, P. J. Cowley, C. J. Pattie and M. Stuart Voting in the House or wooing the voters at home: Labour MPs and the 2001 general election campaign Journal of Legislative Studies, vol. 8, 2002, pp. 9 22.
8. As in K. D. Ewing, The Cost Of Democracy: Party Funding in Modern British Politics, Oxford and Portland, OR, Hart Publishing, 2007.
9. The validity of this claim has been successfully tested in R. J. Johnston and C. J. Pattie Funding local political parties in England and Wales: donations and constituency campaigns British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 9, 2007, 365 95.
10. Scotland has been omitted because of the changes in the constituency boundaries - consequent on the reduction of the number of Scottish MPs from seventy-two to fifty-nine - which made data matching difficult. Because the data refer only to constituency parties with turnover of £25,000 or more annually, certain parts of the country are over-represented in the 261 constituencies for which we have data. Thus, for example, 82 per cent of constituencies in the South-West region are included in the analyses, as are 73 per cent of those in the South-East and East Anglia. Against this, the data set includes only 17 per cent of constituencies in the North, 19 per cent in the North-West and 20 per cent in Wales.
11. C. O'Leary, The Elimination of Corrupt Practices in British Elections, 1868-1911, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1961 see also N. S. Ghaleigh, 'Expenditure, donations and public funding under the United Kingdom's Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 - and beyond?', in Party Funding and Campaign Financing in International Perspective, eds. K. D. Ewing and S. Issacharoff, Oxford and Portland, OR: Hart Publishing, 2006, pp. 35-56.
12. D. Butler, The Electoral System in Britain since 1918, Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1963 R. J. Johnston, Money and Votes: Constituency Campaign Spending and Election Results, London, Croom Helm, 1987; Ewing, The Cost of Democracy.
13. R. J. Johnston, C. Pattie and I. MacAllister The funding of constituency party general election campaigns in Great Britain Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, vol. 17, 1999, 391 409.
14. For a general introduction, see K. D. Ewing Transparency, accountability and equality: the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000 Public Law, vol. 2 AUT, 2001, pp. 542 70 see also Ewing, The Cost of Democracy.
15. For registered parties, this applies to all donations of more than £5,000 plus those donations which, when added to those received from the same donor during the reporting period (quarterly save in general election periods), sum to more than £5,000. For the separate accounting units, the threshold is £1,000. All of these data are collated by the Electoral Commission and made available on its. website : http://www.electoralcommission. org.uk/regulatory-issues/registers.cfm. On donations to British political parties generally, see K. D. Ewing and N. S. Ghaleigh, 'Donations to political parties in the United Kingdom', paper presented at a Democratic Audit of Australia Workshop on Political Finance and Government Advertising, Canberra, February 2006, at http://democratic.audit.anu.edu.au/events/ 2006_pol_fin_wksp_papers.htm
16. At http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/regulatory-issues/ soayearend2002.cfm
17. Each party has some accounting units that are not aligned with a single constituency covering, for example, two or more adjacent constituencies (as with Milton Keynes), an entire urban area (Newcastle upon Tyne, for example) or a region (such as the East Midlands).
18. At http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/regulatory-issues/ legsoapolparty.cfm
19. At http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/files/dms/ StatementofAccountsBestPracticeGuidanceforaccountingunits_22918-17116_E_N_S_W_. PDF
20. These data are also briefly analysed in Ewing, The Cost of Democracy, pp. 84 5.
21. They were as follows: Buckingham; Maidstone and The Weald; Saffron Walden (which made a return for 2004, but not 2005 Tatton (for which there was a 2004 but not a 2005 return); and Windsor. In addition, a key page was missing from the Surrey East accounts, so they couldn't be analysed here.
22. The Electoral Commission requires that both the income from fund-raising events and the costs of staging them should be separately identified, but again not all local parties complied with this.
23. This figure is less than the maximum that parties are allowed to spend on the formal general election campaign.
24. That party's accounts return only £6,385 under election expenses for 2005, but a further £68,297 under 'sundry expenses'.
25. On 31 December 2006, The Sunday Times reported that David Cameron charged £480 for membership of the Patron's Club for his Witney constituency, producing an income of £29,254 in 2005 and £25,167 in 2004 - against outgoings in the former of only £3,226. The main 'perk' for members is two private lunches annually in the House of Commons dining rooms - which Labour MPs, who raised the issue with the Parliamentary Standards Commission, claim are against Parliamentary rules precluding the dining rooms being used for fund-raising. Other shadow cabinet ministers also raise substantial sums from similar sources. See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,176-2524440,00. html
26. The constituency party owns a freehold property that was valued at £1,397,500 in January 2005, for which it then received an annual rent of £155,000 from the Equitable Life Assurance Co. It has always been a generous donor to the central party on the basis of this large rental income - see C. J. Pattie and R. J. Johnston Paying their way: local associations, the constituency quota scheme and Conservative party finance Political Studies, vol. 44, 1996, pp. 921 35. The party gave £52,000 to the fund for marginal seats in 2005.
27. See Cutts Continuous campaigning and electoral outcomes Expenditure on printing and stationery is combined with that on postage in some returns. Some others indicate substantial expenditure on the latter - £21,230 in 2005 in Romsey, for example, compared with £9,535 in 2004.
28. The Calder Valley party reported spending £10,353 on leaflets alone. The Dartford accounts reported that its £15,537 spent on campaigning involved: 'an extensive schedule of doorstep canvassing which produced the highest number of pledges of any Kent marginal seat'; delivery of 200,000 leaflets during the campaign; 12,000 pledge letters to pledged supporters; 10,000 survey forms posted; and 100 'estate agent sized' posters displayed. They reduced the Labour majority from 3,306 in 2001 to 706.
29. The Somerton & Frome accounts, for example, reported that the party generated more election literature, knocked on more doors and erected many more posters than at previous elections... but were nevertheless unable to reach the results for which we were all striving (the Liberal Democrats held the seat).
30. In some cases, the fighting fund does appear in the accounts, as with the £28,249 spent in Great Yarmouth in 2005, including £9,797 on agent's expenses.
31. For Uxbridge, election expenses of £6,301 in 2005 were shown as 'negative income'. For Tunbridge Wells, election expenses were returned as net: the campaign fund in 2005 raised £24,992 and £15,945 was spent.
32. See Johnston and Pattie Funding local political parties in England and Wales'.
33. The Wrekin party, for example, joined with Shrewsbury & Atcham in the Shropshire Conservative group. It transferred £41,046 to that group in 2004 and £73,592 in 2005: total group expenditure is reported as £135,888 in 2004 and £162,983 in 2005 - with £37,363 of the latter being listed as 'election expenses'. Several constituency parties in Gloucestershire - including Cheltenham, Cotswold, Forest of Dean, Gloucester, Stroud and Tewkesbury - contributed to Gloucestershire Conservatives, according to a quota scheme. Cotswold constituency contributed £114,000 in 2004 and £100,500 in 2005 - and also contributed £115,400 to the party's target seat support fund in 2005.
34. In some of these cases, it may have been that spending on a local election campaign - there were local government elections on the same day as the 2005 general election in many parts of the country-was included in the total campaign spending in the accounts, although in a few cases this was separately identified.
35. For the seats won by Labour or the Liberal Democrats with relatively large majorities, the relatively large means in some cases are associated with only small numbers of constituencies that have relatively strong local Conservative parties despite their current poor electoral prospects. For example, the four Liberal Democrat constituencies held with margins of 20 percentage points or more where Conservative party donations averaged £11,918 included Bath, Devon West & Torridge and Harrogate & Knaresborough, all of which returned Conservative MPs in the 1980s: the fourth - Berwick-upon-Tweed - has been a Liberal seat for much longer (but its local Conservative party attracted only £1,517 in donations, compared to £10,673, £17,417 and £18,068, respectively, for the other three, which the Conservatives clearly hoped to win back (they gained only one - Devon West & Torridge). The two Liberal-Democrat-held seats with majorities of 5-10 percentage points, which raised on average £25,146 through appeals in 2004, included Devon North, where £47,808 was raised (through Orlando's Promotions' Fund): in the other - Teignbridge - the comparable amount was only £2,485.
36. On agents, see J. Fisher, D. T. Denver and G. Hands Unsung heroes: constituency election agents in British general elections British Journal of Politics and International Relations, vol. 8, 2006, pp. 569 86.
37. For example, R. J. Johnston and C. J. Pattie Where's the difference? Decomposing the impact of local election campaigns in Great Britain Electoral Studies, vol. 16, 1997, pp. 165 74.
38. See also Pattie and Johnston Still talking but is anyone listening? The Wantage constituency party gained £180,000 from the sale of its office building in 2005 the Torbay party raised £143,710 from a similar source.
39. See the discussion of these donations in Ewing, The Cost of Democracy, pp. 166 7.
40. In an interview with The Financial Times 8 January 2007, p. 3 Hazel Blears (chair of the Labour party) claimed that there had to be reform with regard to caps on donations to local parties 'following evidence that heavy backing by Lord Ashcroft... of Tory candidates in some swing constituencies at the last general election "effectively bought" seats'.
41. At http://www.electoralcommission.or-g.uk/regulatory-issues/registers.cfm
42. Non-cash donations to the same value also have to be reported. There are relatively few of these, mainly relating to the provision of premises and office machinery. In 2004, of the constituencies studied here, twenty-two were reported as receiving such donations, totalling an estimated value of £159,865, with an average of just £4,700. The comparable figures for 2005 referred to thirty-four constituencies: the non-cash donations totalled £127,107 in value, at an average of £5,777.
43. For the local parties whose accounts were returned to the Electoral Commission, the total amount recorded as donations in 2005 was £2,576,249: the sum recorded as separate donations to those constituencies was £2,159,428. In 2004, the respective totals were £1,769,083 and £1,070,069.
44. Cutts Continuous campaigning and electoral outcomes see also Johnston et al. Voting in the House or wooing the voters at home The Sunday Times, 26 March 2005, p. 5. According to the official returns of spending by candidates, available on the Electoral Commission's website at http://www. electoralcommission.org.uk/templates/search/document.cfm/14985, the only constituency where the Conservatives outspent Labour by a ratio of 10:1 or more was Cornwall North, where Labour was in a poor third place behind the Tories and the Liberal Democrats. The Conservatives outspent Labour by a ratio of 8:1 or more in eight other seats, in all of which Labour came a poor third behind the Conservative and Liberal Democrat candidates.
45. One possible loophole, available to MPs only, is to increase the amount of literature sent to voters, without making it campaign specific. This, as suggested by Maryann Sieghart in The Times on 16 March, 2007 (see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/mary_ann_sie-ghart/ articlel522472.ece), could be how an additional £10,000 annual communications allowance voted for MPs in November 2006 is used.
46. Strengthening Democracy: Fair and Sustainable Funding of Political Parties. 2007, London, HMSO, available at http://www.partyfundingreview.gov.uk/ htms/download.htm
47. In The Cost of Democracy (p. 169 Ewing disagrees with this proposal, on the grounds that if few spend a great deal now, raising the limits will only encourage more to do so. He also notes (on p. 235) that additional regulation of national spending could see more money channelled through the constituency parties, which may then have to be regulated further, inviting the parties to identify further loopholes.