Election expenses - it’s enough to send a shiver down the spine of any self-respecting local politician (assuming they still have a spine left, that is.) How much exactly does it cost to buy a @lambeth_council seat?
Ooh, just under £500 if you consider the average amount spent on each candidate by our friends from @LambethLabour and @LambethLibDems in the May local council elections. But even this doesn’t guarantee a seat. If only it was as simple as that.
Inspired by @darryl1974‘s poking around of the election expenses register over in Greenwich, I made my own appointment with the Electoral Services team at Lambeth Town Hall to have a snifter around the receipts that have now been filed.
It was all very co-operative, dare I say, being given my own desk space and the complete run of the accounts. By law, the party agents that are propping up the candidates have to declare all the expenditure spent during the campaign.
I wasn’t quite sure what I was looking for in Lambeth; evidence of an equal contest would have been encouraging. This is more or less the conclusion I came out with just over an hour and a half later as I left Lambeth Town Hall.
First of all, one would hope the electorate vote for policies, and not be pampered by the amount of cash spent on a campaign. Local election campaigns are a world away from the Westminster seat buying option, with strict guidelines in place dictating the maximum spend within each ward.
This is worked out as a ratio of the number of votes up for grabs - so for example a candidate could spend no more than £756.20 on their campaign in the Oval ward. You really wouldn’t want to spend any more around here to be honest.
With twenty-one wards to peruse, I needed some focus as I took up my seat in the Electoral Services office. Best keep it local I thought, and immediately got my grubby paws to work, leafing through the receipts for the Oval ward.
Let’s start off with the winners.
The good @janeinlondon / E Hants has declared election expenses of £569.88. This is a figure worth remembering - I soon found out that this is the exact same amount that every single @LambethLabour candidate in the borough has filed as an expense.
In fact every single @LambethLabour candidate in the borough has filed an exact same copy of expenses, pound for pound, penny for penny. This includes £38.83 on accommodation (slightly strange, seeing as though one would hope all candidates live locally,) £33.33 for staff and £6 for a rosette. Bless. Let’s hope they weren’t blue.
It soon became clear as I thumbed through the various ward expense sheets that all the returns for @LambethLabour were in fact photocopies of the exact same expenses sheet. It’s good to know that for a party where some are more equal than others, this thankfully isn’t the case when declaring election expenses. The same sheet was bundled in for every single @LambethLabour candidate.
But who pays for this campaign?
The entire funding for all @LambethLabour candidates came from an organisation called the Lambeth Campaigns Forum. Google is no friend here; it simply appears to be the name being used to print and publish the promotional material. The postcode of SE24 9DL (Rosendale Road) also appears across the campaign blogs.
It all appears above board, but it would be decent to know who or what the Lambeth Campaigns Forum is, and where exactly it obtains any funding from itself. If it is simply a collective pot for all @LambethLabour subscriptions, then why not publish under the name of Lambeth Labour, as is the case with the Libdems and Tories?
Ah, about those Love Me I’m a Liberal Lot…
Councillor Brown, the lone LibDem here at the Oval spent £426.25 on her successful campaign. The same figure has also been filed for @LambethLibDem candidates Andrew Brown and Claudette Hewitt, both of whom failed to get elected.
The Vauxhall LibDem party kindly donated £380.85 for each LibDem candidate in the ward. It wasn’t clear where the rest of the cash came from.
The breakdown of expenses here locally for Councillor Brown includes figures of £30.00 paid towards the Streatham LibDem manifesto and £15.40 for an item called the Streatham LibDem Housing Tabloid.
Blimey.
And so with @janeinlondon / E Hants, Jack the Lad Hopkins and Councillor Brown all elected to serve the Oval ward, what of those that missed out? Pity poor old Karim Palant, who despite having the deep pockets of the affluent Lambeth Campaigns Forum at his disposal, still managed to miss out on a council seat, seemingly on account of his surname.
As for the Blue Rinse lot? For a party that prides itself on running a tight ship, it is pleasing to see that each Conservative candidate in the Oval ward only spent £22.33 on their campaign. Given the absence of any Tory literature through my letterbox, I hope the party agent has kept a receipt.
Further down the political food chain and you start to see where the political realists lay. The three English Democrat candidates for the Oval ward have all filed away a great big blank zero on their campaign expenditure. Now that’s what I call cost cutting.
And so going back to the original question of how much does a vote cost? Matching up the election expenses data with the actual votes, and we find that @janeinlondon / E Hants’ 2,274 votes clock in at 25p per endorsement; Jack the Lad Hopkins comes in slightly more costly at almost 26p per vote.
In these days of austerity, it is the LibDem Councillor Brown who is more cost effective in absolute terms, coming in at 19p per vote. The Tories meanwhile are valued at tuppence each, which in relative terms, is probably about right.
To be honest and that was all that I could be arsed to work out. The lovely chaps at the Electoral Services team were starting to get curious as to why a lycra clad bloke was flicking through their books at 9am on a Monday morning, and yep, I really did have better things to do.
But just one more task though…
You may remember the incredibly vile election campaign attack mounted by @LambethLabour over in Herne Hill. Having first refused to even acknowledge the existence of the Green vote, a final smear was put in place by party agent Alexis Darby, claming that the Green party had plans to turn Herne Hill into a “drugs supermarket.”
We should expect nothing less from someone whose job description is basically to s*** stir.
It was truly sickening electioneering, but did the job in scaring the electorate to vote for three @LambethLabour councillors, with the Green party losing its one previous seat in the borough.
But what of the cost involved? As we have seen, @LambethLabour is consistent is spunking away £569.88 on every single candidate in the borough. The Green party however proved slightly trickier to get a handle on.
The Electoral Services team file away the receipts for all parties via wards. There is a ring bound folder for each ward, where all candidates that stood are lumped together. All except the Green party that it. How very strange.
A separate file is kept at Lambeth Town Hall on the Greens. The index sheet is a revealing read, stating that a total of zero pence was spent on all Green candidates in Lambeth. All except Herne Hill that is.
It was no secret back in May that the Greens were targeting Herne Hill as a possible hunting ground. The figures now filed away confirm this. A total of £1,782.29 has been returned for election expenses for ALL THREE Green candidates in Herne Hill. An individual costing was not made available.
As a comparison, @LambethLabour spent £1,709.63 on ALL THREE mud slinging red flag flying candidates in Herne Hill - £72.65 less than the Greens. You would have to say that with a return of three councillors, this is either money well spent, or money well manipulated, depending on your political point of view. The LibDems meanwhile spent absolutely nothing in Herne Hill, leaving @LambethLabour and the Greens to slog it out.
And so with apologies for any readers out in St Leonards, Streatham Hill or Streatham South - one and a bit wards was really all that I could stomach. Of course it’s not about the filthy wonga and the cash from chaos. Oh nope, not here. It’s all about value, or even perceived value.
I’m still struggling to make any sense of the figures.
