Mar 29, 2018 - Minister for the Constitution. Cabinet Office. 70 Whitehall. London SW1A 2AS. Dear Chloe,. Doc: 12308/17
European Union Committee
Chloe Smith MP Minister for the Constitution Cabinet Office 70 Whitehall London SW1A 2AS
House of Lords London SW1A 0PW
Tel: 020 7219 6083 Fax: 020 7219 6715
[email protected] www.parliament.uk/lords
29 March 2018
Dear Chloe, Doc: 12308/17 Proposal for a Regulation on the Statute and Funding of European Political Parties and European Political Foundations. Thank you for your letter dated 15 March 2018 which was considered by the EU Justice SubCommittee at its meeting of 27 March. In the light of your request, and due to the tight timetable that you anticipate, we decided to waive the scrutiny reserve ahead of the Council’s imminent agreement of this matter. We remain perplexed by the Government’s negative stance on the proposal for the publication of gender diversity data. This is particularly disappointing given the Prime Minister’s stated desire to encourage female representation in Parliament. You referred the Committee to an earlier Government response to the Women and Equality Committee’s report on Women in the House of Commons. The relevant extract was not enclosed but we presume that you are referring to their recommendation that the statutory requirement for political parties to publish their parliamentary candidate diversity data for general elections, as set out in Section 106 of the Equality Act 2010, should be brought into force immediately. The Government’s response to that Committee’s recommendation was that this requirement would impose a potentially onerous regulatory burden on smaller parties. This position is at odds with the Government’s earlier acknowledgement to us that any regulatory burden on parties from the proposal that we are scrutinising would be small, and that UK political parties would only be affected for a short period of time. The proposal is not one for quotas or targets. If such minor administrative requirements are considered by the Government to be a ‘regulatory burden’, it is hard to imagine how significant improvements in selecting more diverse candidates will ever be achieved.
What efforts were made to assess the feasibility of the proposal and the burdens that would have been placed on smaller political parties? Moreover, the Government’s response does not engage at all with our point that the publication of this data is a matter of public interest as it is essentially public money that is being provided to European Political Parties. Hence, we see no reason why this should only be done on a voluntary basis. We look forward to your response after the Council agrees this proposal. I am copying this letter to Sir William Cash MP, Chair of the European Scrutiny Committee; Lynn Gardner, Clerk to the European Scrutiny Committee; Arnold Ridout, Legal Adviser to the European Scrutiny Committee; Les Saunders, Department for Exiting the European Union; Maria Miller MP, Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee; and Judith Boyce, Clerk of the Women and Equalities Committee.
Lord Boswell of Aynho Chairman of the European Union Committee
