Electoral Registration and Administration Bill

Nick de Bois Excerpts

Wednesday 27th June 2012 Commons Chamber

[Mr Streeter]

Thank you—a very important distinction, I am sure. I am saying that I believe our rules for people living overseas who are British citizens have been fashioned in a bygone age. When we consider the world today, a young person can work anywhere, as we have heard from my hon. Friend the Member for South Derbyshire (Heather Wheeler) who mentioned the large employers in her constituency, Many students are studying mandarin Chinese and may spend much of their lives—more than 15 years—in China. Many of our fine and bright young people spend more than 15 years in America. Given our weather, many people retire to sunnier climes overseas.

My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr Shepherd) spoke about people giving up their allegiance to this country and the Crown, but many people who aim to retire overseas for ever, end up coming back. The stats are quite staggering on that. People have not given up their allegiance and they will certainly have family here and perhaps property here. As we have heard, they may pay taxes here. I believe that because we have this old-fashioned mentality, we lag behind many of the countries that my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds mentioned in respect of our systems to ensure that British citizens living overseas can vote.

The important point about the 15-year rule, apart from the fact that there is an absolute cut-off point after 15 years, is that it creates confusion in the minds of many of our citizens overseas as to whether or not they are allowed to vote, so they do not even look into it fully. I have looked into the process we put in place for people to register to vote in this country, and I have found that it is just about as old-fashioned as could be imagined. I realise that there are security issues, but I think that the Government should consider making the system more streamlined and more user-friendly and allowing greater use of the internet.

I wonder whether, because ours is one of the oldest democracies in the world, we have become a bit complacent. Other countries are so much more dynamic and proactive in encouraging their overseas citizens to vote. I was staggered to learn that well over a million French citizens who were not living in France at the time voted in the recent presidential elections. As we heard earlier, in this country we mustered the staggeringly small number of about 30,000 Brits out of the 3.5 or 4.5 million who were eligible to vote. Fewer than 30,000 had registered to vote, and of course even fewer than that will have actually voted.

I think that we have become complacent about the importance of our democracy. We make only feeble efforts to encourage our active service people to vote, and I think that our lack of support for British citizens living overseas may be another indication of our complacency. I believe that we need to do an awful lot more to remove the barriers and the confusion, and to improve the system. A French person living in London can go to the French embassy to vote in the French presidential elections, but we cannot go to the embassy in Paris. It is all rather odd, and the Government should look into it. Perhaps, in the time-honoured Liberal Democrat tradition, they could even set up a royal commission, but we probably need rather more dynamic action than that.

I support this important new clause, which takes us quite a long way towards being able to send a strong signal to Brits living abroad. We need to be able to tell them, “We still think that you are an important part of our democracy, and we want you to engage in our democratic processes. We want you to register and we want you to vote, because you have a valuable part to play in our country.” Let us remove the 15-year barrier, and make a much more dynamic and proactive effort to encourage Brits living abroad to engage in our democratic processes.

[Nick de Bois (Enfield North) (Con)]

I am delighted to follow my hon. Friend the Member for South West Devon (Mr Streeter). For one thing, he has more or less covered many of the points that I was going to make. I will not follow the traditions of the House by simply restating them, but will press on and make one or two observations.

When it was drawn to my attention that we had imposed a time limit on British citizens living abroad, it struck me that we were sending a rather perverse message. I think that if the Committee supported the new clause we could send a very different and positive message, as well as doing a service to the democratic process. I do not think that we should say to a British citizen who has served his or her country before going abroad, be it through industry, public service, civil service or the military, “At the end of your working life—at the end of the time for which you have served your country and paid your taxes—we intend to disfranchise you if you exceed a Government target.” I am sure that none of us would wish to find ourselves in that position, and to feel that we had been effectively disfranchised for having done the right thing for most of our lives.

Why are such people disfranchised? It is quite a simple question, but I can find no convincing reason for it. I looked at the reports of some of the original debates about the issue in the House, going back as far as 1984, but none of them seems to have addressed the problem. In my opinion, ridding ourselves of the limit would involve no real cost to the Government, but only a benefit.

[Mr Andrew Turner (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

Surely the reason is that the system was built on a 19th-century rather than a 21st-century model. I should be grateful to my hon. Friend if he pushed for a system whereby people voted in the countries in which they live, and the results were telegraphed to this country.

[Nick de Bois]

That is entirely the point. We are living in a new world, and in a world that changes at a much faster rate than it has ever done before. There are no barriers to voting. There may be challenges for us as politicians when it comes to reaching the electorate, but that is for us to deal with. It is for the electorate to have free and fair access to the exercising of their vote. As a result of the changing world—the changing technologies, and of course the British consulates that are represented around the world—it is now possible for people overseas to vote in person.

I should like to make one important distinction. The Committee has an opportunity to move with the times by allowing overseas voters—I mean overseas British citizens; I am glad that my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) is not still present, as I should be in trouble if he were—to exercise their democratic right. I was struck by a paragraph in a public letter from a Mrs Margaret Hales, MBE, who lives in Spain. She sums things up rather well, and if the Committee will forgive me, I shall read out the full quotation. She wrote this letter to the Deputy Prime Minister, and said:

“I am immensely proud that one of my ancestors was Emmeline Pankhurst. One hundred years ago she struggled through arrest, imprisonment, force-feeding and the derision of the then Liberal government”—

I make no partisan point—

“finally to gain universal suffrage. Had she been alive today she would have supported the help given to free Libya, she would have been behind William Hague in his negotiations to secure freedom in Syria and his support of Aung San Suu Kyi. But she could never ever have dreamed that her relative would be writing to you today to remind you, the British Deputy Prime Minister, that universal suffrage is the ultimate goal of every democracy and that the government is there to serve its citizens and not to disfranchise them.”

I rest our case.

[Mr Heath]

I am grateful to the hon. Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) for introducing this new clause. We had a taster of the argument it raises earlier in our proceedings, when he got some answers from the Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office, the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), who is constitutional affairs Minister, but I shall attempt to give some more answers today.

The hon. Gentleman raises an interesting question, ably supported by the hon. Members for South West Devon (Mr Streeter) and for Enfield North (Nick de Bois). If I was asked to defend 15 years as the right length of time for qualification, I am not sure that I could come up with a convincing argument, other than the fact that that is what Parliament decided. Parliament has considered this matter on a number of occasions, and it has come up with different definitions of the appropriate qualifying period. On no occasion hitherto has Parliament decided that there should not be a qualifying period, however; it has always said, “Well, there must be a point at which somebody’s links with their country of origin are sufficiently tenuous not to entail having a vote.” Whether that is the correct view is for the House to decide. I merely report the view the House has taken when it has discussed this matter previously.