Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Debate between Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville and Lord Flight

Monday 14th January 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Flight]

My Lords, I support my noble friend’s amendments. I have lived as an expatriate and, unless you happen to have parents resident where you want to register to vote, it is extremely difficult to get registered, particularly if people are busy with whatever their careers are.

My particular point is this: in most places, you are not entitled to vote in national elections wherever it is that you are living abroad. If such individuals cannot vote in the country of their nationality or in the country where they live, which is indeed the case with this country, then effectively you are denying them any major political vote whatever. No one seems to be concerned about that, but it is an unreasonable thing to do.

I was rather proud that in the most recent French elections London was, I think, the seventh largest-voting French city of the French electorate, as a result of so many French citizens living in London. Clearly there would have to be changes in the way that representation deals with expatriates if we were to adopt permanent voting by passport-retaining British expatriates, and the concept of the local constituency where they might have lived 10 or 20 years before does not work particularly well, but I suggest that for once it is worth while looking at how France runs its affairs because it deals rather more fairly with its expatriates than we do.

[Lord Brooke of Sutton Mandeville]

My Lords, my noble friend who moved this amendment is a historian, and I wish to add a historical footnote as well as to pay tribute to the chivalry of others involved in the exercise. In the late 1980s there was considerable embarrassment and concern that the amount of money being spent on parliamentary by-elections greatly exceeded the amount that agents, in signing for those expenses at the end of the election, were themselves putting down. It was a risk being run entirely by the agents, and all parties were involved in the problem.

I suggested to my noble friend Lord Hurd, who by coincidence I am sitting next to at the moment although I have not mentioned this to him, that it would be sensible if we managed to pass legislation briskly to correct this problem. He sensibly advised me that the only way in which that could be done would be if I could reach agreement with other parties, and it was sensible that that should occur. He referred me to the shadow Home Secretary, now the noble Lord, Lord Hattersley, who referred the matter to the noble Baroness, Lady Gould of Potternewton, who had some responsibility within the Labour Party for these matters. She and I had a meeting; we agreed that it was a problem and that, were we to recommend legislation to our respective Home Office Ministers and if there would not be a problem in getting it through the House promptly, then it was worth doing. We also determined that the same legislation should in fact increase the number of years from five to 20, and that was agreed between the noble Baroness and me.

I say that this is a matter of chivalry because she and I reached in private extremely rapid decisions on the matter that then went through the House of Commons in less than a month. I simply say that everyone has been involved in this story quite deeply in the past.