More Money And Questions For Lib Dems After Best Ever Election Result
Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey (centre right) and deputy leader Daisy Cooper (centre left) during a photocall with the party's 72 MPs, who won seats in the 2024 General Election (Alamy)
4 min read
The Liberal Democrats can look forward to more funding and guaranteed House of Commons questions after winning more than 70 seats last week's General Election.
Ed Davery's party has become the third largest in Parliament after securing 72 seats — its best ever general election result. The Lib Dems take the place of the Scottish National Paty, which returned nine MPs to Westminster, down from the 48 that secured it third place in 2019.
As a result, the Lib Dems will now be entitled to more short money. This is cash that comes from a funding system set up in the 1970s to support opposition parties.
Conversely, the SNP will lose out on a significant amount of short money this time around compared to the last parliament, having returned almost 40 fewer MPs than in 2019.
According to the Parliament website, opposition parties are entitled to £22,295.86 for every seat won at the election, plus an additional £44.53 for every 200 votes they gained. This cash is paid every year of the Parliament.
The money is paid to assist opposition parties in their parliamentary business, and there is an additional short money fund for the running of the Leader of the Opposition’s office that will go to the Conservatives.
Louise Thompson, a politics lecturer at the University of Manchester who specialises researching into smaller parliamentary parties, told PoliticsHome that for the Liberal Democrats, being the third party means that as well as a position on the front of the opposition benches, there will be more guaranteed time and rights in the Commons.
"Davey will get his two questions to the PM every week.
"They’ll get guaranteed questions at all the other departmental question times, they’ll get guaranteed rights of reply to all ministerial statements, they’ll get guaranteed start of debate slots whenever a piece of legislation is discussed,” she said.
“Whereas beforehand they had absolutely no guarantees and they were relying on informal agreements with the Speaker for things like having a question at PMQs.”
Davey’s enlarged party will be able to be “more strategic and much more efficient in terms of their resources” than it has been able to in recent years, she said.
“I imagine in the last Parliament many of them [Lib Dem MPs] were writing speeches that were never delivered and that’s not going to happen now because they will be going into the Commons knowing that they will be called if they’re a spokesperson to give that speech or that response,” she said.
“That means you can plan things and you can use your resources well because you know that speech is not going to be wasted.”
Third party status is also likely to give the Lib Dems more media prominence than before, with the public visibility that comes with that.
On the other hand, the SNP and their Westminster Leader Stephen Flynn will be facing “the opposite problem”, said Thompson.
There is excitement in the party about the prospect of more broadcast time, with the expectation that there will be more opportunities for MPs to take part in morning media rounds, as well as allocations on programmes such as Question Time and Any Questions.
The hope is that more time on screen could help push poll ratings upwards.
“We always saw our poll ratings increase around local elections partly because of that,” a Lib Dem source told PoliticsHome. “And likewise the General Election saw poll bounces when we got major broadcast coverage like after the manifesto launch.”
With more MPs available than before, the Liberal Democrats hope they will now be able to have more of a ‘front bench’ and ‘back bench’ setup, a dynamic which party officials think could help new MPs have more time to “learn the ropes” before taking on more senior jobs.
In the previous parliament with a significantly smaller cohort, most Lib Dems MPs had a form of parliamentary portfolio, with some by-election winners finding themselves with spokesperson responsibilities just months into the job.
In his first parliamentary speech since the election on Tuesday, Davey said that he wanted to work “constructively” with the Speaker through this session, “as the largest third-party force in this Parliament for over 100 years”.
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