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Political Parties and Elections Bill

I agree; if we are going to have such an arrangement, it has to conform to standards that are more rigorous than the existing ones. That is part of the quid pro quo, and my hon. Friend is right about that. However, the essential issue is the reason for wanting to control local financial spending. We have a permanent election campaign now, which has direct implications for spending at a local level, and it is right that we want to control that, just as we want to control national spending. I was interested in the speech of the right hon. Member for Horsham (Mr. Maude) because, as I understood it, he said that although he did not like the return to the trigger mechanism—I had some sympathy with him on that because none of us found it satisfactory—he accepted that there was a case for some sort of control on local spending. That was confusing; he said he was not persuaded that there was a need for any kind of cap on spending, but went on to describe the kind of cap that he might support, referring to the number of months for which it might apply. In the spirit of the consensus that we do not usually do here, there is room for movement there, because in a sense there is a shared objective. There is an agreement about the need to constrain spending at a local level if we can agree on the mechanism. If I can agree that there are deficiencies in the operation of the trigger mechanism as it used to be, perhaps he could agree on finding a more effective mechanism to achieve the same objective.