Non-party campaigners: UK Parliamentary general elections

Spending by lead and minor campaigners

If you are a lead campaigner, your spending and any spending incurred by your minor campaigners as part of the joint campaign will count towards your spending limit during the regulated period. We call minor campaigners who have agreed to you reporting on their behalf ‘your minor campaigners’.

Lead campaigners must be registered, while minor campaigners must be unregistered. 

If you are a minor campaigner, then none of the spending on the lead/minor joint campaign counts towards your spending total. This applies to: 

• your own spending on the joint campaign
• the lead campaigner’s spending on the joint campaign
• any other minor campaigner’s spending on the joint campaign

Therefore, for your own spending total, you only need to count:

• your own spending outside of any joint campaign 
• any spending by your partners in an ordinary joint campaign

This allows minor campaigners to remain unregistered, even in situations where the total joint campaign spend is over the notification threshold.

Reporting by lead and minor campaigners

If you are a lead campaigner, you must report:

• your own spending on the joint campaign 
• any spending on the joint campaign by your minor campaigners 
• any other regulated spending you incurred separate from the joint campaign. 

Your spending return must also include receipts or invoices for any spending over £200 incurred by you and your minor campaigners.5

This means you should ask all your minor campaigners:

• to let you know how much they have spent on the joint campaign in each part of the UK
• to provide you with receipts and invoices for any spending over £200 on the joint campaign

If you are a minor campaigner, and you spend up to £10,000 (the notification threshold), and the constituency limit, on regulated campaign activities unconnected with the joint campaign during the regulated period, you do not have to submit a notification or report any of your spending.

The lead campaigner is responsible for reporting your spending on joint campaigning to us. To enable the lead campaigner to fully report the joint campaigning, you should:

• agree with all other non-party campaigners involved in the joint campaign how much you can spend
• tell your lead campaigner how much you have spent in each part of the UK
• tell your lead campaigner how much you have spent in each constituency
• provide receipts and invoices for regulated campaign spending over £200 to your lead campaigner

Example

Save the Rivers and three other campaigners decide to work together as part of a joint campaign in Wales. They have all agreed that they will each spend £9,000 on the joint campaign. Save the Rivers also plans on spending an additional £5,000 on regulated campaign activities unconnected to the joint campaign. The three other campaigners do not spend any other money on regulated campaign activities.

The reporting threshold for spending in Wales is £10,000. Since the total spend on the joint campaign will be £36,000 (which is over the reporting threshold), if this campaign is run as an ordinary joint campaign then all four campaigners will have to register and report the spending individually.

As Save the Rivers is planning to spend the most money on campaigning, and to lessen the regulatory burden on the other three campaigners, they decide to become the lead campaigner. Before any spending is incurred, they submit a notification without a reporting threshold declaration. Save the Rivers do not make the reporting threshold declaration with their notification because their intended regulated spend total (£41,000 comprised of the total spend on the joint campaign of £36,000, plus their own regulated campaign spending of £5,000) is above the reporting threshold.

Save the Rivers also notifies the Commission that they are the lead campaigner, and that the three other campaigners are minor campaigners in the joint campaign.

As the three other campaigners have been notified as minor campaigners, and outside of the joint campaign they have not exceeded the notification threshold (£10,000) or the constituency limit, they do not need to submit a notification to us or report their spending on the joint campaign.

As the lead campaigner, Save the Rivers must report spending of £36,000, which is the total of their spending and the three minor campaigners’ spending on the joint campaign after the election. They must also report the additional £5,000 they spend outside of the joint campaign.

The three minor campaigners provide details of the spending alongside receipts and invoices for any spending they incurred over £200 to Save the Rivers so they can include this in the return.