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Political Parties and Elections Bill

I shall speak also to Amendments 87 and 88. We now move on to what will be new Section 54A, which is inserted via Clause 8 and relates to declarations as to source of donation. Our amendments are designed merely to provide some sort of protection for those who have a duty to make such a declaration. The first one changes the words from, ""best of the individual’s knowledge"," to "individual’s reasonable knowledge". The second amendment leaves out in line 41 "or recklessly", so it has to be quite clear that a person knowingly makes a false direction and there is no question of recklessly. To underline that particular point, after that we insert a new subsection to make it clear that: ""A person does not commit an offence if it can be reasonably proven that the person had no intention of making, or by innocent mistake made, a false declaration under this section"." When a new criminal offence is being created, as it is here, it is right that if the individual does not have the mens rea and has not properly thought that he was committing a crime, it would be unwise to deem that he or she has done so in that event. I hope that the Minister will accept that it is particularly the last amendment that is the most important, in that it makes it quite clear that from Amendments 87 and 88 a person must know that they are committing an offence before they commit it, rather than being able to be found guilty having made a reasonable mistake. I beg to move.