TWELVE police forces have now passed files on suspected illegal election spending by the Tories to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), a CPS spokesman said yesterday.

Allegations that the Conservative Party broke campaign spending laws to win their wafer-thin majority in Parliament have dogged the government since last year.

The Electoral Commission is looking into whether the party broke spending limits nationally, while police forces have been investigating whether local candidates exceeded their local limits — in some cases by wrongly classifying cash spent on promoting an individual as spent on behalf of the national campaign.