Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I am grateful to the Lord Chancellor for making that point, because it takes me on to the second category that I wanted to discuss, which comprises 2.5 million people who we believe are eligible to vote; the Foreign Office believes this and I accept its figures, although they are still estimates. I am talking about the British expatriates who have lived abroad for less than 15 years. As he correctly says, a small proportion of that number participate in elections in this country, so I will return to the relevant question that was posed by the hon. Member for North-West Leicestershire. The reason why very few of those people participate is because we make it almost impossible for their vote to count. At the previous general election, in 2005, 17,000 British expatriates participated; I believe that that was more or less the number who were registered, so the turnout among those who had bothered to register was quite high. Today—as at the last time of calculation—there are only 14,000 such people, as evidenced by a response to a parliamentary question. Only 14,000 people, out of 2.5 million, are registered. We have to ask ourselves why. The Lord Chancellor and his colleagues will say that it is because they have no interest—they have left the country, they cannot be bothered and they are no longer engaged with the political process in this country. It is possible that a proportion of the 2.5 million feel that way, and that that proportion is similar to the proportion of the domestic population who, regrettably, feel sufficiently apathetic about our election process and politics in this place not to participate in voting. Let me explain one or two of the practical difficulties of participating in a general election in this country for those who happen to live abroad.