My Lords, we on these Benches are in favour of extending the franchise further, but as part of a wider reconsideration of inclusion on and exclusion from the register. I remind the House that we have an estimated 8 million British
citizens living in this country who are not on the register—about which something ought also to be done. We are concerned about how this is implemented and some of its unintended consequences. I remind the House that there are 3.5 million British overseas citizens. That is, by my calculation, roughly 5,500 per constituency, if they all registered. If we assume that no more than 50% register, that is still well over 2,000 per constituency. I am sure the Minister will have been briefed that overseas registration in constituencies is not uniform but highly variable. Some London constituencies already have approaching 2,000 overseas electors, whereas a number of constituencies in Wales have fewer than 20. That is to be expected. Next time we redraw the tightened boundaries of our constituencies, do we take into account the number of overseas voters who are registered in various constituencies? If we do, some London constituencies will get quite a bit smaller because the numbers of overseas voters will take them way over the quota.
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A whole range of questions have not been considered. For example, I know of no element in this SI that talks about spending limits for parties when dealing with and searching out overseas voters. This is all part of the reason why overseas constituencies are, for us, a necessary consequence of extending the franchise for a long time. I should have declared an interest, of course: I will skype my two elder sisters just before Christmas. One has lived overseas for more than 50 years and the other for more than 60 years. I shall remind them that now is the time, as dual nationals, to register to vote in British elections as well as the elections in the countries in which they reside.
My noble friend Lord Rennard talked about the inconsistency between the rules for domestic and overseas attestation. The noble Lord, Lord Hayward, talked about the resources of electoral registration officers. I have spoken to electoral registration officers in Yorkshire who say they fear they will be overwhelmed by this, because people will register at the last minute. The SI suggests that you can challenge or check an application. That simply cannot be done during a short election campaign. This will end up as a considerable mess, with complaints afterwards.
There is, as has also been mentioned, no real mechanism for who enforces some of these rules. The Elections Act 2022 weakened the role of the Electoral Commission. It is quite clear that, whatever happens after the election, we are going to have to look at electoral law as such and the role of the Electoral Commission as the guarantor of the integrity of British democracy.
I do not know whether the Minister has been briefed on the story that appeared in the Financial Times on 17 October, very recently, which told us that Penny Mordaunt, as Leader of the House of Commons, wrote to Tom Tugendhat, the Security Minister, in September,
“calling for a new intelligence-sharing framework between the security services and the UK’s main parties”,
and that:
“Some government insiders fear parties have too little access to sensitive information about potential donors … Mordaunt has been working with officials to identify new mechanisms for data sharing between intelligence officials and political parties”.
I tried to discover whether that letter has been placed in the Library of either House or published, and I have been informed by our Library that it has not. It seems to me that it is of relevance to what we are now discussing, which is the question of how on earth we will check. The Electoral Commission does not have powers to investigate either registration or the source of donations in other countries. I remind the Minister that one of the largest donations to the Conservative Party this year, of £5 million, came from someone whose financial interests are centred in Dubai, which, as we well know, is one of the main offshore centres for Russian and Chinese money, not to mention Gulf money itself, which in turn may have particular ways of foreign interference. Another of the largest such donations, of £2 million, came from someone whose financial and commercial interests are in Indonesia and Thailand. It is very difficult to check, and Penny Mordaunt’s letter was suggesting that political parties do not check, whether the person giving the money is really the origin of the money.
So we have a large list of questions that this SI does not answer. Clearly, after the election we need a full and cross-party examination of electoral law, of the role of the Electoral Commission and of the whole question of inclusion and exclusion in voting rights. It may indeed include some of the questions that the noble Lord there was raising. We on these Benches will support this regret amendment if it is pressed, because we are not convinced that the Government have thought this all through. It is quite evident that they have not and we are therefore led to conclude that concern for increasing large foreign donations to the Conservative party from people based in Dubai, Singapore and elsewhere without checks being made is one of the main motivators of pushing this change through so rapidly without thinking through the consequences. We will regret that, because it is a threat to the integrity of our democracy.