Elections: Armed Forces

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Monday 4th April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord McNally]

I am sure it would be and I look forward to reading it. Whether we have followed exactly the consultations initiated by the noble Lord, Lord Wills, quite frankly I am not sure. Nevertheless, we are following all the initiatives that he brought in during that time and some new ones as well. I do not doubt that we want to see the military participating in elections, as did our predecessors. If that consultation is still going on somewhere, I will report it as the noble Lord requested. I assure the House that the various initiatives are still being pressed forward with due vigour.

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

My Lords, at the last general election, of the 10,000 troops in Afghanistan, only 500 were able to register a vote either by proxy or postal vote. This is totally unacceptable.

Furthermore, can we have some consistency in the length of time between, say, nine, 10 or 11 days for a nomination for a general election until polling day, and 25 days for others? Can we work very hard in the immediate future to make sure that we have the same length of time between nomination, close of nominations and polling day?

[Lord McNally]

My Lords, the call for consistency, which I think was also made by my noble friend Lord Rennard, is exactly the issue that Mr Mark Harper is looking at at the moment. As I said before, I think that there is a lot of sense in getting that kind of uniformity.

As to the turnout by troops serving in Afghanistan the last time, perhaps there were problems in getting to vote, but there is also a low propensity to vote among servicemen. That is something else that we are trying to address in terms of encouraging initiatives in the services by responsible members of each unit.