Standards, Procedures and Public Appointments Committee 06 November 2025
Good morning. As you know, I was disappointed and frustrated not to have more of an opportunity to feed into the process without the need to lodge such a motion. The committee would have welcomed the chance to comment further in advance and to work something out in a more collegiate way, because there are problems with the guidance. If we expect people to comply with electoral law, the guidance on how to do that must be sound. In particular, we need to keep in mind that this is guidance for non-party campaigners, and, although candidates and agents are rightly expected to be well across their legal duties, non-party campaigners need to be as clear as possible about how they can best do that.
I am grateful to the Electoral Commission for meeting me earlier this week to discuss some of the finer points, and I am reassured that there are plans to improve the non-statutory guidance, but I still feel that the statutory guidance is, in places, quite difficult to understand. Some of the logic is a bit circular, so it is worth having further conversation about how we approach these issues in the future.