Brexit: MP claims of ‘foot-dragging’ over charges for referendum rule breaches rejected by police

A group of MPs and peers is threatening judicial review over delays in responding to dossier from the electoral watchdog

The Vote Leave battle bus and its infamous claim was widely seen during the 2016 referendum (Getty)

The Metropolitan Police has rejected demands from MPs to explain alleged “foot-dragging” over electoral offences in the 2016 EU referendum.

A cross-party group of parliamentarians gave the Met Police 14 days to take action on a dossier of information passed to it more than a year ago by the Electoral Commission. They warned that if no decision on prosecution of the Vote Leave and BeLeave campaigns was made, they would seek judicial review.

But Scotland Yard lawyers responded that the group – which includes Liberal Democrat, Labour and Green Party MPs – does not have the “standing” to challenge the police investigation.

And in highly critical comments about the UK’s democracy watchdog, lawyers for the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) said the Electoral Commission had failed to provide it with all the information needed to decide whether criminal charges could be brought, despite numerous requests for further disclosure.

In reply, the commission accused the Met of making “unfounded, misleading and incorrect” assertions about its work and said it was writing to commissioner Cressida Dick to seek urgent reassurances from her about the “startling” letter from the force’s directorate of legal services.

In July 2018, the commission imposed fines on the Vote Leave and BeLeave campaigns, as well as on BeLeave founder Darren Grimes, after finding that they had breached electoral law by falsely reporting joint spending on the referendum. Another group, Veterans for Britain, was fined for incorrectly reporting a donation it received from Vote Leave.

Fronted by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, Vote Leave was the designated lead campaigner for the Brexit camp in the referendum. The commission found that Vote Leave passed a £680,000 gift to youth group BeLeave, which would otherwise have taken the campaign’s spending over the £7m limit.

The Met confirmed last September that it had received more than& 2,000 documents from the Electoral Commission in relation to the breaches, but no announcement has yet been made on any possible criminal charges. In May, the unofficial campaign Leave.EU was fined £70,000 for exceeding its statutory spending limit and its chief executive, Liz Bilney, was referred to the police for investigation.

Parliamentarians including Liberal Democrat Brexit spokesman Tom Brake, Labour’s MP Ben Bradshaw and ex-MP Fiona Mactaggart and the Green Party’s Caroline Lucas MP and Baroness Jenny Jones, last month threatened judicial review over alleged “foot-dragging” in the case.

But in today’s letter, the Met’s lawyer wrote that, as the group were “neither complainants nor suspects” in the case, they did not have the “sufficiency of interest” required to mount a judicial review.

The letter said that one of the investigations was “nearing completion”, but was critical of the state of the file provided by the commission in the other.

“The proposed claim appears to be premised on the assumption that … when the Electoral Commission referred those matters to the MPS it supplied all potential relevant documents,” said the Met’s lawyer. “That assumption is incorrect.”

The commission “did not provide the documentation from its own investigation” and the information provided was not arranged in “a systematic or logical fashion”.

“The Electoral Commission’s approach to the gathering and disclosure of evidence does not appear to the MPS to have complied with the letter or the spirit of the Criminal Procedure and Investigations Act 1996 and associated guidance,” said the Met’s lawyers.

“The MPS has sought further disclosure from the Electoral Commission on a number of occasion. The MPS remains of the view that the Electoral Commission has not disclosed all of the documents in its possession or control that are potentially relevant to MPS’s investigation.”

The commission responded in a statement: “The letter from Metropolitan Police lawyers contains a number of assertions about the work of the commission which are unfounded, misleading and incorrect.

“This a startling argument, put forward as part of an organisation’s defence of its record on timely investigatory work.

“It is also directly contrary to recent positive comment made by the Metropolitan Police commissioner about collaborative working between our organisations. We are writing to her to seek urgent assurance of her position in relation to this correspondence.”

Liberal Democrat Brexit spokesman Tom Brake (Getty)

Mr Brake told The Independent: “I take some comfort from the fact that one of the cases is close to being submitted.

“Whether MPs have a formal standing in this case or not, it is of huge interest to MPs and our democracy whether the referendum was subverted or not, and as soon as this is made clear the better.”