Overseas Voters Bill — House of Commons, 2015-01-23
Topic: Civil Rights
Samuel Phillip Gyimah (Conservative, Centre-right): Individual electoral registration is about making the register both as complete and as accurate as possible. We should expect that people who are on the register but who should not be will fall off as result of the transition, and as one in 10 were not automatically transferred, we should also accept that more needs to be done about people who should be on the register and are not. The Government are investing £14 million in targeting under-registered groups including students, minority ethnic groups and forces personnel. A significant amount of the funding has gone to local authorities, who have the responsibility for ensuring that the register is as accurate as possible. I therefore hope the hon. Gentleman is reassured that the Government are committed to making sure that the register is as complete and accurate as possible The Bill of my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch seeks to achieve three things: first, place a duty on the Electoral Commission to identify British citizens overseas eligible to vote in UK parliamentary elections and facilitate their registration; secondly, scrap the current 15-year time limit on overseas voting rights; and, thirdly, enable overseas voters to cast their votes via the internet. I welcome the good work done by the Political and Constitutional Reform Committee in this area, and I will seek to address each of these aims in turn, but it may be helpful if I first provide some of the wider context to the issue The recognition of the right of overseas electors to vote was first acknowledged in 1985. The Representation of the People Act 1985 provided for the first time for British citizens resident overseas to vote in elections to the House of Commons. That right was time-limited to a maximum of five years from the point when they were last registered to vote in the UK. The time limit has changed on two occasions since then, extending to 20 years in 1989, before settling on 15 years in 2002. I therefore agree with the hon. Member for Hammersmith that the time limit is an arbitrary number; that is clear from the fact that it has changed over time. I will return to the question of the time limit later Only 35,000 overseas electors were registered to vote in 1991, and since then the number has decreased. That is a tiny proportion of those eligible. There are perhaps around 5.5 million British citizens resident overseas. We have no reliable information on the number who have been overseas for less than 15 years and so would be eligible under current rules to register to vote, but we can be sure that the number is substantial. It is certainly more than the 23,000 overseas voters who are currently registered. By contrast with what the hon. Gentleman asserted, I think it is right for my hon. Friend the Member for Christchurch to focus on this. If there are about 5.5 million British residents overseas and only 23,000 are registered, that should be a matter of concern to this House. [Interruption.] The hon. Member for Chesterfield (Toby Perkins) is chuntering from a sedentary position, but before he arrived in the Chamber we did discuss what the Government are doing for people in this country who are not registered The big difference between local voters and overseas voters is that for those resident in the UK, registering to vote is primarily a matter of responding to local electoral registration officers when prompted to do so, typically during the annual canvass. Relatively few proactively take steps to ensure they are correctly registered. For British expatriates spread across the globe, a canvass of households is obviously not feasible. It therefore falls to the individual voters to take the appropriate steps to register. That is always likely to mean that a much smaller proportion of expats are registered. Of course, that does not mean that we should be complacent. It is worth putting it on record that, to date, the Government have done no research into the drivers of registration for overseas voters, and that needs to be looked at. At the moment, we are looking at the matter in the context of raising awareness of the registration process Changes that have been introduced by this Government have already done much to make it easier for British expats to register and to vote. The introduction of online registration last June in England and Wales, and last September in Scotland, has made electoral registration more accessible and convenient for all groups of voters. Indeed, people can register to vote in as little as three minutes using a smartphone. Online registration will particularly help overseas voters, as well as those groups about which the hon. Member for Hammersmith expressed concern, including transient voters, students and tenants. They should all benefit from the fact that they can register online.