Mark Pack

Hundreds of local records which would reveal the extent of Lord Ashcroft’s donations to Conservative Party candidates during the crucial last few weeks of the 2005 general election campaign have been destroyed the Electoral Commission has confirmed.

Although the Electoral Commission publishes records of donations made to political parties, donations made specifically to individual candidates during an election campaign are recorded separately.

Those separate records are submitted with candidates’ election expense return forms and stored locally after an election before subsequently being destroyed by the local council. The Electoral Commission also takes in copies of all these returns for its national analysis of election expenditure, but the Commission confirmed to me yesterday that it too has destroyed its copies of the records.

The data from these direct local donations are not included in the donation totals published by the Electoral Commission, such as on its website and in its quarterly reports. Therefore, there is no longer any record of such donations made by by Lord Ashcroft (or anyone else).

It is usual practice for the local copies of these records to be destroyed, but this issue does raise the question of whether in future the Electoral Commission should keep such records for a longer period – and at least until after the next general election.