Overseas Electors Bill (Second sitting)

Gareth Snell Excerpts

Wednesday 24th October 2018 Public Bill Committees

I turn to telephone numbers and email addresses. Under the existing application process, overseas electors are required to provide their address or an address at which they may be contacted. They are also asked to provide an email address and a telephone number, but that is optional, for rather obvious reasons; not everybody has a telephone and/or an email address. If we were to make their provision a requirement, we would be at risk of disfranchising individuals because they did not have them. The argument that they should be requirements is not strong .

[Gareth Snell (Stoke-on-Trent Central) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the Minister have any actual numbers to back up the suggestion that overseas electors may not have those things? I ask that because we could be talking about a relatively tiny proportion of the overseas electorate and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Nottingham North pointed out, the number of individuals who may be enfranchised under the Bill could run to the millions. Does she have some numbers that could put the flesh on the bones of that statement?

[Chloe Smith]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for asking for that information, but I do not have it, nor do I think it is relevant. We would not say to a category of domestic electors, “Don’t worry—if it’s only small numbers, you’re not coming in”, nor would we say, “If you don’t have an email address or a telephone number, you’re not going on the register.” No Member would dream of saying that to one of their constituents. We should use the same principle here. I do not think the numbers would help the hon. Gentleman’s argument, and in any case I can confirm that I do not have them with me in Committee.

One germane point, however, is that we have committed to encourage applicants to provide an email address, because it is rather obvious that when we are talking about sending communications around the globe, email may be one of the quickest ways. However, as I say, we recognise that not all applicants will have an email address, so it is not right to make that a legal requirement.

I will move on to country of residence. Currently, electors are not asked how long they have lived in their current country of residence, and I put it strongly to the Committee that again, that is irrelevant to one’s eligibility to register to vote. An individual could have moved from country to country very rapidly, but that would not reduce their Britishness—the key tenet of the Bill is that one is British however far one has gone. That does not change whether someone has lived in a place for one day, 15 years or 15 years and one day, so I do not think it would serve a purpose for EROs to keep records of those periods of time in an elector’s life.

Moving on to voting offences, some of the amendments provide that the renewal declaration must require declarants to state that they are aware of voting offences under the RPA. I appreciate the basis on which those amendments have been tabled; as I said at the outset, we should all endeavour to reduce and indeed eliminate voter fraud and voting offences, but I am not sure that the renewal form is the right place to bring those offences to the attention of the elector. They are already brought to the attention of voters overseas, where they vote by post, in the postal voting pack that they receive. There is currently a requirement to include a statement on the initial application form that it is an offence to provide false information in the application and of the penalty for that offence, so we already have that. I do not think it is necessary to have more than that.

Furthermore, legislation currently prevents a person from having two declarations of the same date with different addresses and brings a declaration to an end if the same person seeks another declaration in a different constituency. That position will not change under the new proposals.