Constitutional Reform and Governance Bill

I, too, welcome the Government's movement on the subject and support the proposal. However, I fear that they have chosen the wrong method to bring about a result that hon. Members of all parties want. I ask the Government to think again about that method because it does not reach the heart of the problem. As I understand it, the Government propose a deeming clause so that, regardless of whether a Member of the House of Lords or the House of Commons is, in fact,""resident, ordinarily resident or domiciled"" in this country, they will be treated as""resident, ordinarily resident or domiciled"" for tax purposes. The transitional provisions simply deal with the position of someone who might wish to resign as a consequence of being treated in that way. I have a problem with the deeming provision. It is about domicile rather than residence. Residence is about the present and the immediate past, but domicile is different. Domicile is about long-term intentions—the place in which people are settled permanently in their own minds. It is ultimately about loyalty to one place or another. It is also true—this is relevant to the comments of the hon. and learned Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve)—that one can have more than one residence, but only one domicile. The law of domicile goes back to an idea about personal law—law that applies to a person, who carries it around with them and is judged according to it, wherever they are. It goes back to a definition of domicile in Halsbury, which states:""Every individual is regarded as belonging, at every stage in his life, to some community consisting of all persons domiciled in a particular country"." The phrase "belonging…to some community" is why I think that domicile is an important matter in itself for judging whether someone should be regarded as a proper person to sit in a country's legislature. There is a contradiction in saying, "My long-term intention is to live in another country and to be part of another community rather than this country, in this community where I want to act as a legislator." There is a problem with that. There are different examples, which might have different consequences, but I think they all lead to the same problem. Let us consider a person whose father had a domicile in a different country—a domicile of origin that is not Britain. Later, when the person reaches the age of 16, the law states that, at that point and any point afterwards, they are entitled to choose a different domicile. Let us say that that person then fails or declines to change their domicile from that of their father to domicile in this country. That is not a technicality about tax, but a reality about that person's view of themselves, and of which country and community they wish to belong. That example has something in common with the situation of Mr. Zac Goldsmith. His position, as far as I understand it, is that his father's domicile of origin was a different country, and that since the age of 16, he has had the opportunity to change that but has not done so. He now says that he is about to change his domicile, but he did not do so from when he was 16, which I believe was about 1981, to the present day. The question is not about paying tax, but about a person's commitment to this country. Other people are in a similar position. It is perfectly reasonable for a migrant to this country to have a domicile of origin in a different country, but once they come here, assuming they are of age, they are entitled to choose a different domicile. If they do not do so, especially over a long period, one must ask whether they have the commitment to this country that is required of someone who wants to sit in our legislature. That appears to be the case with Lord Paul, who came to this country in, I believe, 1966. Throughout that period, he has had the legal right to change domicile to this country but has not done so. The position of Lord Ashcroft, of course, is rather more obscure, perhaps deliberately so, but it appears to be a different sort of case—one in which someone starts with a domicile of origin in this country. One could be born in Sussex to a British father, and therefore, I suppose, have a domicile of origin in Britain, but then one might move to a different country—to Belize, for example, or to the Turks and Caicos islands—and develop an intention permanently to live there for the rest of one's life. Making a domicile of choice somewhere else would be an intention not to live in Britain. One could argue that of the Goldsmith-Paul and Ashcroft examples, the latter shows even less commitment to this country, because it is a case not of someone being landed with a domicile by their family or origin and then having to decide what to do about it, perhaps without realising what the law is, but of someone consciously going out to develop a domicile of choice in a different country. Being generous, it is possible to argue that someone who has chosen a domicile in a different country might still have the requisite amount of commitment to this country if they refuse to take advantage of their domicile for tax purposes. This is the importance of the remittance basis of tax: a person living in this country might have a long-term intention to live in a different country, but they do not want to take advantage of that for tax purposes. That might show a sufficient commitment to this country. However, someone who has a long-term intention not to be domiciled here and takes advantage of that for their personal advantage is not the kind of person who has sufficient commitment to be a Member of our legislature.