Guidance for Returning Officers administering a Greater London Authority (GLA) election

Candidates must report their election spending and donations made towards their campaign after the election.

The agents for Constituency Assembly Member candidates must submit a spending and donations return to you together with any accompanying documents, such as relevant invoices and receipts for payments made over £20 and donations made over £50, within 35 calendar days of the declaration of result of the election.1

Spending returns and declarations for London-wide Member candidates or candidates for the Mayor of London election are delivered to the GLRO.

The legislation also requires election agents and candidates to submit declarations confirming the candidate’s election spending return is complete and correct. The election agent’s declaration must be submitted at the same time as the return. The candidate’s declarations must be submitted within seven working days of the election agent submitting the return.

If the candidate is out of the UK the declaration must be made within 14 calendar days after the candidate’s return to the UK.2

If a candidate is acting as their own agent, they are only required to submit one declaration.

Failure to follow the rules could lead to committing an offence and losing their seat if elected.3

How spending returns may be submitted

It is for you to determine how candidates can submit their expenses, either as hardcopies, by email or both. When determining this you should ensure:

• You advise all candidates and agents of the process in advance
• All candidates and agents are treated fairly and consistently
• The process for submitting spending returns is clear, easy to follow and accessible for all

If you decide to accept expenses returns by email you should specify any requirements, such as:

• The specific email address(es) to be used
• How emails should be labelled
• Any requirements regarding the format of email attachments

You should also consider the internal processes you will follow for spending returns submitted by email, for example:

• How you will acknowledge email submissions
• How you will manage spending returns sent to a different email address, such as having processes in place for monitoring email addresses that could be associated with the CRO or electoral services team
• How to make other teams across the council aware that they should contact you as soon as possible if they receive any emails regarding spending returns
• How you will store the returns electronically

Checking of spending returns

Whilst there is no duty for you to check the completeness or validity of candidate spending returns, if you are aware that an obvious administrative error has occurred, it would be reasonable for you to advise the candidate or agent of this. For example, if you accept spending returns by email and the covering email refers to an attachment of receipts, which have not been included, it would be reasonable to highlight this to the candidate to enable them to re-send the attachment.

You should ensure that all candidates are treated fairly and consistently, and are provided with the same level of support on the submission of their expenses.

Retention of candidate’s spending returns

You must retain a copy of each election spending return and declaration, and any accompanying documents, for a period of two years from the date you received it.4 During that period, you must make copies available for public inspection without charge in your office or another convenient place chosen by you. 

If you have accepted spending returns via email, you should think about how you will prepare returns for inspection. For example, will you allow inspection to take place on a computer under supervision, or will you print off all of the returns.

You must also provide copies of the returns, declarations or any accompanying documents on request. The fee for a copy of any return, declaration or document is 20p per side of each page.5

You must remove the addresses of individuals who have made donations to candidates from all copies of statement of donations made available for inspection or supplied on request. 

At the end of the two-year period if the candidate or the election agent requests them, the returns, declaration and accompanying documents must be returned to the candidate, otherwise they should be destroyed6 .