Gareth Snell
Main Page: Gareth Snell (Labour (Co-op) - Stoke-on-Trent Central) Overseas Electors Bill
Gareth Snell Excerpts
Philip Davies
I am delighted to be scoring more runs with my hon. Friend than I did with my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough (Neil O’Brien), and I welcome his intervention.
Philip Davies
I am accused of many things when discussing private Member’s Bills on a Friday, but I think it best if I stick to one at a time. If we get on to the hon. Lady’s Bill, I am sure we can go through its merits, or otherwise, and I look forward to that. I hope she will forgive me if I resist the temptation to start that debate prematurely. Mr Speaker would probably rule me out of order if I started discussing her Bill in a debate on this one.
Gareth Snell
May I probe the hon. Gentleman on the wording of the new clause? It mentions those who are “going to move”, and those who have moved, which are two different groups of people. I can foresee that measure being included in the annual canvass that every local authority has to make, so that those who are likely to move within the next 12 months are prompted to register as an oversea elector if they are leaving the UK. Those who have already moved, however, are a different group of people, and the local authority might not have information about where they have moved to. What guidance does the hon. Gentleman suggest the Electoral Commission should provide regarding those who have moved? The matter is simple for those who are going to move, but how does he intend to track down those who have already left the country, given that nobody keeps that information?
Philip Davies
Clearly, I have more faith in the amendment tabled by the hon. Member for City of Chester that the hon. Gentleman does. I do not seek to take over the responsibility of people who are more expert in these matters than me. It is not the job of hon. Members to be prescriptive to experts in this field about how they should go about their job—I am happy to leave it to them. The hon. Member for City of Chester can correct me if I am wrong, but I see this as a matter of principle, and not really about the nitty-gritty and practicalities, which I am happy to leave to the experts.
The hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central (Gareth Snell) may or may not be right to say that the new clause will not make a massive difference, but that is not a reason not to include it, because it might help. Indeed, as he acknowledged, the new clause will help with one group of people, and that is an argument for taking a step forward, rather than saying, “Let’s not bother because I don’t know how many people it will benefit or how it will be used”.
Philip Davies
I am certainly not going to give way to the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton again. I will give the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central another go.
Gareth Snell
In this country, 17-year-olds can currently register as attainers so that they will be on the register when they turn 18. Is the hon. Gentleman suggesting in the new clause that those who are prompted to become overseas electors will be able to register as such while they are still resident in the United Kingdom and that the registration would only become active if they choose for that to happen? How will he get around the double registration issue if they are already registered as domestic voters?
Philip Davies
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman. That was a very good and sensible intervention, if I may say so. I do not envisage people registering before they have moved, because something might change and they might not do so. I think that that would be quite improper. The purpose of the new clause is to prompt them to be sure to register as soon as they have moved overseas. However, I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention, which I think was very helpful.
Gareth Snell
I thank the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. He is being remarkably generous with his time. I appreciate that we will not debate amendment 50 until later, but it is part of this grouping. In it, he talks about declarants wanting to vote “at a polling station”. New clause 3 talks about assessing ways in which overseas electors could participate in elections. In French presidential elections, overseas electors from France who are in the UK can physically turn up and cast their vote in a ballot box here. Is it his understanding that, as part of the assessment that he wants the Cabinet Office to carry out, it should consider the introduction of physical polling stations in overseas areas for overseas electors?
Philip Davies
The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting point. Obviously I will come on to my amendment 50 when I get to it. I do not really have a particularly strong opinion on whether such polling stations would be useful. It may well be that in areas with a large concentration of overseas voters, that might be more convenient for everybody and it might encourage turnout. I do not have a strong opinion on this, however. I am not necessarily disagreeing with the hon. Gentleman, but I would not want him to take it that I was necessarily agreeing with him either—
Philip Davies
I hope that he will accept that.
New clause 4 is again one of the hon. Member for City of Chester’s greatest hits. He proposed this in Committee, where he made these points:
“It is essential that there is appropriate evaluation and investigation of the effects of passing the Bill on the number of registered electors in each constituency. We must have a clear idea about the sheer volume of people we are enfranchising in order to establish the necessary procedure to register and deal with the inevitable administrative bedlam that will result from the change.”––[Official Report, Overseas Electors Public Bill Committee, 17 October 2018; c. 69.]
I want to cite some of the figures that the hon. Gentleman gave during that debate, because they were very interesting. He said:
“Under the 15-year rule, the number of registered overseas voters in the June 2017 general election reached just over 285,000, surpassing the December 2016 record. The Government have estimated that that is about 20% of eligible expats under the current 15-year limit, giving a potential electorate of around 1.4 million. Indeed, the figure has the potential to increase fivefold with the passing of the Bill. The number of overseas voters registering to vote has risen exponentially over the last 10 years and continues to rise. That can be attributed to the general increase in awareness by overseas voters about voter registration. Until 2015, the number of overseas voters registered to vote had never risen above 35,000.”––[Official Report, Overseas Electors Public Bill Committee, 17 October 2018; c. 70.]
I thought that that difference was quite telling. What made the seismic difference was the EU referendum in June 2016. I mentioned earlier the amount of work that was done in embassies around the world to try to encourage people to register for that referendum.
New clause 4 therefore has merit if we are to deal with the scale of the increase in numbers that we are talking about. I am not saying that I would press it to a vote, but I certainly think that it has merit and requires further consideration today, because the points that the hon. Member for City of Chester made in that debate were striking and something that we should all consider.
Philip Davies
Certainly not. I think the best measure of our ability to represent our constituents is shown at an election by whether or not our electorate wish us to continue to represent them. That is the best scorecard I can think of.
Gareth Snell
The hon. Gentleman is being exceptionally generous with his time. He has touched on the question of how MPs represent overseas electors as being quite important, but does he share my concern that if we have constituencies with an increased number of overseas electors putting burdens and strains on Members’ time, offices and staff, the ability of the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority to recognise those unique circumstances will be zero and we will spend most of our time battling with IPSA for the resources we need to do our job rather than actually doing it?