Public confidence in the fairness of UK elections is being eroded by opaque money flows, globalised digital campaigning, and outdated regulatory frameworks. Without decisive, creative Government reform, elections will continue to be legally compliant but publicly distrusted – undermining democratic legitimacy.
There are four challenge areas to overcome:
1/ Opaque funding: Voters cannot easily see who is paying to influence them
2/ Loss of territorial control: UK elections are increasingly exposed to foreign actors and cross-border influence
3/ The collapse of the money > reach link: Digital communication has radically reduced the cost of reach, meaning spending limits no longer effectively constrain influence.
4/ Changing media: Regulation still rests on broadcast/non-broadcast distinctions that no longer reflect how voters encounter political messages.
Meeting these challenges requires a single, coordinated reform package across campaign finance, digital transparency, and media regulation – a “big bang” to restore public trust.
We hope the forthcoming Elections Bill can rise to meet the challenge.
Campaign finance
Campaign finance is the most important pillar. The Government should:
1/ Reduce campaign spending limits which, following increases in the last parliament, are now too high. Current limits have two negative effects. They (a) make parties excessively dependent on large individual donations; and (b) entrench a divide between “haves” and “have-nots”, where only the best-funded parties can campaign fully. Lowering the limits would reduce large donor dependency and improve perceived fairness.
2/ Cap individual and corporate donations at around £1 million per election cycle. £1m is a significant contribution, but limits outsized influence. All donors (or the owners of the companies in question) should be registered to vote and straightforwardly tax-resident in the UK.
3/ Shift towards a greater proportion of public funding for political parties, allocated on the basis of past election results. This would offset the impact of lower donation caps while tying public funding to democratic support.
4/ Introduce “always-on” political spending reporting, making it as close to real time as possible. New digital tools, housed within the Electoral Commission, should automate and standardise reporting, reducing compliance burdens while dramatically increasing transparency.
5/ Rebalance national and constituency spending limits. High national limits, combined with modern data-driven targeting, allow parties to concentrate their resources on a small number of seats by drawing on very large national budgets. This concentrates influence while weakening accountability.
Digital campaigning and media regulation
Digital campaign regulation is no longer fit for purpose. The Government should:
6/ Require digital platforms, including AI services, to provide real-time, privacy-preserving random samples of political content (posts, ads, and prompt-response pairs), enabling regulators, researchers and the press to assess the prevalence of narratives and potentially systemic risks as they emerge.
7/ Mandate platforms provide real-time public leaderboards of highest-reach and highest-engagement political content in the UK, allowing journalists, researchers, and voters to understand which messages are actually shaping public discourse.
8/ Radically update the system of Party Political Broadcasts to reflect modern media consumption. This should extend the principle of universal access to voters through “must-carry” obligations for streaming platforms and/or free or low-cost political advertising quotas on major social media platforms.
9/ Set clear, statutory transparency and verification standards for political advertising (on- and offline), while ensuring these requirements are technically workable. This should include financial, content and targeting transparency, and be made available via Ad Libraries and APIs. Regulation should be (within reason) co-designed with providers to avoid the unintended consequence of de facto bans on lawful political advertising (as we have seen in the EU).
10/ Introduce explicit transparency rules for influencer marketing and paid “verified/blue tick” programmes, with meaningful penalties for accounts, parties, or platforms that fail to comply. Platforms should bear responsibility (within reason) for enforcement.
11/ Align the campaign quiet period across all media, extending existing broadcast principles so that election day messaging is limited to “get out the vote” activity, with no new persuasive campaign messages published online.
12/ Ban all foreign political advertising, including advertising delivered via paid verification schemes, which function as a form of unwanted political interference.
13/ Address coordinated “organic” political campaigning. Platforms should have a statutory duty during election periods to detect and expose coordinated inauthentic or misleading political behaviour, working with researchers and regulators to counter it.
14/ Extend regulation to third-party and issue-based digital campaigning. Update the definition of regulated political content to include digital activity that is reasonably likely to influence electoral behaviour, even where it does not explicitly promote a named party or candidate. This will help avoid actors trying to circumvent the rules.
15/ Introduce a new cross-platform election integrity obligation. Require major digital platforms to cooperate during election periods through standardised metadata, secure information-sharing, and coordinated reporting to the Electoral Commission. Campaigns are cross-platform, and regulation should account for this.
16/ Set clear rules for synthetic and AI-generated political content. Platforms should be required to support provenance and labelling standards for synthetic political media during election periods, with enhanced penalties for undisclosed impersonation of real individuals.
Improve implementation, enforcement and accountability
17/ Strengthen enforcement and sanctions for digital campaign violations. Ensure new transparency and integrity rules are backed by credible, timely enforcement. This should include escalating fines proportionate to campaign spend or platform turnover, expedited enforcement powers during campaign periods, and personal accountability for responsible officers in cases of systematic or deliberate non-compliance.
18/ Ensure the Electoral Commission has the powers and capacity to deliver. The proposed reforms above will require explicit statutory powers, adequate funding, and in-house technical capability for the Electoral Commission, including data science and platform oversight expertise.
19/ Support independent journalism and civil society. Recognise the critical role of investigative journalism, fact-checkers, and civil society organisations in holding campaigns, parties, and platforms accountable. The Government should provide sustained support for independent monitoring, including access to public datasets, platform transparency tools, and funding for capacity-building initiatives. Strengthening this ecosystem ensures that oversight extends beyond regulators and enhances public trust in the electoral process.
20/ Actively build societal support for democracy. Polls show support for democracy is in decline. This is partly a result of successive political failures, partly due to persistent efforts to undermine it but also due to an unwillingness to foster and invest in renewing it. This must go far beyond the usual policy tool of “changing the school curriculum”, into a much wider, better funded and more consistent effort, ideally with cross-party support.
Conclusion: Restoring trust
Taken together, these reforms would modernise important aspects of election law for a digital, global media environment – restoring public confidence without suppressing political debate. Too much is changing, too quickly, and the UK has (along with many other governments around the world) fallen behind. Incremental change isn’t enough. The Government should act decisively, through the Elections Bill, to safeguard UK democracy.