Elections Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Stunell

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Monday 28th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I will briefly intervene, having heard the noble Lord, Lord Mann. It is important to understand that, as far as Clause 39 goes, the amendment talks about making sure there is some way of identifying the message you have. Of course, if it says “Vote for Mann” it might be a reasonable presumption that it had been sponsored by somebody supporting the candidacy of Mr Mann, as it would be. But the evil, if I can put it that way, of much social media advertising is that it is not clear what it is doing. You have negative campaigning as well as positive campaigning. It is not necessarily done in a way that makes it obvious that what you are reading is not a news item or a fashion page—to pick up the point from the noble Lord, Lord Mann—but it nevertheless conveys an important message to a particular category of reader. So I ask the Minister to address the substance of my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones’s Amendment 180A.

“Reasonably practicable” has already been completely circumvented in Scotland, so we know it does not work there. It is inconceivable that whatever lessons were learned by campaigners in Scotland will not immediately transfer to campaigns across the United Kingdom. It is a good challenge for the Minister to explain what is wrong with “possible” and maybe, behind that, to say whether the Government have decided not to implement the clear advice of the Committee on Standards in Public Life and the Electoral Commission, both of which, I respectfully suggest, might be offering advice that is slightly more researched than that of the noble Lord, Lord Mann.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones for the amendments he has brought forward with a great deal more expertise about this new dimension of campaigning than I have. I first learned about this new dimension of campaigning when I looked into post-Soviet Russian politics and discovered the new term “political technologies”, used by campaigners working for Putin to mould public opinion and to try to interfere in other countries, using the newly available digital media to help their efforts.

Of course, this also costs money. As we have seen in the United States, the use of digital media, data mining and negative campaigning—as has already been mentioned —is one way in which, unfortunately, American politics is being debased. We do not want that to happen in Britain.

Elections Bill

Debate between Lord Wallace of Saltaire and Lord Stunell

Lords Hansard - Part 2 & Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, overseas voting extension is an important part of this Bill, one of the many bits that is substantially changing the pattern of voting. It could add a couple of million extra voters and deserves better than the treatment it is getting at present. Some of us may wish to discuss whether we will oppose Clause 12 standing part on Report just to make sure we have a proper discussion. I have been struck, in everything I have read and discussed with Ministers and officials, by the fact that this has not been thought through and has been poorly prepared. If I were unduly suspicious, I would say that Ministers are more interested in getting donations from people who will then come on to the register than they are in really getting proper overseas representation.

We know where this comes from: the campaign that Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, when he was head of the Conservative Party’s international office, took to encourage overseas voters, particularly retired British expatriates in Spain and France, to register. Academic research that I found, which the Minister, when I spoke to him, appeared to be unaware of, showed that the distribution of votes—I do not know whether the Minister is listening to me; he may not be interested—in constituencies had been lopsided from the start. It was always concentrated in London and the south-east. Now, it continues to be very lopsided. The Minister said that he was unaware of the distribution of votes by constituency. I found it out quite easily, through the Office for National Statistics. I am sorry it was not available to him. It ranges from over 2,000 in several north London constituencies, to 25 or so in various Welsh constituencies. If we double that, the maldistribution of overseas voters in different constituencies will entirely undo the redrawing of the boundaries to make them more accurate, which is just going through.

The academic research in the mid-1990s suggested that two-thirds of overseas voters in 1992 had voted Conservative, but only in small numbers. After the introduction of individual electoral registration allowed Conservatives abroad to mount a registration drive on individual registration from abroad, numbers rose from 33,000 in 2010 to 106,000 in 2015. The Conservative Party International Office encouraged targeted donations from abroad to marginal seats in the 2015 general election, showing that donations were a very important part of this. After the referendum, the numbers registered surged to over 300,000, which perhaps suggests that the Conservative assumption that they are all going to vote Conservative may have been a little shakier than they had intended.

There are many weaknesses with the proposals as they currently stand. First, in a Bill that tightens identity checks for domestic voters, the identity checks for overseas voters are extremely weak. Furthermore, the Government do not know who the overseas citizens are, how many of them there are or where they live. I put down a series of Written Questions six months ago, and the answers I got to most of these was “We do not have the figures”. I asked the Foreign Office what information it had, and it said that it plays no role in the registration of overseas voters and it does not expect to play any role in assisting them to vote. If the Minister had looked at comparisons of the way in which other Governments handle overseas voting, he would have noted that embassies and high commissions play a very active role in this. The noble Lord, Lord Hayward, reminded me that the largest polling station in Australia is at the other end of the Strand in London. The British Government apparently do not want to get involved in that, and it would be very complicated.

The problem we were discussing about digitisation and how to get the balance out and then get them back in a short campaign, remains and is already a grievance with overseas voters.

The absence of preparation, therefore, is absolutely clear. The problem of how you identify fraud is very considerable if the Government have such little information on where citizens are and who they might be. The identification checks are very weak, and the powers given to the Secretary of State to take whatever measures he thinks appropriate to provide information campaigns suggest that a particular Secretary of State might decide that Portugal, Spain, Italy or France are where he wants to concentrate their efforts, rather than on those who retired to Jamaica or southern Nigeria or Pakistan.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

Or Belgium.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

Or Belgium: exactly. There are many weaknesses in this. We put down another amendment, which comes in the next group, suggesting that the appropriate answer is overseas constituencies. The idea that people should vote in constituencies in which they have not lived for 50 years is absolutely absurd. My conversation with my local ERO suggested that trying to check on whether they actually have lived there or not might prove an impossible task.

This is a very shaky part of the Bill. My conversation with the Minister and officials suggests that they have not thought this through; it seems the Minister is not interested in thinking it through any further. I suspect, therefore, that it is the donations that they are really interested in, and this leaves me very discontented with this part of the Bill.

[Lord Stunell (LD)]

My Lords, I want to ask some technical questions, without necessarily knowing what the correct answer is myself. I hope that the Minister, if he is not able to answer today, would be prepared to write to provide a further explanation.

I start by referring to some of the text of Clause 12. On page 14, line 13, under the new section “Extension of parliamentary franchise”, there are various conditions that a person has to satisfy. They have to be,

“not subject to any legal incapacity to vote (age apart)”

et cetera. I take it—perhaps the Minister can consult the Box to get an answer to this—that that is to make sure that nobody overseas registers who is under age. I assume that is the meaning of that. If I am wrong about that, then there might be a whole set of questions arising, but that seems to be the common-sense explanation for those two words in brackets.

I want to move on to the next page of the same clause. New Section 1B is headed,

“British citizens overseas: entitlement to be registered”.

The proposed new section sets out that, essentially, there are two ways in which one can qualify to be registered. The first is as a former elector in a United Kingdom constituency. There will be discussions about that, I am sure, but the second is what I want to focus on at the moment. The second condition is that you were a former resident in a UK constituency. We already know that there is quite a large number of people who are not registered, because we discussed earlier on that the Electoral Commission’s estimate is that in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, there are somewhere between 8.6 million and 9.8 million people who are currently resident but not on the electoral roll. There is, therefore, quite a large pool of people who, presumably in approximately equal proportion, will be overseas now. There is no special preference for people who have registered being the people who have migrated.

So my question is: does this legislation grant voting rights to someone who left the UK with their parents as a baby and moved to Switzerland, say, to claim their vote alongside their parents, once they reach the age of 18 overseas? If it does, I note that there does not seem to be any requirement for that baby to have been born in the United Kingdom; they need to establish only that they were resident here. As far as I can tell, there is no specified minimum period for that residence.

I will take a case that is not entirely hypothetical. Parents who came to the United Kingdom, having been working in Ghana, with a baby who was born in England, move to Switzerland six months later. It seems that nothing is set out in the legislation to prevent that baby from claiming their vote on reaching 18 while still living overseas. I want to check that I have not misunderstood what the legislation is saying there and that, by virtue of that brief period of residence, they would be eligible to vote and—I suppose I could add—to make a donation. If that is true, I know of two British nationals now in their 50s who will be very happy to take up the offer.

But I want to know whether that really is the extension to the franchise that the Government want or whether I have actually missed something and, in some other part of the RPA—or Schedule 9 or goodness knows where else—there is something that would prevent that absurd outcome.