Neil O'Brien
Main Page: Neil O'Brien (Conservative - Harborough) Overseas Electors Bill
Neil O'Brien Excerpts
Philip Davies
As the hon. Gentleman says from a sedentary position, there have been many, and I am certainly not going to disagree. We probably should not have a Division on that, because I am certainly not going to disagree. In all seriousness, I think he made some very good points in what is now new clause 1. When he suggested the change in Committee, he said that the purpose behind it was
“to ensure that people register at the outset so that we avoid spikes in registration in the immediate lead-up to an election period when, given everything else that is going on, electoral registration officers are at their busiest, their work is at its most hectic and they are under the most careful of examinations.”
He pointed out that as we very much saw
“in constituencies across the UK at the previous general election, there was not just a flurry of late registrations, but in certain constituencies there were complaints afterwards that people had not been allowed to vote, even though…they had registered in time.”––[Official Report, Overseas Electors Public Bill Committee, 31 October 2018; c. 103-104.]
He also said that, in some circumstances, they had confirmation that they had been registered, but then found that they were not on the register, and that the new clause is intended to avoid those problems happening again.
Neil O’Brien (Harborough) (Con)
At the start of his remarks, my hon. Friend said that we must be careful about repercussive measures. My concern is that the new clause is repercussive and will lead to calls for similar prompts for other kinds of people—new citizens, for example, or those turning 18. My other slight concern is about what kind of information registration officers are likely to receive about those intending to leave, or who have left. Surely if such a provision is to work, the email addresses of many more people would need to be available to registration officers, otherwise we will have no way of knowing that people have left or are intending to leave.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend makes a good point, and I do not argue with much of what he said. If he thinks that the registration officer will not have much information, that is not a problem with the new clause. His argument seems to be that there is not much point to the new clause—in the second part of his remarks he did not point out a problem with new clause; he said that he did not think it would be used very much, but that is not an argument against it. He might be surprised at what the registration officer finds out. The fact that the provision might not be used often does not mean that it is bad to slot it into the Bill—it just might not be used very often.
Neil O’Brien
I must have expressed myself badly. My second question was about what would need to change on the forms and the things that we use to get people’s information. If someone is a new tenant in a property and the previous tenant has moved out and gone overseas, unless we have some other process or forms, often those new tenants will not know that the previous tenants moved to another country. They will therefore have no way of providing the information that the registration officer needs to provide the prompt suggested in new clause 1. My question was about the process that would be needed to support the new clause to make it work.
Philip Davies
Just as the hon. Member for City of Chester did in Committee, I have avoided being too prescriptive about what should be involved. The new clause will be used if someone becomes aware of something, although that might be something we cannot currently envisage. New clause 1 advocates the principle that, should someone become aware of something—I do not necessarily know how, and I cannot be prescriptive about such things—there should be a mechanism to try to make the system easier, and to avoid the problems that we all accept took place in the previous general election, when people were turned away—it was a shambles in many constituencies. This may not be the most important piece of legislation the House has ever passed, and it might not be used a great deal, but it cannot do any harm. Even if it does a little to alleviate some of the problems that we faced previously with late registrations, it cannot be a bad thing.
Neil O’Brien
My hon. Friend is generous with his time. Will he address my first point about the repercussive nature of new clause 1? He says that it cannot do any harm, but it will surely prompt people to say, “Ah, we now need similar prompts for those who turn 18 or who are new citizens of this country”.
Philip Davies
I do not accept that that is a necessary extension. We are dealing with new clause 1 of this Bill, and if somebody wanted to extend it to something else, they would have to find a Bill in which to do that, and argue for that extension. That would be a matter to consider at that time, and it has nothing to do with this Bill. My hon. Friend could be right—I do not say he is wrong—but I ask Members to consider the new clause in the context of this Bill, rather than thinking about its repercussions on other legislation
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend has had a good knock so far, so if he will forgive me, I will give way to the right hon. Gentleman.
Philip Davies
I think the right hon. Gentleman is also referring to the merits of the whole Bill, and I had just said that I did not really want to get into that at this stage. Third Reading is probably the best time to deal with that. Indeed, I am sure that we can save up all these points for then. I am rather anxious to get back to new clause 1, but I will first give way to my hon. Friend the Member for Harborough.
Neil O’Brien
My hon. Friend is further burnishing his credentials as a centrist with new clause 1, so I hesitate to introduce a European dimension into the debate, but is he confident that it is compatible with the general data protection regulation? He is imposing a new duty on registration officers. Let us suppose that someone comes to an electoral registration officer and says, “My next-door neighbour is planning to move to another country. You should contact them and send them the forms to register overseas.” Can such information, not gleaned by the registration officer for any particular purpose, be turned into a list under GDPR and used for a different purpose, such as to send the prompts that my hon. Friend is proposing? Is that compatible with European law?
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend makes a good point. I am not a lawyer and I do not know the answer, but I am sure that we have plenty of qualified people in this place—we tend not to be short of them—who may be able to offer an opinion. However, new clause 1 is not limited to the registration officer finding out from a third party. It will apply if they find out from the person themselves, so my hon. Friend might be right about that circumstance and he might be wrong—I do not know; that might need to be tested by the courts—but the new clause is not limited to that group.
Neil O’Brien
My hon. Friend the Member for Brentwood and Ongar (Alex Burghart) has done a better job than me of teasing out one of the problems this new clause might cause for registration officers. My example of the helpful neighbour was in one sense unhelpful, because a more real difficulty for ROs would be on the question of what it is to be aware that someone is planning to move overseas, but as my hon. Friend pointed out, many other parts of Government might hold information that implies someone is about to move overseas.
My fear is that there will be differences in practice around the country in that some ROs will be quite effective and determined to seek out that information from other parts of Government, including local government, while others will not be, at which point there will be a row, because this is not an entirely unpolitical subject: some people are keener on registering overseas electors than others. We can imagine a world in which people say, “Look, in Rutlandshire we are using a data sharing system to pull information from this part of local government that people are about to move overseas in order to send out these prompts, but you over in Blodchester are not doing that. Why are you not doing that? You are failing in your duty to send prompts to people who parts of Government have become aware are about to move overseas.”
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend makes a good point, but I do not agree with the thrust of where he is coming from. I am sure he will correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that he is criticising the fact that there could be a postcode lottery, to put it in common jargon. Therefore, it seems to me that he is basically advocating that, to avoid that, he would rather nobody could do something, rather than have some people doing something. I would sooner some people did something and we encouraged the others to follow suit than say, “Because I can’t guarantee everyone is going to do it I would rather nobody did it.” So I have a slight difference of principle.
Neil O'Brien
My fear is not so much that there would be a postcode lottery—I do not necessarily have a problem with differences in treatment around the country—but that there would be a legal problem for ROs who might be told by ROs elsewhere in the country, “You are not following best practice; you are not following the duty set out in new clause 1, and therefore you are legally failing in your duties.” What would their response be?
Philip Davies
If an RO was failing in their duties they absolutely should be pulled up on that. If this new clause were to enter into law and an RO was made aware that somebody was about to move overseas or had done so and did nothing about it, in effect they would be in breach of what was expected of them, and it would not be unreasonable for them to be pulled up for that. I would like to think that if this was put into law, ROs would be more than capable of complying with it.
Neil O’Brien
I agree with everything that my hon. Friend has said so far about new clause 3, but I have a question about his new clause 5, which we will come to later. In it, he specifies that the report must be produced
“within 12 months of this section coming into force”,
yet in new clause 3 there is no timetable to guide the Minister or the Cabinet Office on the publication of the report. Such a report could be published 10 years later and be of absolutely no use. Is there a particular reason my hon. Friend has not suggested a timetable in new clause 3?
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend again highlights the importance of the scrutiny of Bills, particularly on a Friday, and I am grateful to him for doing that. He makes a very good point; I am sure that a date would have been beneficial to this proposal. As it happens, I am not trying to pass on responsibility, because that is not the purpose of the new clause. I have merely taken what the hon. Member for City of Chester tabled before, because that was a good proposal. However, I obviously take full responsibility for the new clause that I have tabled, and my hon. Friend is right to say that it would have been better with a timetable. I hope that, if new clause 3 is passed, pressure could be brought to bear on the Minister to speed things up in the usual way that we do in this House.
Neil O’Brien
I do not regard the absence of a date as in any way fatal to new clause 3, or as an argument against it, but for the benefit of those who have to implement it, I wonder whether my hon. Friend could guide them by specifying now in this debate, which they will read, whether he expects this to be done prior to commencement or in a progress report sometime later, and indeed whether he expects there to be a regular report produced every year or every couple of years?
Philip Davies
I think that it should be done as soon as is practical, and my hon. Friend is right to suggest that it should not just be a one-off. It should be something that the Cabinet Office does on an ongoing, regular basis. I am grateful to him for picking up on that particular flaw.
Philip Davies
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. It is amazing what can be achieved when the Government and the powers that be set out their stall.
The point that the hon. Member for City of Chester was making, as I see it, was that this measure could make a big difference to elections in this country and ultimately elections could, and might well be, decided in future by people who do not live here. Is that something we want to see? People might well be happy for that to happen, but I brought the new clause back after the hon. Gentleman tabled it in Committee because I think that the people should at least properly consider whether they want to put in place legislation that could in effect mean that the deciding votes in elections in this country are cast by people who do not live here. What might people living here think about that? We need properly to consider it and to ensure that we are content before we go ahead with it. I brought the new clause back so that people could be aware and could think about whether that was what they really wanted to happen with elections in this country.
Neil O'Brien
Before we raise our sights to the question my hon. Friend has just raised, may I press him on the question of new clause 4(2)(c) and
“whether the current election timetables are of sufficient duration to enable the full participation of any increased numbers of overseas electors”?
I was not clear when I read it why there was any fear about this and why there might be any problem with timetabling. If we can get postal ballots out, I cannot see what the problem is that my hon. Friend is trying to address. Perhaps he could enlighten me.
Philip Davies
As I mentioned earlier on the new clauses, we have experience in this country of things being a bit of a shambles during elections, with people not being able to vote when they thought they were able to, with people not having time or with things not arriving in time. We have it at the moment. I am sure that like me—this happened at the last election—my hon. Friend must have had voters get in touch and said they did not receive their postal vote at all or in time for the election. That is the problem I envisage. It is just a general one, and the fact that we might have so many more people involved—the increased volume—means that it seems to me that the chances are we will have even more complaints. That is the purpose of new clause 4(2)(c).
Philip Davies
The hon. Gentleman might be right. I am not one of those people who bashes IPSA; it has its job to do, it makes its decisions, and our job is frankly just to get on with whatever it determines. However, he might be right. My right hon. Friend the Member for North Thanet (Sir Roger Gale) is right that this largely would not be a problem. I accept that, but there might well be examples of a certain group meaning that the Bill affects certain constituencies a lot. I do not think it would affect mine, frankly, but it might have a disproportionate effect on others. One thing that IPSA finds it difficult to do is to deal with situations where there are different pressures in different areas. Things are usually done on a more across-the-board basis, understandably, but that can cause some problems, so on that basis the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent Central makes a fair point.
Neil O’Brien
Further to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Walsall North (Eddie Hughes), it seems to me that in new clause 5(2)(a) we are asking for something that is impossible, as it is simply a radically subjective measure. Is the Minister supposed to measure the turnaround time of correspondence, to look at a Member’s contributions in the Chamber or measure their eloquence? I am afraid that it simply seems impossible.
Philip Davies
I do not see it in those terms. I will accept that it is not particularly well drafted if that is the conclusion that my hon. Friend has drawn from it, but I do not see it measuring the success of MPs in that sense. I see it as more about whether constituents are getting the service that that MP provides to other constituents in the same way. I do not see this duty being placed on the Government or MPs in the same way as my hon. Friend does.
As for new clause 6, I appreciate that in a moment or so—