As the independent regulator of party and election finance, we make sure that political parties, including their many volunteers, understand and follow the rules.
We provide support and guidance to help them do this, and assess the financial data they provide. To ensure transparency and maintain public confidence that the law on donations, loans and spending is followed, we publish party finance information on the public registers section of our website.
Monitoring compliance with the rules on party and candidate expenditure is part of our statutory remit. As part of our work for the UK Parliamentary general election, we have undertaken a programme of campaign monitoring.
The purpose of this work is to promote compliance with the law by:
- raising regulated entities’ awareness of the rules and our role in applying them
- obtaining information on campaign activity which the Commission may refer to when reviewing campaign spending returns; and
- identifying emerging issues and opportunities for us to proactively offer advice and guidance to those we regulate.
We monitor campaigning activity in a risk-based way, focusing our resources on specific electoral ‘battleground’ constituencies across the UK. We will assess the level of campaigning in those constituencies, including campaigning by registered parties, individual candidates and other ‘third party’ campaigners.
The purpose of this activity is to examine and evaluate the types of online campaigning including press and web coverage of ongoing related events. Our monitoring work covers press and online activity, party advertising on television, in newspapers, and on websites, with ongoing monitoring on relevant websites such as newspaper sites, YouTube, Twitter and blogs.
Our campaign monitoring programme commenced across the UK in January 2010 and runs until polling day. A report on campaign spending will be published after the election.
- Click here for our briefing note on our campaign monitoring activity in the run up to the UK Parliamentary general election (PDF).
- Find out more about the rules on election spending and reporting requirements here.
- Guidance for those campaigning in the UK Parliamentary general election is available on our resources for those we regulate pages.
For more about our monitoring activity, please call our party and election finance information line 0207 271 0616 or email us.
