British Election Will Cost Taxpayer £2m

Press, Volume CIII, Issue 30469, 17 June 1964, Page 12

British Election Will Cost Taxpayer £2m

(By FRASER WIGHTON} LONDON. The British General Election, now expected to be held in October, will mean a bill of more than £2m for the nation. But the man>in*the>street will be unlucky if his share of the total, in tax, amounts to more than Is. The strictest rules and scrutiny govern all expenditure.

About half the total will come from the Treasury, which takes care of such arrangements as the printing of ballot forms and the provision of staff to supervise, polling and to count the votes. The Treasury will in due course recover its expenditure from the taxpayer. The remainder of the cost will be borne by candidates and the political organisations whom they represent. Theoretically, the candidate himself pays. In practice, the bulk of the money is provided by “fighting" funds contributed by party well-wishers. Britain (with Northern Ireland) has 630 Parliamentary Constituencies. On average, the maximum permitted expenditure is about £9OO per candidate. Candidates in county constituencies, which are more scattered than towns, are by law restricted to an expenditure of £450 plus, a penny half-penny for each registered voter. Ip Northern Ireland, which sends members to the Parliament at Westminster, the limit is 2d a voter plus an allowance, for agents’ fees, not exceeding £75 in a county election, or £5O in a borough election. This works out in practice to about two-thirds of the allowance in Britain. In addition, each candidate may spend up to £lOO, but no more, on personal expenses. The spending rules are imposed, not to hamper the candidate but to ensure that a wealthy candidate does not have an unfair advantage over another who cannot afford to spend too freely. Must Answer There was a time, less than two centuries ago, when it was easy for a man of means to “buy” his way into the

House of Commons., But today each candidate’s agent must answer to the Government for every penny spent on the campaign. Within 35 days after the pool result is declared, he must submit to the returning officer a complete statement of expenses incurred, together with the relevant bills and receipts. ■Within the following ten days the returning officer must publish in at least two local newspapers a summary, under seven heads, of the expenses of all candidates concerned. And within a year, a summary of all the accounts, with other relevant information, is pub-

lished as a report to Parliament under the title “Return of Election Expenses.” In the last General Election, in 1959, Conservative candidates spent on average 89 per cent of the maximum allowed them, Labour candidates spent 83 per cent and Liberal 62 per cent. Minor party and independent candidates spent an average of 36 per cent. Cars Restricted Until less than ten years ago, there was a ban on the use of too many cars to take voters to the polls. Technically, it was illegal for a man to take anyone except members of his own household by car to the polling station. It could have been an offence tb give a neighbour a lift. Voters had to be taken only in specially-registered cars, which were restricted in number. But in 1958 this rule was

dropped—though not without strong opposition in the House of Commons, where Labour members protested that the relaxation would weigh unfairly against their party. Conservatives retorted that the motor-car was no longer a rich man’s privilege but, in prosperous Britain, the transport medium of an evergrowing proportion of the general public.

In the 1959 General Election, the total of the returning officer’s expenses charged to the public was £1,303,694, or an average of fully £2OOO a constituency. This covered the cost of election notices, receiving and publicising nominations, sending out poll cards to all the 36m-odd voters, employing. polling-station clerks for election day, employing people to count the votes after the polls had closed. Regular Income

The Government has one small but regular source of income from elections. Each candidate has to deposit £l5O as a guarantee of good faith. He forfeits this sum if he fails to gain at least one-eighth of the total votes cast in his particular constituency. In 1959, these forfeitures brought the Treasury the modest sum of only £17,400 for 116 lost deposits. Its best post-war “haul” was in 1950, when there were 461 forfeited deposits, 319 of them by Liberals, benefiting the Government to the tune of £69,150. The law is particularly rigorous on one point of electioneering. There must be no “treating” of voters by buying them drinks, or other favours.