Representation of the People Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 4th November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord McCobb (LD)]

I am grateful for that additional point. Returning officers are already accountable for how they run their counts, and, ultimately, accuracy matters more than speed. However much we love a traditional election night, we should not allow that desire to impose unworkable or unnecessarily restrictive practices on already stretched returning officers.

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I put my name to Amendment 124 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Jackson. I want to explain why and bring one element into this debate that we have not had so far, which is the voters and how they perceive the electoral process in local elections. It is quite a recent development that counts have drifted into the next day—really only since the late 2000s in local elections. We seemed to manage the situation perfectly well before that. Certainly, elections have got more complicated since then, as many noble Lords have noted. Nevertheless, we seemed to do it, and it is not an inherently implausible suggestion that we might be able to do it again.

In UK elections there is a sense of drama, and that sense of drama is important: the idea that something significant is changing as a result of the ballot. The drama of democracy is quite important. That is more true at general elections, but it is something we should not lose in local elections, which have, in many ways, just as big an effect on people’s lives as general elections.

On Monday, the noble Baroness, Lady Thornhill, said:

“The main beneficiaries of immediate counts are not the voters”


but

“the campaigners, candidates and commentators”.—[Official Report, 2/11/26; col. 1452.]

That struck me as an interesting comment, because I am not sure I entirely agree with it. Speaking as somebody who has seen elections on TV and listened on the radio far more than I have actually participated in them, one of the things that has struck me with our longer counting process is that it allows much more opportunity for political parties, the party leadership and party-aligned commentators to spin the results. Long before we know what the actual results of a whole period of local elections are, we have media comment on them. We have party spokesmen telling us how to interpret the results long before we know what the actual results are.

One or two councils take on exaggerated significance because they come relatively early in the sequence and shape the narrative, and that suits political parties. I am not making a party-political point; I think it is true of all parties. It blurs what is important. It allows scope for commentary and spin, and the actual results of the process take longer to come out. By the time we know the results, what is more important is the nature of the commentary. So, there is an issue here. I am happy to give way.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My noble friend has not addressed the issue of the extra matters on which we now give local voters the opportunity to vote. He referred to 2000, but in the previous Conservative Government and before that, we introduced things such as environmental neighbourhood referenda, mayoral elections and police and crime commissioner elections. I am not going to delay the House by listing them all, but that is one of the reasons why, as was identified, you finish up with people being asked to vote on three, four or five different decisions on one day.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

The noble Lord makes a good point. It has been touched on already that the situation is much more complicated than it used to be. But those practical angles cannot be the only thing that is brought into the debate. We have to remember what we are doing here. We are marking the achievement through democracy of a shift in political power, potentially, from one set of people to another. How that is accomplished, how people see it happening, and the media discussion of it are just as important. It should not be neglected when we consider how local elections are conducted.

That balance is important. Of course, different authorities can reach different judgments on that balance. The amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, as he noted, allows for that balance to be reached in certain cases, but we must not forget that these are elections about the shift of power. Administrative and bureaucratic convenience—how it is done—cannot be the only determining factor. We have to think about what is happening here and that is why the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, deserves discussion and support.

[Lord Pack (LD)]

My Lords, I will start with a different amendment in this group, Amendment 123 on the issue of poll cards, because they are a topic that is well suited to the sort of scrutiny that we rightly pride ourselves on in this House. It is a niche issue and a serious one, but also, I concede, not the largest of issues. But we should not be too blasé about the issue, even though it is not the largest of issues, because a very considerable amount of money is spent on the production and distribution of poll cards. In the second half of 2019, for example, £19 million was spent, excluding the local and European elections that year. That was just for the general election. So, millions of pounds are spent each year on poll cards. And yet, I think it is fair to say, if any of us was involved in a recruitment process for a graphic designer and they were to show us proudly the main item in their portfolio a modern poll card, we would quite rapidly be thinking, “How can we bring this interview to an end?” Because, clearly, it is not very good.

In fairness, one should say that everyone involved in the process has a good alibi for why it is not their fault, because there is a complex interaction of legislative requirements, IT systems and their capabilities, and time pressures on returning officers. All of those interact. Everyone can say, “It’s not my fault”. But the reality is, we spend millions of pounds every year on something that we all know when we look at it is not very good.

We should also bear in mind that it is the one official communication that everyone on the electoral register receives about the election. If that is, as it were, the front door or the shop window of democracy to voters, it is both a poor use of money and also slightly embarrassing in terms of how we present democracy to people. So, I hope we will hear some positive noises from the Minister in due course on Amendment 123. I certainly welcome the fact that, elsewhere in the Bill, some of the proposals will simplify the legislative framework underpinning poll cards and will make it easier to improve their design in future.

I turn to the issue that has taken up most of our time on this group this morning. I, along with others, admire the irony of the timing of debating whether or not counts should be overnight on a morning when many of us would rather have been able to stay up later to watch the elections from the US. There is an important lesson from those elections, which is that we should not underestimate the importance of speedy election counts in terms of giving confidence in the security of the system.

Thankfully, in Britain, those concerns, broadly speaking, are a long way in the past, but the reason we have the system where it used to be the norm that just about everything was counted overnight was because of the fear that ballot boxes would be interfered with. We should not be blasé about the risk of those fears in the future, but, as several noble Lords, including the noble Lords, Lord Hayward and Lord McCobb, have pointed out, there are significant good, practical reasons why overnight counts are not always possible. Indeed, in some cases, they would be so difficult to practically organise that one would even go so far as to say that on some occasions they are not even desirable. So, while I sympathise with the thrust of the amendment from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, I do not think a central, top-down mandate in the way that it suggests is the right way to progress on that.

I will speak more positively about a couple of other amendments in this group, including one from the noble Lord, Lord Jackson: Amendments 125 and 128. Their proposals are welcome. We saw in our discussions on the first day of Committee the value of election pilots. In this case, several references were made to the pilots that have been carried out in Wales around automatic voter registration. Those pilots properly inform our decision-making. It is fair to say that the election pilots on other topics that we have discussed so far have not been hugely successful. There seems to be a relatively small number of ideas that are piloted and never turn out to be particularly effective. So, the spirit of Amendments 125 and 128 is very welcome, and I hope we may hear in due course from the Government a willingness to be a bit more imaginative about what is piloted.

I will throw in one example of what I mean. In academic research into the turnout in local elections, the evidence is pretty strong that, if you have to walk more than 600 metres to your polling station, turnout drops significantly in local elections. There are different possible ways of piloting having more polling stations so fewer people have to travel long distances to them, which is the sort of slightly more imaginative approach to piloting I hope we can hear about in the future.

Finally, on Amendments 129 and 136, I have little to add to what my colleague and noble friend Lady Thornhill said eloquently about them and what others have contributed today. I simply add that it is fair to say that, as we saw, for example, with the Gorton and Denton by-election, there are significant differences of view about what may be the exact scale and nature of the problems that these amendments seek to address. But that seems to me a good reason to want to face up to that—to want to have a good evidence base and careful consideration, rather than simply ignoring the issue completely.

Representation of the People Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

Committee stage
Wednesday 4th November 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Frost]

25: After Clause 16, insert the following new Clause—
“Part 1ANationality qualification for votingNationality qualification for voting and registration(1) A person is not entitled to vote as an elector at a relevant poll unless the person is—(a) a British citizen,(b) a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, or(c) a protected EU elector in relation to that poll.(2) Subsection (1) applies also to entitlement to be registered, or to remain registered, for the purposes of a relevant poll.(3) A person is a protected EU elector in relation to a relevant poll if—(a) the person meets the requirements in subsections (1)(a) to (d) of section 203B of RPA 1983 (meaning of “EU citizen with retained rights”) , disregarding paragraph (e) of that subsection, and(b) under the law governing the poll, apart from this Part, the person would satisfy the nationality qualification otherwise than by virtue of being a Commonwealth citizen.(4) For the purposes of subsection (3)(a), section 203B of RPA 1983 (meaning of “EU citizen with retained rights”) is to be read as if it extended to the whole of the United Kingdom.(5) In this Part “relevant poll” means—(a) an election for membership of the House of Commons, the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru or the Northern Ireland Assembly,(b) a local government election anywhere in the United Kingdom,(c) a City of London ward election, and(d) any other election, referendum or poll held under an enactment at which entitlement to vote is determined by reference to a register of parliamentary or local government electors.(6) This section applies to entitlement to sign a recall petition under the Recall of MPs Act 2015 as it applies to entitlement to vote at an election for membership of the House of Commons.(7) In this Part—(a) references to registration include inclusion in a City of London ward list, and(b) “enactment” includes an Act of the Scottish Parliament, an Act or Measure of Senedd Cymru, Northern Ireland legislation and subordinate legislation. (8) Other voting rights provisions are to be interpreted consistently with this section.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new Part and its consequential changes would remove voting and registration rights based solely on Commonwealth citizenship throughout the United Kingdom, while preserving those of British and Irish citizens and the existing non-parliamentary rights of the pre-2021 EU retained-rights cohort. It provides for registration review and appeals, and protects the new provisions from modification by the devolved legislatures.

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will speak to my Amendments 25 to 29, 288 and 289, and 299 and 300 on the Marshalled List. Before I explain the thinking behind these amendments, I will give a brief explanation of how they work from a technical point of view.

These amendments form two alternative packages rather than a single scheme. I will explain why. Amendments 25 and 26 would end voting and registration rights based solely on Commonwealth citizenship across the UK, while preserving British, Irish and retained EU citizens’ rights. Amendments 27 to 29 offer a reciprocal alternative: one where Commonwealth citizens retained eligibility, but only where their country gave British citizens similar, exercisable rights at corresponding elections. Obviously, Ministers would have to designate those countries through regulations approved by both Houses, publish the assessment and review periodically.

The amendments are designed to focus on the Commonwealth issue, which is why they keep the existing non-national elections rights for the EU cohort and for Ireland. I will come to those points, although they merit debate at some point. Both packages also cover parliamentary devolved and local elections. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, who is not in her place, would be pleased to hear that they cover City of London ward elections, relevant referendums and other acts of democracy. They are drafted to be consistent with the amendments I put forward earlier in our discussions on devolution, although there is much room for debate about how far down the hierarchy of elections these provisions need to extend.

To complete the technical introduction, Amendments 288 and 289 would bring the relevant administrative and designation machinery into operation, with the first draft regulations required within 12 months. Finally, Amendments 299 and 300 would require the substantive nationality rules to start on the same day throughout the UK, at least six months after the regulations, unless polls and petitions were already under way.

I put forward these two alternative routes because they are probing amendments designed to provoke discussion about the nature of the franchise in this country. That is very much worth discussing. The only point I will make at this stage on the distinction between them is that the reciprocal arrangements require much more process. There is much more complexity. They require a system under which the Government have to review whether reciprocal arrangements exist and whether they have changed, report on them, and then, of course, feed that through to the electoral register. Such a system has to exist if a reciprocal arrangement is to work. It is more complicated and more likely, I guess, to be got wrong, but it is a possibility.

I will move on to the thinking behind the amendments. Once again, we come back to a “who” question: who gets to vote in the arrangements that we are describing? I find, when I discuss this issue, that most people assume that the franchise in a country is limited to citizens of that country. People are often extremely surprised when you tell them that is not the case in the United Kingdom—that we extend the franchise quite considerably. They often literally cannot believe it when they are told about the arrangements for Commonwealth voting, which illustrates to me that this is an issue that needs addressing.

The technical provision is that “qualifying” Commonwealth citizens are allowed to be on the electoral register. The word “qualifying” is really not very qualifying at all. Such qualifying Commonwealth citizens do not need to be permanent residents. Any permission to enter or stay in the UK would do, whether it is time-limited, conditional, student, worker, family member or whatever. The Electoral Commission spells it out:

“Any type of permission to enter or stay is acceptable, whether indefinite, time limited or conditional”.


So you can have a situation where a student here on a short visa could help elect a Government who could have a life long beyond the individual’s time in the country. Indeed, the Electoral Commission’s definition of “qualifying” is so wide that it is not obvious to me that it would not capture tourists or casual visitors—after all, we issue six-month visas and it is quite possible to register and vote over that period. It is not entirely obvious whether it would be possible, under the arrangements, to pick up and distinguish permanent residents from people who are here for a short period.

This means that our franchise is, in principle, open to 2.7 billion people around the world: the entire population of the Commonwealth. Any Commonwealth citizen who reaches Britain on any of the bases I have just described is able to vote here. That is the extraordinary breadth of the entitlement that exists in our law and deserves to be discussed.

My amendments are designed to provide for exactly that discussion. They maintain the provision under which Irish citizens will be able to continue to vote. It is a logical consequence of the Northern Ireland settlement, which recognises the right of its people to identify as British, Irish or both, and I suspect this is not the moment to open that question. Moreover, it is reciprocal: British citizens can register and vote in elections in Ireland. My amendments also retain the existing rights of EU citizens with settled status to vote in local and some other elections. In some ways, that is questionable and will probably need to be debated and dealt with at some point—but not now.

Commonwealth entitlement is quite different, and very hard to defend in its current form. For one thing, it is a complete anomaly internationally. No EU country allows non-citizens to vote in its national elections, with the exception of Ireland, through the reciprocal arrangement with us, and Portugal, in the arguably somewhat similar case of Brazilians. You cannot vote unless you are a citizen in national elections in Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Australia—with a small, technical exception—and the United States. What we do is very unusual. The only real exception is New Zealand, which allows all permanent residents to vote—all, not just a subset. That at least is logical. What we do in our franchise is extend the right to vote to a group of countries and their citizens, mostly but not entirely on the basis that Britain governed them half a century ago. This does not make logical sense in the world as we now have it.

These arrangements would be easier to defend if they were reciprocal. The problem is that they are not at the moment. Only a small number of Caribbean countries and a couple of relatively small African countries allow British citizens to vote. Even then, they generally have to be pretty permanent residents.

Indians can vote in Britain, but no British citizen can vote in India. It is the same in Pakistan, Canada, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nigeria—I could go on with an extensive list of important countries with large populations. I do not blame them, though. Those countries rightly regard choosing their Government as the business of their citizens, and I think they are right in that. The argument is around why we do not do the same.

This is a bit of a hangover from the empire. The voting rates reflect the relationship that existed 50, 60 or 70 years ago; they are in law a legacy of the original expansive discussion of who could claim to be a British subject. The Representation of the People Act 1948 originally provided that citizens of newly independent Commonwealth countries were still to be regarded as British subjects for the purposes of nationality and voting. That provision has been tightened up a lot since then, and so has the definition of citizenship, but the legacy voting rights remain. They have nothing to do with citizenship of modern nation states as we now understand them. Of course, we all value the Commonwealth and our friendships with its members, but they are different countries, and that has to mean something.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

The same voting rights will apply across the franchise.

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response; as she said, I am not entirely surprised by it. I thank those who have spoken in this short debate. It has been worth having, and I do not think that the issue will go away.

I apologise to my noble friend Lord Mackinlay for not mentioning that he was the only noble Lord to raise this issue on Second Reading. He has followed it for some time and, as his intervention showed, he knows a lot about it. He mentioned Australia, which has an extremely restrictive policy generally. It restricts voting and candidacy to citizens, and it prevents dual nationality entirely as a condition for being a member of the legislature. Australia may be at one end of the spectrum; we are definitely at the other. The international norm is that only citizens vote and only citizens are candidates: I find it hard to see how one can defend any other position. Of course, citizens of many other countries in the Commonwealth and outside the Commonwealth have made huge contributions to this country, but that is not how we determine voting rights.

I have one last comment, for the noble Lord, Lord Pack. I entirely understand, and in some ways sympathise with, his asking, “Why should somebody who has lived here for a long time not get to vote in local elections?” That point is worth discussing, but national elections, referenda and questions are not the same as local questions and issues. It is something worth thinking about, but if one went down that road it should be for everyone, or at least for logically defined categories, not a hangover from the Commonwealth.

I will stop there. I thank noble Lords for a good discussion. We will reflect on what we will do on Report. It will probably be worth having further discussion and reflection on this. Meanwhile, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 25 withdrawn.

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[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, I support the principle behind Amendment 32 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, just as I previously supported the principle when the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, introduced a Private Member’s Bill in 2020 and when the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, introduced an amendment to what became the Elections Act 2022. The ban on Peers voting in general elections belongs to bygone times when the House was entirely hereditary and had an absolute veto over legislation, and when Members of this House were often Prime Minister. We no longer have an absolute veto on legislation; we have no say at all over financial measures, including the Budget; and we have no say on who is the Prime Minister, because that is determined solely by MPs.

The amendment is far from being our priority, however, when elsewhere in the Bill we are addressing issues of considerable importance, such as the many millions of ordinary people missing from the electoral registers who are therefore unable to vote. I also consider it ironic for Members of this House to claim the right to elect Members of the House of Commons without equally supporting the right of the people to have a say in who sits in this Chamber.

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I will briefly speak to Amendments 41 and 42 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. These amendments arguably ought to have been in the previous group, because they raise very similar questions. For reasons of time, I will not run equal and opposite arguments to the ones I just ran in the other group, but I want to make two points.

First, the effect of Amendments 41 and 42 would be once again to extend the franchise beyond citizens, but in a different way. Once you do that, you lose a firm grounding for the principle you are trying to apply. In this case, it would extend the franchise to anyone with EU settled status or anybody with indefinite leave to enter or remain, which is something that can be changed quite quickly. As we have seen this week, it is relatively easy to change ILR conditions. If these amendments ever came into force, you could have two citizens identical in every respect except that one was a care worker and one was not. Under the proposals announced this week, one would get the right to vote five years earlier than the other. I use that example to show how fluid the electorate can become if they are not soundly grounded on the objective fact of citizenship.

The other point that I want to make that is relevant here is one that my noble friend Lord Jackson made in the previous group. He alluded to the fact that residents do not necessarily have the same interests as citizens; they are not completely substitutable—citizenship means something. In local elections, that may be less so, but with national-level issues, it seems reasonable to think that residents will have different interests on certain important questions—on trade policy, trade links, visas and travel, for instance, or even on defence policy, and which country we choose to be allied with. Those are questions that citizenship and a commitment to a country affect. Of course, constitutional issues are the last one; the sense of legitimacy about a vote on the constitutional future of the country, or an aspect of it, really depends on whether you are legally committed to that country or merely living here. If we extend that situation and make it even more disconnected from citizenship than it already is, we risk undermining the legitimacy of some really quite important votes, because people can see that residents from the EU or elsewhere do not necessarily have the same interests and views as citizens. For those reasons, to come back to the point that I made earlier, citizenship is the only safe basis, and any attempt to extend it for any less satisfactory criterion is inevitably going to work out less well.

[Lord Hayward (Con)]

My Lords, I shall comment briefly on one or two aspects of the debate. I first make the observation that I have a group of clause stand part debates later on, and it was my error that probably caused the officials serious concern when briefing the Minister as to why I wanted to have stand part debates on Clauses 18, 19 and 20 but had not included Clause 17. I shall leave that aside.

I have two other observations. One is in relation to the comments and amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. I have strong sympathy with her on the size of local government wards and the burdens imposed on some councillors in some parts of the country and not imposed on others. There appears to be no logic behind the position that we have from the size of one council or another. I could understand it if one was talking about large geographical areas—that is a perfectly good reason for saying that a councillor has difficulty in serving an area. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, referred to Kirklees; there are other metropolitan authorities where the number of voters per councillor is substantially less than in places such as Kirklees and Birmingham—the noble Baroness cited London. There is no logic to that whatever.

I shall not go on to the question of parliamentary boundaries, because I referred to it during a debate earlier. I merely make two other observations. One is that Clause 17, in new Section 12A(1)(c), refers to

“the person appears to the officer to be of voting age”.

I am not sure that I am happy with that phraseology. Equally, my noble friend Lord Jackson referred in passing to Christchurch, and I am not happy about that reference either, although the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, because of his experience in winning the by-election that crushed my candidacy, would probably get more pleasure out of the reference than I did.

Representation of the People Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 2nd November 2026 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Frost]

5: Clause 2, page 2, line 19, leave out “in England”
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, and others in the name of Lord Frost, seeks to make the Representation of the People Act 1983 franchise, as amended by this Act, the franchise for all statutory elections, referendums and polls in the United Kingdom, except City of London ward elections. It would abolish the Scotland-only and Wales-only franchise variants and make the franchise a wholly reserved matter.

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I shall move Amendment 5 and speak to Amendments 7, 30 and 31 on the Marshalled List.

In considering the Bill, we are going to be considering some major changes to how we conduct our elections in this country. We will spend a lot of time considering the “what” of these changes and their justifiability, but we are not going to spend much time considering the “who”: who has the right to make, or not make, the changes that are being brought forward? I want to discuss that question and particularly the consequences of the devolution of the electoral franchise for all but national elections, and to suggest, as my amendments suggest, that these arrangements need to be looked at again.

I emphasise the franchise; I am not looking at the electoral system, for there has always been variation on that within the country. I am not looking at the merits of voting at 16, Commonwealth voting or anything like that. We will be coming to some of those issues where we have not discussed them already. This is about the wider consequences of allowing the devolved Governments to change the electoral franchise and the knock-on effects that that has for the wider system and the rest of the country. That is why I thought it right to table these amendments; they are probing amendments designed to get the matter discussed. Their effect would be to make the electoral franchise a reserved matter and the same in every part of the UK. In other words, they would restore the constitutional system on that point as it existed before 2013.

I will speak briefly on how these amendments would work. Amendment 30 would establish two common franchise categories: it would establish the parliamentary franchise, described as for Westminster elections and UK-wide or nationwide referendums or similar; and it would establish the local government franchise, which would apply for almost everything else. The amendment would therefore replace Scotland’s and Wales’s wider nationality qualifications. It would remove Scotland’s short-sentence prisoner exception, and it would make inconsistent legislative provisions ineffective.

Amendment 31 would go on to prevent the devolved institutions from subsequently recreating different franchises once again. It would expressly reserve for Westminster the voting entitlement in Scottish Parliament, Senedd and local elections and referendums, and polls in Scotland and Wales.

Amendments 5 and 7 seek to make the necessary consequential changes concerning detained young offenders. Amendment 5 would remove the England-only restriction on their disqualification from local government voting, and Amendment 7 seeks to delete the Northern Ireland modification that is rendered unnecessary by the earlier change. So that is how they would work.

I will say a word about the history and how we got to this point. As I noted, the devolution of franchise setting is hardly something from the dim and distant past; it is not a long-established and well-accepted part of our constitution. It goes back all of 13 years. That is why I want to examine this history in more detail.

I take Scotland first. The original devolution settlement left the franchise reserved in 1998, and the then Labour Government defended that explicitly. Lord Sewel explicitly said that the Scottish Executive

“cannot mess around with the franchise; that remains reserved”—[Official Report, 23/7/1998; col. 1077.]

That statement was not regarded as controversial, at that point. The genie was let out of the bottle only with the SNP’s determination to give itself the best chance of winning the 2014 independence referendum, and the Government consented to votes at 16 for that referendum under a special arrangement, and then agreed to it permanently in 2015.

After the referendum, the Scotland Act removed the general reservation on all but UK Parliament elections in 2017. Controversially, your Lordships’ Constitution Committee said at the time that devolving constitutional powers, including the franchise,

“risked introducing variation where there should be none”.

It identified possible differences in the enfranchisement of non-British residents and British citizens abroad—not merely the question of the voting age. It also warned that changes in Scotland could, in the end, pressure Westminster into matching them, rather than having a prior, wider, UK-wide debate on how the system should work. Those warnings were correct, but they were ignored. In 2020, the Scottish Government extended the franchise further not just to short-sentence prisoners but to all foreign residents in Scotland for everything other than national parliamentary elections.

--- Later in debate ---

Finally, the noble Lord, Lord Wigley, spoke about the Welsh Youth Parliament. That is a very important point, particularly in view of our previous debate. When I was a council leader, I instigated a youth council—the members of which sat on the full council, where they could speak in our debates but could not vote—and a youth mayor for our town. It is that active participation in decision-making that encourages our young people to get involved. For now, I repeat that the Government cannot support these amendments.

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister. I am disappointed, but not entirely surprised, to hear that she will not support the amendments. I thank those who have supported them. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for raising the problem of the City of London. Actually, I slightly sympathise with what the noble Baroness said, but I did not want to increase the complexity of these particular amendments by getting into that slightly niche problem. I do not want to dwell too much on what has been said. I felt that we drifted slightly into a discussion of age limits and electoral systems, which I am sure we will come on to later.

This has been an interesting discussion because it revealed fundamental differences of view about what the United Kingdom is as a country. Is it, as some seem to be saying, a collection of nations—a sort of mini-EU—or is it what it legally is: a unitary state which has devolved powers to devolved nations? Because the United Kingdom is the latter, and because it has devolved powers to devolved nations, there must be a power for the Westminster Parliament to consider whether that settlement is correct in every detail. Of course there can be variation, but it must be the role of the centre to ensure that the variation is in the interests of the whole of the country, not just a sectoral interest in one of the devolved nations. I contend that that has been the risk of devolving the franchise, and the variation in that.

My worry is that “devolve and forget” will one day become “dissolve and forget”. I do not want that to happen, which is why this Parliament must remember the United Kingdom is a devolved country; it is not an aggregate of nations that have voluntarily come together. I am sure that we will come back to all those issues, but for now I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.

Amendment 5 withdrawn.

Home Owners and Home Ownership

Lord Frost Excerpts

Thursday 10th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Non-Afl)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Baroness, Lady Eaton, on securing this debate. She set out very eloquently the benefits of home ownership, and I do not need to dwell on them again. We know what they are, and I am sure most of us agree with them: the stability it gives and the stake in society and in your local area that it provides—we all saw the socially transformative effects of the council house sales programme in the 1980s.

We can all agree on that. The problem is: how do you deliver home ownership in modern conditions? We need to achieve it. We need an effectively functioning housing market that is capable of providing housing where people want to live, at affordable prices. At the moment we simply do not have that in this country, and we have not had it for quite a long time.

Much government policy over the last 20, 40 or even 70 years—it depends where you start—has been going in the opposite direction. Obviously, this all began with the Town and Country Planning Act and the green-belt policy that first came in in the 1950s and has expanded since then. But a lot of the real damage was done in the 1990s and afterwards, with the huge rise in stamp duty that has persisted, and the constant green and environmental restrictions on what can be built, how it can be built, where you can build, the style in which you can build, and so on and so forth. To mitigate all this, successive Governments have engaged in price manipulation, such as the so-called affordable housing scheme—subsidised housing, really. Of course, we have had the latest wave of restrictions on tall buildings, specifically in London, that has brought housebuilding almost to zero. We have had the war on renters across successive Governments that has also destroyed rental stock.

This has taken us to a position in which we have a planning process where there are simply too many blockers in the process to get the job done. We have the absurd situation that the green belt now is actually bigger than the developed area of the country. It is quite an unusual belt that is bigger than the area it is trying to constrain, and it is certainly constraining the growth of our cities and towns pretty effectively. Prices are of course super high as a result of all this.

It is worth pausing for a moment to contrast the situation in this country with that of other European countries, which are of course our nearest comparators. It is true that the UK is a fairly small and dense country, and England even more so. However, there are European comparators, and the story is not particularly flattering. Belgium is a country I know well. It still has a lot of natural beauty of all kinds and is only slightly less dense in population than England is. Of course, the Netherlands is significantly more dense.

Here in England, we have 430 dwellings for every 1,000 in the population, in the Netherlands there are 490 and in Belgium there are 500. Our dwellings are also the smallest in Europe. If we want to give English people the same housing opportunities as those in Belgium and the Netherlands—and that is a reasonable aim—we will have to build 2.8 million houses just to catch up with just the Dutch, 3.6 million to catch up with the Belgians, and 4.5 million if we aim for the European average. That is simply to catch up, not to deal with any of the social changes or trends that are currently driving the problem.

We have to face up to this reality. Much of the current debate on this question—not just today but generally—is about trying to avoid this reality and the belief that we can somehow have more houses without changing any of these rules: the magical Tardis-like powers of the brownfield in cities that can supposedly accommodate everything we need. We have a policy that appears designed to maintain the economic geography of the 1950s and 1960s and never allow villages to merge or towns to grow. We have the belief that people can be made to live where the houses are, rather than the other way around, and we have an endless circular debate about social, council and affordable housing—we have one of the biggest sectors in Europe, of course—all of which is avoiding the problem.

The Government deserve a bit of credit for the planning Act and for the latest plan, but the solution is not driving the current system to work harder, and still less is it, as some have suggested, to allocate housing to favoured categories of workers. It is not about telling people they need to rightsize and that they are somehow occupying the wrong kind of house. It is about freeing up the system and trying to generate a real housing market with incentives to build, invest and grow, but we are simply not achieving that.

I fear we are heading to a social and economic crisis if we do not look this hard in the face and realise we have to do some things that many of us do not particularly like. We have to give opportunities to our young people to settle and to have houses, as we did. We need to get serious about this.

Renters (Reform) Bill

Lord Frost Excerpts

2nd reading
Wednesday 15th May 2024 Lords Chamber

[Lord Frost (Con)]

My Lords, I begin by thanking my noble friend the Minister for her comprehensive opening statement and for the time that she has already devoted to discussing the provisions of this Bill privately.

I think that I am the first speaker in this debate not to have to declare a relevant interest. I do not have any institutional housing interests, social, private or any other. I own one house and I live in it. If I do have an interest—and it is the reason that I speak today in this debate—it is the interest in living in a country that one day has a minimally functioning housing market. Unfortunately, we do not have that in this country. That should be the starting point for discussing the Bill.

We have an utterly dysfunctional housing market. We have far too little supply, as has already been noted. We last met the 300,000 building target in 1977 and, if we had been building at the same rate as the French over the past few years, we would have 4 million more houses than we do now. It is therefore not surprising that house prices are at nine times incomes—a historic high. Most policy has focused on Help to Buy schemes rather than expanding the supply.

Ideally, we would want a policy approach that involved building more houses of all kinds by liberalising planning, expanding supply in the rental market and, meanwhile, trying to make the market that we have work better and reducing the dysfunction. In fact, we are seeing that housebuilding is falling further. Last year, we built only 189,000 houses and, in the first quarter of this year, we are building at a rate of only about 100,000. There has been an attack on private landlords through the tax regime and the rental sector is shrinking. That, plus anticipation of the measures in this Bill, is taking private rental property off the market. It is therefore no surprise that, while sale prices for houses are flat, we are seeing rental prices in the private sector accelerate by 9%.

Now we have this Bill. I have philosophical concerns—that I think it is fundamentally unconservative, speaking as a Conservative politician—and I have practical concerns; namely, that it ties up and restricts the market still further and the practical effect will be to make things worse, not better. I regret that I must speak in these terms of a Bill that my own Government are bringing forward, but I think it is extremely problematic. If we want to help people—as has been said—into safe, secure, sound housing and reliable tenancies, we need to produce a better housing market and not distort it still further.

I have four specific concerns that I will briefly outline: first, the nature of the Government’s manifesto commitment and, secondly, its extent; thirdly, the restrictions that the Bill brings in on the use of property; and, fourthly, its developing complexity.

First, on the nature of the manifesto commitment that the Conservative Party and this Government made, I entirely accept that we committed to abolishing no-fault evictions—Section 21 evictions—but we also set in the manifesto a

“target of 300,000 homes a year by the mid-2020s”,

which has not been met, and promised to

“make the planning system simpler for the public and small builders”,

which also has not been met. We made an effort in the early years of this Government; it got blocked and, since then, we have given up the attempt.

These two things go together: one liberalises supply; the other constrains the market. I wish we had focused only on building houses and reforming the planning system, but at least together, there is some sort of balance. Now, we have dropped the commitment to build more houses and liberalise the system, but we are pushing though the provisions that tie up the market still further. This will only damage housing affordability further.

My second point concerns the extent of the manifesto commitment. As I said, we committed to abolish no-fault evictions. We did not commit to end fixed-term tenancies, and they are not the same thing. Section 21 is a way, among other things, of ensuring that landlords can reliably get possession, after the first 12 months in an AST, at two months’ notice. If we abolish Section 21, another way of providing some certainty for landlords that they could get their property back would be to leave open the option of agreeing another fixed-term tenancy, for another year or whatever. The Bill removes that option. It scraps fixed-term tenancies entirely and makes every tenancy rolling, bringing in the possibility that landlords will have to go to court much more often to recover their property. I repeat: one commitment is in the manifesto and another is not. That is why my honourable friend Anthony Mangnall MP tabled Amendment 10 in the Commons providing for the maintenance of fixed-term tenancies, and I am ready to table it again to ensure that we can have some debate on the subject and so that the Government can explain why they have expanded their commitment to take in fixed-term tenancies.

My third concern is philosophical. The Bill takes another step away from normally understood property rights. Even if both parties want to, they cannot agree a fixed-term tenancy; it is illegal. A landlord may no longer choose who they want to rent to. Landlords must accept pets. They cannot simply recover their own property but must persuade the courts—the state—that they have a justifiable reason for doing so. We are already too far down the road, as a Government and as a country, of accepting that people enjoy property rights only at state whim, and only in line with the purposes of the state. I am afraid that the Bill takes us a step further down that road.

My final concern is practical. Looking at the way the Bill has evolved in the Commons, I cannot avoid the impression that, in their heart, the Government know it is a bad Bill and are trying to mitigate it, under pressure. They have realised, for example, that the redress schemes, the decent homes standard and the PRS database, all of which may be good things in themselves, will reduce flexibility and push up costs. The Government have realised the risk that restrictions on long-term lets might bring in a shift to short-term ones, so they have brought in some rules to cover that situation too—though I note that these too will now require further mitigations to deal with special circumstances.

Of course, as has been noted, the Government have had to accept that the court system is not ready to deal with the abolition of Section 21 in full, and they have had to delay its introduction, so we are not even getting credit from our political opponents for the one thing that was supposed to be the purpose of the Bill in the first place. Everything that has happened in the Commons has brought in complexity, cost and delay to the system, and these are the very things that will drive more landlords out of the market, push up prices further and make the market even more dysfunctional than it is now.

To conclude, and I am sorry to conclude in this way —noble Lords will know that it is with great reluctance that I criticise the policy of my own Government—it is a poor Bill and I do not think it is getting any better as it proceeds through the Commons and through this House. It is inevitably going to make the private rented sector smaller and more expensive. It is pursued from the best of motives, but its consequences will be that housing supply shrinks and the cost of housing goes up. It will generate more social problems rather than mitigate them. I am sorry that the Government are pursuing it, but I hope that it will still be possible in Committee to improve on some of the fundamental points that I have mentioned, and in particular to retain fixed-term tenancies as an option. I hope some noble Lords will join me in that effort.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

As I said, there will be an annual report, which will monitor in detail the impact of the Bill, and going forward we will have the data in granular detail as a result of the private rented property portal, once it is established.

[Lord Frost (Con)]

I apologise. I too do not want to prolong this, but I and a number of noble Lords mentioned concern about the abolition of fixed-term tenancies. The Minister mentioned that briefly at the start of her summing up. Will she undertake to set out in a little more detail—not now, but on a future occasion or in writing—the Government’s reasoning as to why it is necessary to abolish fixed-term tenancies, as well as Section 21, as an option?

[Baroness Swinburne (Con)]

I undertake to do that. I invite all Peers who would like to do so to come to discuss these things in detail over the course of the passage of the Bill. I will put further dates forward ahead of Committee, so please make use of them. I am available to have those discussions throughout.

I believe the Renters (Reform) Bill honours the Government’s 2019 manifesto commitment to create a private rented sector that works for everyone and to level up housing policy in this country. The reforms in the Bill will give tenants greater security in their homes for generations to come. The Bill will also support landlords, ensuring that they have the confidence to invest—to invest more, we hope—in the private rented sector in England. I look forward to working with noble Lords during the passage of this important Bill.