Elections Bill (Ninth sitting)

Alec Shelbrooke Excerpts

Committee stage
Thursday 21st October 2021 Public Bill Committees

[Kemi Badenoch]

Yes, I have just referred to that. However, within the UK, there are many who do not pay tax who can still vote. That is my point: the principle is not used universally at the moment. Many of the people who they are claiming do not pay tax actually quite often do. A classic example is full-time students, who do not pay tax but are allowed to vote.

The hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood asked whether the Government have an indication of how many people we are talking about enfranchising. I do not have that information at my fingertips, but I can write to her on that specific point.

On the funding of electoral registration officers, the new burdens doctrine applies. We will not ask people to do things for which they do not have the resources.

The House has debated votes for 16 and 17-year-olds exhaustively. The fact is that 16 and 17-year-olds will eventually get the right to vote. The clause is a completely different issue, and we should not muddle them up. Based on those answers, I hope the hon. Lady feels we have had a sufficient debate and agrees to withdraw her probing amendment. We can have discussions on what else we can do to tighten up the franchise.

[Alec Shelbrooke (Elmet and Rothwell) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Ali. I was not going to comment on the amendment. However, while I have great regard for the shadow Minister, as she knows, I was disappointed in the route her speech went down by trying to make the issue about political donations. There is a system in this country for how our political parties are funded, and it is a cheap kick-around to try to say that our system is being corrupted. Donations to the Conservative party are declared through the official lines. Some of the examples the hon. Lady gave would still be eligible to make donations under existing legislation.

I make that point because this clause offered the possibility for some probing amendments to try to expand this issue, because it does need a great deal of thought. I am disappointed because the amendment is perhaps not clean enough to go down that road. However, I think that we are doing all of us in this House a disservice when we try to link a political issue to extending the franchise and the reasons behind that.

The Committee may recall that my right hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) gave the example of Harry Shindler and that question is the driving force behind why he feels, despite being a Labour party member, that it is important to try to extend the franchise. Within the thinking—I say this as a former vice-chairman of the Conservative party, the international chairman of the Conservative party—at no time in any of the discussions about the idea was it linked to trying to bring in further funding from abroad.

We can get into a real political knockabout on political funding. We can talk about union funding; we can talk about the lack of tax returns from Unite the union. We can have that knockabout. What I have found over the years is that, yes, political funding can be a problematic thing, and it can be kicked about, but it is still a better position to have it than to have state funding for political parties, whereby people have their taxation used to fund a whole bunch of political parties whose political beliefs are nowhere near their own.

When we probe the clause, I make the plea that we should move away from trying to make out that there is some kind of corruption behind it, and stick to the arguments that many have made over a great period of time. I am sure that there are varying views in my party, even though there was a very clean line in the manifesto on this issue, about how things should go ahead and the implications, including about somebody who has basically absented themselves from this country for a long time—these are issues that are to be debated.

I put on the record my disappointment about how the amendment has been drafted and that it has been brought down to an issue that I do not think does anybody in this House a service—that is, when we try to paint the picture that there is something corrupt underlying legislation. My plea to the shadow Minister, when she sums up, is that she speak more to the amendments, because I am genuinely interested in them, although I do not think they are quite clean enough. My plea would be that we should please not bring this down to a level of, “This is just so you can expand your political funding”.

[Cat Smith]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his contribution. We always have very interesting to-ing and fro-ing in these Committees, as we both have a keen interest in elections and constitutional matters.

I will specifically address amendment 79. I am conscious not to stray too much into wider discussion of the clause, because we are debating the amendment. I am quite pleased with some of the reactions to it from the Government Benches, in exploring the options—not all of them. It would have been nice to have had a little more pre-legislative scrutiny, and maybe a draft Bill, because I think there was common ground on some of these issues.

I am keen not to stray too much into discussing political donations right now, but I am aware that I did set out my broad response to clause 10 to put amendment 79 into context. There is one very easy way of clearing up the matter, which would be basically not to have political donations attached to it, because then of course there would not be a debate at all.

I very much welcome the Minister saying that there was nothing wrong with the suggestion by the hon. Member for Glasgow North that there might be some Government assessment of tax intake from the voters who are likely to be enfranchised by this legislation. I certainly look forward to seeing such an assessment and I also look forward to her writing to me with the estimated number of overseas electors that the Department feels are likely to be enfranchised by the changes that clause 10 makes.

In that spirit, I beg to ask leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

--- Later in debate ---

[Cat Smith]

I beg to move amendment 84, in clause 10, page 16, line 15, at end insert—

“1CA Closing date for electoral registration applications by overseas electors

(1) The Representation of the People (England and Wales) Regulations 2001 are amended in accordance with subsections (2) and (3).

(2) In regulation 56, after paragraph (7), insert—

‘(8) This regulation does not apply to applications by overseas electors.’

(3) After regulation 56 insert—

‘56A Closing date for electoral registration applications by overseas electors

(1) The provisions in this regulation relate to applications to vote by post or proxy by overseas electors in parliamentary elections.

(2) An application by an overseas elector under paragraph 3(6) or (7) of Schedule 4 shall be disregarded for the purposes of a particular parliamentary election and an application under paragraph 4(3) of Schedule 4 shall be refused if it is received by the registration officer after 5 p.m. on the eighteenth day before the date of the poll at that election.

(3) An application under paragraph 3(1) or (2), or 6(7) or 7(4) of Schedule 4 shall be disregarded for the purposes of a particular parliamentary election if it is received by the registration officer after 5 p.m. on the thirteenth day before the date of the poll at that election.

(4) An application under paragraph 4(1) or (2) or 6(8) of Schedule 4 shall be refused if it is received by the registration officer after 5 p.m. on the thirteenth day before the date of the poll at the election for which it is made.

(5) An application under paragraph 7(7) of Schedule 4 shall be refused if it is received by the registration officer after 5 p.m. on the eighteenth day before the date of the poll at the election for which it is made.

(6) An application under—

(a) paragraph 3(5)(a) of Schedule 4 by an elector to be removed from the record kept under paragraph 3(4) of that Schedule, or

(b) paragraph 7(9)(a) of Schedule 4 by a proxy to be removed from the record kept under paragraph 7(6) of that Schedule,

and a notice under paragraph 6(10) of that Schedule by an elector cancelling a proxy’s appointment shall be disregarded for the purposes of a particular parliamentary election if it is received by the registration officer after—

(i) 5 p.m. on the eighteenth day before the date of the poll at that election in the case of an application by an elector who is entitled to vote by post to be removed from the record kept under paragraph 3(4) of Schedule 4, and

(ii) 5 p.m. on the thirteenth day before the date of the poll at that election in any other case.

(7) In computing a period of days for the purposes of this regulation, the same rules shall apply as in regulation 56.’

(4) The Secretary of State must, by regulations, amend—

(a) the Representation of the People (Scotland) Regulations 2001, and

(b) the Representation of the People (Northern Ireland) Regulations

so that each closing date in Scotland and Northern Ireland for electoral registration applications by overseas electors moves back by seven days in keeping with the amendments made for England under subsections (2) and (3).”

This amendment pushes back the deadlines to register to vote for overseas voters by 1 week to allow electoral administrators more time to process applications.

Amendment 84 would push back the deadline for overseas electors to register to vote by one week, allowing electoral administrators more time to process applications. The timescale for registration deadlines does not work, as we heard in evidence, and the amendment seeks to improve that situation.

The single biggest concern I hear from overseas voters is that they do not receive their postal vote in time and so are not able to return it in time for their vote to count. Concern has already been raised with the Committee by the sector and more widely about the timescale for postal ballots for overseas voters to go out, which of course is not easy when postal systems globally are so varied. In many ways, there is currently simply insufficient time for an ERO to register and process overseas electors’ last-minute postal vote applications and to send them so that they can be returned in a timely manner. I seek a practical solution for this issue.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

This may purely be my misunderstanding of the amendment, so I stand to be corrected, but would the consequence of the amendment be to extend the election period beyond 25 days?

[Cat Smith]

I do not believe that it would; perhaps I have misunderstood the right hon. Gentleman’s intervention. The amendment would make overseas electors’ deadline to register as an elector in a constituency a week earlier than that for domestic voters so that EROs would be able to prioritise getting those postal votes out. In the evidence sessions, I was struck by what EROs were saying. An overseas elector currently has the same deadline to register to vote as a domestic voter. If EROs send a ballot paper to a postal voter in Lancaster who registered on the deadline day, we can be quite confident that our postal system is robust enough that the ballot paper could reach the voter and that the voter could return it. However, when it is going to the other side of the world, we know that they could not. Allowing that extra week would ensure that overseas voters’ votes are more likely to count when they cast their ballots, rather than so many, as currently, being disenfranchised because postal systems do not allow their ballot paper to get back in time.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

I understand the point that the hon. Lady is making. What I am unclear about is what happens if the registration deadline is moved further into the election. I am not sure where the hon. Lady is going, because she is talking about the time to return the mail, so we are talking about registration and then the ballot being sent out and coming back. Is there confidence in the timeframe for the ballot itself to come back, if we are talking about delays in the timeframe, or do we need to add more time to the overall short campaign as a consequence of the amendment? I could be entirely wrong on all of this, which is why I am probing the hon. Lady on the amendment.

[Cat Smith]

If I understand the right hon. Gentleman correctly, I think we have identified the same issue, and I am going to go out on a limb here and say that we probably agree it is a problem that so many of these electors’ ballots are not returned. My proposed solution—I would be very keen to hear solutions from any member of this Committee; I do not believe any one of us has a monopoly on knowledge or innovation—is that allowing EROs an extra week on the UK end, at the start of the process of issuing a postal ballot to an overseas elector, would increase the chances of many of these ballot papers being returned in time. I do not see the amendment as changing the electoral timetable for domestic voters or the wider election, which I think is what the right hon. Gentleman is asking.

I hope that the exchange that I and the right hon. Gentleman have just had has not confused the Committee too much. My intention is to give EROs the extra time that they will need to register overseas electors, which takes longer than registering a domestic elector. The aim is for them to be able to issue, post and have returned a postal voting form from overseas electors, thereby ensuring that fewer overseas electors are disenfranchised in future elections.

--- Later in debate ---

[Patrick Grady]

I do not have much to add, because I think the matter has been dealt with pretty well in debates, and in the evidence sessions. I reiterate that UK voters do pay tax if they live here, because they buy things and pay VAT, so there is a point about taxation and representation. I appreciated the Minister’s earlier comments, and I hope for a little more analysis of exactly how people who have lived away from this country for a long time and can now vote will do so.

Engagement with overseas electors is valuable. I have a small number registered in Glasgow North, and they will sometimes offer quite valuable perspectives. Perhaps one of the takeaways from this is that we can all organise Zoom surgeries for our overseas electors. SNP Members will continue to do our best to increase the number of overseas electors in the UK Parliament, largely by making Scotland an independent country, and then people who live in Scotland who want to register as overseas electors for elections to the UK Parliament will be able to do so.

[Alec Shelbrooke]

On that basis, will Scottish residents living in England be able to vote in any possible future referendum?

[Patrick Grady]

I think that may be outwith the scope of the Bill, although I will speak later about encroachment into devolved matters. There was some call for what the right hon. Gentleman suggests, but it would be difficult for the Scottish Parliament to legislate for it. We have a legislative framework here that defines an overseas elector, and that would not apply to people who live elsewhere in the United Kingdom, but I can see from the Chair that this is definitely outwith the scope of the Bill, so I will leave it at that.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 10 accordingly ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Schedule 6 agreed to.

Clause 11

Voting and candidacy rights of EU citizens

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.