Political Party Finance and the Electoral Commission

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 2nd July 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, it is very good that we are having this discussion today; I want to raise two issues. The first is the role of the Electoral Commission and the second is the composition of the electoral register.

On the first, I cannot entirely agree with the general approval of the direction of travel of the Electoral Commission in recent years. I worry that we are creating another quango, as we have previously in other areas, that in day-to-day practice is relatively unaccountable. We have touched on the reporting arrangements that were originally brought in for the Electoral Commission when it was created. There is not real accountability to the Speaker’s Committee; it is a financial scrutiny loop, really. Of course, the Speaker’s Committee has a government majority on it. That is why the Government that I was briefly a part of changed this in 2022, so that there was at least some attempt to pay due regard to broader strategic priorities in this area. It seems that we are now going to change this back.

The problem is that somebody has to decide how the Electoral Commission acts. If it is not proper accountability from outsiders, then it is the permanent bureaucracy that runs it. The permanent bureaucracy is not, in my view, neutral, and has a very strong worldview in these areas. We saw that on the Electoral Commission during the Brexit period when the commission went after people without properly understanding its own rules, putting individuals through the wringer. We saw it—I say this at the risk of distressing the noble Lord, Lord Wallace—in the highly contentious and political recommendations in some areas of the Rycroft review. We see it in some of the actions of the Electoral Commission even today. I do not think it should be a semi-political actor and I do not think its head should be a political figure, but that is what is beginning to happen. I happen to agree with the comments by the head of the commission a few months back:

“As a matter of principle, we do not think that capacity constraints are a legitimate reason for delaying long planned elections”,


but I do not think it is his job to be rebuking the elected Government in these highly political areas. There are real risks here.

The only thing that would be worse than government direction of the commission would be the commission becoming a player itself. It should be an umpire, not a player. The head of an electoral regulator carries automatic media authority. When he pronounces on contested questions, he lends the weight of officialdom to one side of a live political argument. Public confidence depends on visible restraint by the Electoral Commission. I worry that the powers that we are about to give it will push it in the opposite direction.

On my second point, on the electoral register, we all believe and often say that you must be a British citizen to be able to donate to a political party—Ministers often say this. Actually, it is not true. The condition is that you have to be on the electoral register. As we know, the electoral register includes many qualifying Commonwealth citizens, and indeed Irish citizens, resident here, so the right to bankroll a British political party in fact goes rather further. The real problem is not the donation issue itself, but the absurdity in the first place of having large numbers of non-British citizens on our electoral register. I must say that, when I have written and spoken on this subject, I find that people are incredulous—they literally cannot believe that you do not have to be a British citizen to be on the UK electoral register.

The scale is not marginal; it almost certainly runs to the millions. The Electoral Commission itself holds no record of it, but we can estimate it. In the 2021 census, there were 1 million adults here holding only a Commonwealth passport. That figure has plausibly doubled, at least, since then. The Electoral Commission’s own report in 2023 found that 66% of eligible Commonwealth citizens in Great Britain were registered to vote. This is not even properly policed. Zimbabwe withdrew from the Commonwealth in 2003 yet, more than 20 years on, its nationals can still register to vote because Parliament never amended the relevant schedule to the nationality Act.

This is not a new problem. The noble and learned Lord, Lord Goldsmith, recommended in 2008 that the rules should be changed to establish a clear connection between citizenship and the right to vote and donate. That has never been taken up. This is the real scandal. If we are really worried about foreign influence in our politics, we need to stop foreign citizens voting. If people want to vote in our country, they need to commit to our country and become citizens. This anomaly has lasted too long and it should be ended.