Tories fined £70,000 over “numerous failures” in election expenses

The Tories have been fined £70,000 after a damning investigation confirmed they broke rules on election expenses.

Today the elections regulator highlighted “numerous failures” by the party as they battled to survive in government during a race when polls put them on level-pegging with Ed Miliband’s Labour Party.

The report found several irregularities covering Tory declarations over how much they spent at the general election in 2015, as well as in three by-elections the previous year.

The close of the Electoral Commission’s probe came hours after it separately emerged that 12 police forces had sent files to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) over allegations of expenses fraud relating to the tour of marginal seats by the Tory battlebus. And, in a torrid day for the Tories, Philip Hammond was forced to scrap the key tax hike announced in his Budget just a week previously.

Fresh embarrassment was landed on the government this morning when the commissioned published its long-awaited report on the Tories’ election expenses and issued the fine. The review found:

• The Tories’ general election spending return was missing payments worth at least £104,765.
• Separately, payments worth up to £118,124 were incorrectly reported or missed completely. A portion of this cash should have been included in the party’s return but was not, the commission said.
• The party did not include the required invoices or receipts for 81 payments to the value of £52,924.
• They failed to maintain records explaining the amounts invoiced to candidates in three 2014 by-elections. for work on their campaign, so the accuracy of the amounts could not be checked.

“Our investigation uncovered numerous failures by a large, well-resourced and experienced party to ensure that accurate records of spending were maintained and that all of the party’s spending was reported correctly,” said commission chairman Sir John Holmes.

A Tory spokesman told the BBC the party would pay the fines and tried to turn their fire on to the regulator itself.

“This investigation and these fines relate to national spending by CCHQ, and the Conservative Party’s national spending return for the 2015 general election,” he said.

“As we have consistently said, the local agents of Conservative candidates correctly declared all local spending in the 2015 general election.

“CCHQ accepted in March 2016 that it had made an administrative error by not declaring a small amount constituting 0.6 per cent of our national spending in the 2015 election campaign.

“Political parties of all colours have made reporting mistakes from time to time… this is the first time the Conservative Party has been fined for a reporting error.

“We regret that and will continue to keep our internal processes under review to ensure this does not happen again.

“Given the range of technical errors made by a number of political parties and campaign groups, there also needs to be a review of how the Electoral Commission’s processes and requirements could be clarified or improved.”