FOREWORD BY THE HOME SECRETARY

Political parties play a crucial role in our democratic process. Yet for some time there has been public concern about how political parties are funded and about the absence of effective rules governing what they can spend at elections.

The Government was elected in May 1997 committed to cleaning up British politics and to ensuring that the way political parties were funded was open and transparent. One of our first acts in government was to ask the Committee on Standards in Public Life under Lord Neill's chairmanship to consider how the funding of political parties should be regulated and reformed.

I would again like to place on record the Government's gratitude to Lord Neill and his colleagues for their thorough and incisive investigation into this issue. Their report reaffirms the need for robust controls to ensure that political parties are properly accountable to the people whom they seek to represent and that politics in this country does not become a matter of who can spend the most.

When the Neill Committee report was published the Government announced that it welcomed the main findings of the report and that the next step would be to publish a draft Bill to show how the recommendations could be implemented in legislative form.

This White Paper now sets out the Government's response to all of the Neill Committee's one hundred recommendations and includes a draft Bill. We would welcome comments on our proposals from all those with an interest in this subject. This will enable the draft Bill to be improved and finalised, with a view to introducing it in Parliament at the earliest opportunity.

Jack Straw

We welcome your comments on this site. Prepared 27 July 1999