In February 2025, BOVF issued a press release setting out what our survey work had found: most British citizens overseas did not know that they could vote.
The 15-year rule was abolished on 16 January 2024. From that date, every British citizen previously resident or registered in the UK can vote in UK parliamentary elections for life. The change expanded the eligible overseas electorate from around 1.4 million to around 3.4 million people.
At the general election that followed, roughly 191,000 overseas voters were registered — about 5% of those eligible.
The gap is informational before it is anything else
It would be easy to read a 5% registration rate as apathy. Our survey work points somewhere else. Repeatedly, people told us a version of the same thing: they had assumed they were still excluded, because the last thing they had heard about their voting rights was that they had lost them.
Nobody had told them otherwise. There is no mechanism to tell them. The UK government does not hold a register of its citizens abroad and has no systematic way to contact them, which is why we treat government communication as a campaign issue in its own right rather than a technicality.
The contrast with comparable countries is stark: around 68% of French citizens abroad are registered.
What we did about it
The survey shaped everything we have done since. It is the reason we built the Registration Concierge, the reason our branches lead with "are you registered?" rather than with a description of the organisation, and the reason we ask supporters to tell the people they know.
Word of mouth is not our preferred channel. It is the only one that currently reaches this population reliably.
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