What are the problems with allowing long-term expats to vote in UK elections?

Britons who’ve lived abroad for more than 15 years are to get a say at the ballot box. Sean O’Grady considers what will this mean in practice

The Tories have been promising reform for years (Getty)

A Budget statement is about the last place you might expect to find the announcement of a significant change to the franchise, but so it has turned out. Tucked away among the big plans and bigger numbers in this year’s “red book”, the collection of documents published by the Treasury, we find paragraph 2.41. It states: “Overseas Electors – the government is providing an additional £2.5m to remove the limit preventing British citizens who live overseas from voting after 15 years.”

The news shouldn’t, however, come as a huge surprise because the move was promised in the 2015, 2017 and 2019 Conservative manifestos, the most recent one pledging: “We will make it easier for British expats to vote in parliamentary elections, and get rid of the arbitrary 15-year limit on their voting rights.”

Although the new limit, if any, is unspecified, it is bound to be a controversial move, and potentially an important one. Before a drive to register expats in 2015 and a rush to qualify to vote for the 2016 EU referendum, the number of voting expats was about 35,000, roughly half the size of a parliamentary constituency. Now that has risen to 233,000 people, equivalent to about four Commons seats. A number of legal actions and, possibly, some partisan interest by the Conservatives has now put “votes for life” firmly on the agenda. Expatriates were not permitted to vote at all before 1985, when a five-year limit was applied, and it has varied ever since before settling at the present level in the early 2000s.

How many more votes could be harvested as a result of this extension is difficult to estimate, but it could conceivably run into hundreds of thousands more, and there is a widespread assumption it would tend to help the Conservatives disproportionately. This would be greatly exacerbated if expat voters were able to choose which constituency to vote in, with a preference for marginals. Theoretically, the number of expat voters in a single seat could outnumber those citizens actually resident in the constituency. One obvious route out of that would be to specify voting in the place they were last registered, but in the case of those who left before about 2005, there would be no existing register to check them against.

In 2016 the minister then dealing with the proposal, David Lidington, told parliament: “We would have to not just extend the franchise but establish a new system of voter registration, which is not straightforward given that voter registers no longer exist for periods that go back earlier than 15 years. We have to find some way of allocating those individuals to constituencies and verifying a previous place of residence.”

There are obvious matters of principle also involved. Proponents argue that, say, retired service personnel have earned their right to vote in UK elections and that the bundle of rights associated with British citizenship, including the right to vote, cannot be arbitrarily carved up, even by parliament, as a matter of human rights. Against that is the fact that an expat may have little or no direct stake in the UK if they spend all their time in, for example, Spain or Thailand.

In any event, the government can plainly claim a mandate for making a change, but unlimited voting rights were not explicitly promised in the 2019 election manifesto, and the idea provoked little discussion at the time. There is also the question of whether expats can, or should, still vote in referendums, in local elections and for the parliaments and assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland (and all of those administrations will have their own views about who should set their franchises, both for the UK parliament and the devolved bodies). Postal voting is the usual route, but there is also a case for voting by proxy, or even limiting it to voting in person.

There is also the related unfinished business of the rights of EU citizens to vote in British elections post-Brexit. The argument here is whether, say, a British citizen who has resided in Florida for the past 23 years and not even visited the UK has the same stake in the country as a family of Slovaks living and working here, and sending their children to UK schools. The right to vote was not covered in the UK-EU withdrawal agreement sections on reciprocal rights, and the UK wishes to negotiate these bilaterally with EU member states. Thus far, arrangements have been made with Spain, Portugal and Luxembourg, but not for Poles, the biggest single expat population. In some EU countries, British citizens can vote in local elections in any case.

Irish voters have had the right to vote in all British elections since independence in 1922, and Maltese and Cypriot citizens also have that right via their Commonwealth status. Other citizens used to be ineligible to vote in elections for the Commons.

However, last year the Scottish parliament passed the Scottish Elections (Franchise and Representation) Act, extending the right to vote in Scottish local government and Scottish parliament elections to all foreign nationals legally resident, not only EU citizens. A similar act was passed in Wales which extends the right to vote in the national assembly elections to all qualifying foreign nationals.

The numbers involved may be larger than the UK expats abroad. At the end of 2018, there were more than 1.9 million EU citizens on the electoral registers in England and Wales. This represents 4.5 per cent of all voters there. In Scotland, there were 132,800 (3.2 per cent of the total electorate). Some of these voters have left the UK since then.

The British franchise, then, is an increasingly complicated business, and will no doubt be subject to some passionate argument in the months ahead, with draft legislation due later in the year. The principle of “one person, one vote” may be well understood and widely accepted, but its practical application itself presents a political challenge.