Representation of the People Bill
Monday 2nd November 2026
(2 days, 22 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRepresentation of the People Bill 2024-26 View all Representation of the People Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 47–I(b) Amendments for Committee (Supplementary to the Marshalled List) - (2 Nov 2026)
Lord Udny-Lister
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would ensure that the minimum voting age of 18 is retained for all elections to the House of Commons, thus maintaining alignment with the minimum age for standing for election to the House of Commons under section 17 of the Electoral Administration Act 2006.
Lord Udny-Lister (Con)
My Lords, in moving Amendment 1, I shall also speak to Amendments 3, 4, 33, 301 and 302, all in my name.
On Amendment 1, I am firmly of the view that you should be able to vote in an election only when you are old enough to meet the age criteria to stand as a candidate for that election. Eighteen remains the legal age of adulthood and is currently the age at which a citizen may put themselves forward to be elected to the House of Commons. That connection is important, and it is in alignment with the age criteria to vote. If the Government are unable to support Amendment 1, I hope Ministers will be able to explain why they are so keen to separate the age of voting and candidacy in this way. This is not an argument regarding maturity, though much could be said on that topic; I am moving this amendment in defence of a long-established electoral principle.
It will come as no surprise to your Lordships that I do not support the franchise being lowered to enable 16 and 17 year-olds to vote. Through Amendment 1, it is my intention that the minimum voting age remains at 18, which would maintain alignment with the minimum age to stand for election in the Commons under Section 17 of the Electoral Administration Act 2006. Through Amendment 1, I seek to preserve the existing and long-standing alignment between the age of voting for and the age of standing as a candidate. The parliamentary franchise is one of the very foundations of our constitution, and in the passage of the Bill thus far I have failed to see any justification from the Government as to why such a long-standing national rule ought to change.
Further still, I put it to your Lordships that the Government have failed to address what the consequences of the Bill are and why those consequences are justified. Data from the Electoral Commission confirms that through this legislation, if left unamended, we would extend the franchise to 1.7 million additional people. Make no mistake: this represents a major constitutional change. The question is not whether young people should get the vote—it is whether the Government have established a principled case for changing the parliamentary franchise and whether the safeguards, preparation and democratic consent are commensurate with this change. As of yet, the burden of explanation that is required by the House to justify the constitutional significance of this change fails to meet what I consider to be the basic test of proportionality. Perhaps that is because the essence of the Bill is sadly more about gerrymandering the franchise than it is about strengthening the electoral system.
I am, however, sympathetic to this House supporting the greater involvement of young people in our democracy. That is a must. But we should not and must not mistake engagement for the single question of enfranchisement. If the Government are committed to strengthening democratic values and engagement among younger people, I hope that today the Minister will be able to commit to bringing forward a fully funded and credible programme of proper and unbiased civic education, whether or not the Bill succeeds. That will mark whether this Government are serious about the engagement of younger people in the process.
We need only look at the data from Scotland and Wales, where 16 and 17 year-olds are already permitted to vote in the devolved parliamentary elections as well as local elections. Electoral Commission figures from 2025 estimate that only 61% of 16 and 17 year-olds in Scotland and a shocking 39% in Wales are actually registered to vote, despite having the opportunity to do so. This demonstrates my earlier point that the widening of the franchise does not solve the problem of engagement and suggests that the Government should turn their focus to civic education prior to any national law change.
I come to Amendment 3. I am asking noble Lords to support retaining the existing age qualification of 18 for the signing of a recall petition under the Recall of MPs Act 2015. When the recall Act was passed, it was widely accepted that the power of recall was a distinct and profound constitutional act. Through this amendment, I seek to acknowledge the severity of the recall process by asking your Lordships to consider the recall franchise on its own merits and not to assume that every adjustment to voting age must automatically be copied. Amendment 3 would thus ensure that the age for signing recall petitions is equal to the established age of adulthood and the minimum age at which people could vote in the last parliamentary election. If the Government are unable to support this amendment, I ask Ministers to explain why changing the voting age should automatically alter the recall electorate and why they are of the view that this particular extension can be made without full and independent justification.
Given that the power of recall has the highly sensitive ability to remove representation, it is for the Government to now justify whether it is their intention to change the eligible population empowered to terminate the mandate of people elected to the current Parliament. If it is their intention to do this, it is problematic for a number of reasons. If this is left unamended, the House will, in effect, be making changes to a constitutionally sensitive accountability mechanism, simply as a side-effect of another clause. I put it to your Lordships that this is not a sensible way to deal with the complexity of constitutional matters. Therefore, I ask noble Lords to back Amendment 3 as a limited safeguard.
I recognise that the Government made a manifesto commitment to lowering the age of voting, but I caution your Lordships’ Committee that on such major constitutional matters we should still utilise the process of taking the question directly to the people through a referendum. If the question of how we elect our Members of Parliament was considered sufficiently fundamental to warrant the 2011 referendum on the alternative vote, I ask the Government to explain why the question of who should be entitled to elect them is considered any less deserving of the consent of the British people.
This is important. As I mentioned earlier, we are talking about increasing the franchise by an additional 1.7 million people. Through Amendment 4, I am asking for the Government to seek the reassurance of the electorate that this is wanted, as I sense that the national mood on this subject matter is very different from the direction that the Government are taking. My amendment is a democratic safeguard that would require a referendum on lowering the voting age to 16 within two years of Royal Assent.
Amendment 4 should be read alongside my Amendment 301, for the former would require a referendum while the latter would prevent regulations commencing voting at the age of 16 unless a majority had voted for it. The process of a referendum would create a serious and needed national conversation around civic responsibility, one that I hope everybody would be keen to welcome. If we are to make such monumental changes that would alter the integrity of the vote, it is only right that the decision to do so should be put to the British people.
Moving on to Amendment 33, I call on noble Lords and the Government to properly acknowledge the troublesome and dangerous times in which we live. Through Amendment 33, I am calling on the relevant Secretary of State to conduct an assessment of the susceptibility of 16 and 17 year-olds to foreign interference and electoral disinformation prior to lowering the franchise. In tabling this amendment, I am not in any way suggesting that young people are any more uniquely gullible to election-related disinformation and foreign interference than older people. I am asserting the point that the Government have a duty to assess whether any new cohort of electors may encounter particular vulnerabilities or exposures, and what the state must do to protect the integrity of the information environment for the safeguarding of our democracy.
The issue here is that our electoral environment has fundamentally changed, and I draw your Lordships’ attention to the recent research by the Electoral Commission after the 2024 election. It highlighted that 61% of respondents reported seeing misleading information about party policies and 52% misleading information about candidates, and 24% said they had seen or heard an election-related deepfake. These figures must concern us. I fear that 16 and 17 year-olds, through their greater use of chatbots, AI platforms and social media sites, would be even more greatly impacted than older peers.
We know that foreign interference in our electoral process is a real and significant threat. Hostile states, particularly Russia, have in recent years shown their willingness to utilise social media and the plethora of digital tools out there to interfere in the democratic processes of other countries. We would be foolish to think that we are immune to this. With the rapid deployment of AI, it is becoming increasingly hard to establish fact from fiction and the truth from disinformation, and we know there are a lot of rogue actors. Therefore, before increasing the franchise, it is the responsibility of the Government to at least understand the current risks and consider the adequacy of the safeguards.
Amendments 301 and 302 are in my name. Though Amendment 301, I seek to ensure that the Government hold a referendum and publish an assessment of susceptibility of 16 and 17 year-olds to election-related disinformation and foreign interference. These commencement conditions are highly important, as they would make the consent of the electorate in relation to Amendment 4, which would require a referendum, a condition rather than a courtesy and would give the overall exercise a defined constitutional purpose.
Further to a referendum result, through Amendment 301, I also seek to require the Government to discharge the duty to assess the susceptibility to election-related disinformation and foreign interference under Amendment 33. I hope noble Lords will agree that through these amendments, taken together, we would require two independent safeguards prior to commencement.
Finally, on Amendment 302, I seek a requirement for the approval of both Houses under the affirmative principle before the voting age is lowered to 16 for any future elections. In speaking to this amendment, I seek to protect Parliament’s role in scrutiny by reserving the final commencement decision for both Houses. It should be for Members to decide and test whether, through Amendments 4, 33 and 301, a referendum has been carried out and the disinformation assessments properly completed. Through Amendment 302, I provide an opportunity for parliamentary scrutiny as I do not believe it should be left for Ministers to be the judge as to whether the prerequisites for extending the franchise have been adequately met.
In speaking to these amendments, I conclude by reminding your Lordships’ Committee that although the Government may be confident in their policy—indeed, they have the numbers to force the Bill through—a parliamentary majority is no substitute for principle and for democratic consent. I tabled these amendments as the Bill is fundamentally flawed. Why should 16 year-olds be permitted to vote yet remain illegible to stand for election? Why should the franchise for recall petitions be altered without the Government laying before this Parliament a distinct and compelling justification of the fairness of this? What measures are Ministers putting in place to assess the risks of the susceptibility of young people to disinformation and foreign interference?
If the Government have confidence that the majority of the people in this country support increasing the franchise by 1.7 million then putting this to a confirmatory vote of the British people would surely uphold the integrity of our future elections. All these questions remain unanswered, and the integrity of our constitution should not be seen as a political experiment to be conducted at the whim of whichever Government happen to hold office.
I hope I have the support of your Lordships in asking, through these amendments, that the Government think again. The franchise is the bedrock of our democracy. It belongs not to the Government of the day but to the British people. It should not be altered without their consent. I beg to move.
The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness McIntosh of Hudnall) (Lab)
I advise the Committee that if Amendment 1 is agreed, I cannot call Amendment 2 by reason of pre-emption.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lord made a very interesting speech, most of which I disagreed with. I understand the issues, but to say that there is no mandate, constitutional basis or any political support for this measure is absolute nonsense. It was in the manifesto of the Labour Party. When people voted in Northern Ireland, Wales, Scotland and England, they voted, among other things, to agree to voting at 16, so I see no conceivable argument against it constitutionally because it is a constitutional principle—the bedrock of our constitution—that a manifesto commitment is the same as a referendum.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I have tabled Amendment 2, a probing amendment suggesting that the voting age perhaps be changed to 17 rather than 16. I did this for a number of reasons, to get a proper debate about this.
The noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, referred to the Welsh Senedd elections and the fact that it did not do any harm. I am sure it did not, but it is not exactly the same as voting for the national Government. Turnout did not even reach 52% across the whole of Wales in the Senedd elections earlier this year, so we are talking about quite a different scale of representation.
There is one sentence in the Labour manifesto on this:
“We will increase the engagement of young people in our vibrant democracy, by giving 16- and 17-year-olds the right to vote in all elections”.
We have not seen that outcome really happen in other parts of the United Kingdom that have already adopted voting at a younger age. I am not going to have a row, because I appreciate it was in the manifesto, but it is useful to point out that research the Electoral Commission shared with us from across several countries and states that have lowered their voting ages shows that, when enfranchised, 16 and 17 year-olds tend to vote in greater numbers than those enfranchised at 18. According to the Electoral Commission, you are more likely to vote when you are 16 and 17, but then not when you are 18.
There is something interesting going on here; there is a bit of a transition. One of the reasons why, traditionally, I have opposed changing the vote from the age of adulthood is that there is a significant change in what happens in the rest of your life when you turn 18. There are significant differences between what a 16 year-old and a 17 year-old can do. A 17 year-old can drive a car. They can fly a plane and get a private pilot’s licence. They can become a blood donor—you cannot do that when you are 16. They can join the Armed Forces—or rather, to be precise, they can join the Army as an officer at the age of 17 years and nine months; they cannot do that in any of the other Armed Forces. You cannot become a police constable until you are 18.
There are so many things on which we have changed the law, in the past five years or so, to stop people doing things until they turn the age of adulthood. So I am trying to get a sense of why the Government have chosen 16 in particular, recognising that this can be an age when a lot of young people will not even have taken their GCSEs, beyond the one line in the Labour manifesto. When you turn 18, you can do things such as serve on a jury and get a tattoo—I did not know you had to be 18 to get a tattoo until I looked it up. You cannot make a will until you are 18, which is quite surprising; perhaps we can change that in another Bill. You certainly cannot get a credit card or buy alcohol—well, not legally.
Another thing is that young people’s lives are very much on our minds, as we are talking about the statistical NEETs. The ONS reckons that there are 57,000 NEETs between the ages of 16 and 17. Back in 2008, I think the Labour Government made it a criminal offence for those young people; they had to take full responsibility if they were not in education or training or did not have a job. Before the last Friday in June when they were 16, it was their parents’ responsibility to keep them in school. I understand why the Government never chose to enact the enforcement or penalty sections of that Act, but they had done it to criminalise young people—and yet today, they want to do something quite different. They have no real focus on why those 57,000 young people are knowingly breaking the law, and it is their responsibility. By the way, councils are supposed to know what every young person is doing under their broader statutory duty on safeguarding children; they are supposed to know exactly what every child in their area is up to. Why do we not have more focus on giving young people the potential and the future that they desperately need, rather than choosing 16 as the age at which they can start voting?
I have some sympathy with my noble friend Lord Udny-Lister on the referendum; that is an interesting concept. By the way, to match this amendment, I have tabled a later amendment on reducing the age for candidates to 17. I wanted to go a little further in seeing what the Government say about the ages of 16 and 17. The Government say that they can work, pay tax—you can actually do both of those things below 16—and serve in the military. That is correct, but those things need parental consent; they need both parents to consent if the young people are in different houses or their residence is split between two houses. Then there is their contribution to society more broadly, which already happens with young people; we see that in wonderful examples such as the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and many other schemes, and young people have won Points of Light awards in the past.
What is it about 16? I feel that the Government think there will be an electoral advantage to this—it is as simple as that. They should be careful what they wish for. Polling not that long ago showed that more people were going to vote Reform and Green than for the Labour Party. Do they really think this is the right thing to focus on at 16?
I am concerned about the level of education that would be deployed to achieve this. There is a lot going on, which I will come on to in later amendments to Schedule 1. Nevertheless, it comes back to why they have picked 16, and this is what I am trying to get from the Government. There are plenty of things we have barred them from doing. They cannot get married—they can in Scotland, but not in the rest of the United Kingdom. There are multiple things for which we have lifted the age gap. This really needs a better description than one sentence—three-quarters of which is about things that can be done by children under the age of 16—to make sure that we can continue to have a credible electorate. I am conscious that this will be in other amendments that are coming up. With that, I will carefully consider the contributions of other noble Lords.
Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 21 in my name. I think it would be useful for noble Lords to remember the vision that lies behind this Bill, which was published in the Government’s paper last July, Restoring Trust in Our Democracy. I just want to quote a couple of little bits from the beginning:
“Our democracy is central to who we are as a country. We can take pride in its evolution and how it has and continues to inspire. As a government, we have a responsibility to protect and strengthen it. The right to participate in our democracy is a defining aspect of our national identity and should not be taken for granted”.
Until recently, democracy moved in one direction, from no democracy to partial democracy to full democracy, but I believe that in the Bill there are elements which will see a major reversal of democracy, and it is happening here in the United Kingdom.
Until 31 December 2020, it did not matter where you lived in the UK. Every adult had the right either to elect representatives, who between them made all the laws to which we were subject, or to stand for election to do it themselves. However, that changed from 1 January 2021, when the United Kingdom was divided into two different classes of citizens. On the one hand there are UK citizens living in England, Wales and Scotland, who continue to enjoy the right either to elect representatives or to stand for election to do so themselves, and on the other hand, there are UK citizens living in Northern Ireland who are subject to a second-class citizenship through which they have the right to elect representatives to make only some of the laws to which they were and are subject, or to stand for election to do so.
Of course, as we all know, in 300 areas of law—not just individual laws—UK citizens living in Northern Ireland have been disenfranchised and are now subjected to a second-class, truncated citizenship. On 21 January 2021, no laws had been imposed on us, but since then we have seen increasing numbers of laws hedging us in, growing and growing, and providing a constantly increasing reminder of our disenfranchisement that will get worse. Your Lordships’ House is well aware that, because of this, every time a law is imposed that requires some form of Westminster implementation, we try to oppose the statutory instrument.
In this context, I have tabled Amendment 21 because the message that the Bill is sending 16 and 17 year-olds across the UK is that it can be celebrated as playing a role in restoring our democracy, when it does no such thing for the whole of the United Kingdom. At the moment, our laws treat 16 and 17 year-olds across the UK in exactly the same way. None of them has the right to elect a fellow citizen or to stand for election. However, if the Bill becomes law, it will create discrimination where none currently exists. It will create for the first time two classes of 16 and 17 year-olds in the UK. On the one hand, there will be 16 and 17 year-olds in England, Wales and Scotland, who will be given the right to participate in elections that contribute to making all the laws to which they are subject. On the other hand, there will be 16 and 17 year-olds in Northern Ireland, who will be given the right to participate in elections that contribute to making only some of the laws to which they are subject.
Noble Lords should understand that that violates the Belfast/Good Friday agreement. The very purpose of that agreement was to persuade terrorists to renounce violence and seek to pursue their political goals through the ballot box. The agreement contains a special protection for democracy that is additional to those applying to the UK as a whole. It commits to protecting the right of the people of Northern Ireland to
“pursue democratically national and political aspirations”
in relation to all the laws to which they were subject. This was upheld from 1998 until the end of 2020, when the Belfast agreement was violated by the protocol and the Windsor Framework. Now there are whole swathes of life, in 300 areas of law, in which the people of Northern Ireland can no longer pursue democratically national and political aspirations.
It is part of the broader change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. I know that some noble Lords do not like me saying this, but it has, in effect, made Northern Ireland a colony of the EU in these 300 areas. No one in Northern Ireland can have a say on these laws that are made by a foreign Parliament; we are, in effect, a vassal state of the EU. At a time when everyone is apologising, especially in our schools, for colonialism and slavery, it is quite bizarre that we should be acquiescing in its reintroduction, telling 16 and 17 year-olds that they are going to be different.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 6 in my name, which is a probing amendment that seeks to clarify the scope of Clause 2 by excluding secure children’s homes from the definition of “youth detention accommodation” for the purposes of the disfranchisement of 16 and 17 year-olds otherwise newly enfranchised. First, echoing my noble friend Lord Murphy, I emphasise that I very much support our manifesto commitment to votes for 16 and 17 year-olds in the name of recognising their value as citizens, as is the case in Scotland and Wales. I will return in a later group to citizenship education, which is so important.
The issue raised by this amendment was brought to my attention by Mark Alexander, a doctoral researcher at Cambridge, on behalf of the steering group for the Unlock the Vote campaign at the penal charity Unlock. Although I believe that some prisoners should have the vote, that is not what this amendment is about, and I do not intend to spark a more general debate on that. It is about exploring why children serving custodial sentences in secure children’s homes, SCHs, should be denied the new right to vote, when the Government accept that residence in such a home is not of itself a basis for disfranchisement.
I realise that young people in SCHs who are not convicted prisoners will not be disfranchised. The Minister for Democracy has made that clear, both in the Commons and in a letter to Unlock, and the Explanatory Notes recognise that children may also be residents in such homes for welfare purposes, so SCHs will accommodate both children who have the vote under Clause 2 and children who do not. The question raised by Unlock is whether it meets the Bill’s wider objectives that a conviction of a child should disfranchise them when they are accommodated in a welfare-oriented rather than a penal institution.
The Bill is intended to increase young people’s engagement with democracy. The Government have described their objective as enabling young people
“to find their voice and exercise their right to vote”,
thereby, it is hoped, building long-lasting engagement with our democracy. These are objectives that I very much share. However, arguably, they sit uneasily with the exclusion of vulnerable children whom the state is seeking to rehabilitate and reintegrate into our society. Surely such rehabilitative education should include an appreciation of the importance of active citizenship and public duty.
The issue is especially significant because the Government recognise that eligible children in SCHs will require tailored support to exercise their democratic rights. Arrangements are already being developed with the Department for Education to highlight the value of civic engagement and democratic participation in SCHs for some children but not others. There is a risk that a child being told that they cannot participate in democracy alongside their peers in the same home will feel a sense of alienation and disaffection that could undermine their rehabilitative journey. Rather than building their identity as active citizens, it could have the very opposite effect.
I ask my noble friend the Minister, first, why a child serving a sentence in an SCH should be disenfranchised—thereby being treated them differently from other children in the same institution. Secondly, why should the distinctive welfare and rehabilitative character of SCHs not justify treating them differently from those in penal institutions? Thirdly, have the Government assessed the likely impact of this disenfranchisement on the rehabilitation and future democratic engagement of convicted children in SCHs?
Unlock has raised a valid question on whether the justification given by the Government for the disenfranchisement of those children is sufficiently sensitive to the distinctive nature of secure children’s homes. I look forward to my noble friend’s response.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and to speak to my Clause 2 stand part notice, which goes further than the noble Baroness’s amendment but is headed in the same direction.
It is no secret that Green Party policy is that all those held in detention in prisons should be given the vote unless that is excluded by reason of electoral fraud or similar—or if a judge has decided that they should not be able to exercise their vote. However, that is not what we are addressing here. We are talking about a small, important and particularly vulnerable group of young people. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, I have been informed in what I am about to say by the penal reform charity Unlock. This addresses how Clause 2 risks further alienating and marginalising an already excluded group of young people from politics and society in a way that is not just morally wrong but likely to be counterproductive.
I have seen a letter from the Minister in the other place saying that the Government’s view is that those convicted of a crime and serving a sentence in custody should be unable to vote. As the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said, this is creating a real mess in secure children’s homes. More than this, my argument is that we are talking about children whom we want to include, and we want them to see themselves as part of society, as having a stake in society.
We are not talking about an issue that is going to have any significant impact on the outcome of elections. Up to March 2025, 610 children in England and Wales were covered by this clause. There are equalities issues here, because minoritised communities are significantly overrepresented among those children, as are care-experienced children. Hundreds of young people are being told that one more way that they cannot participate in society while their peers can is in respect of voting.
This will affect the way they feel about their society—whether they feel valued or listened to, rather than being abandoned and judged. I note that what I have just said is based on the testimony of lived experience from people who have been through youth detention. I am very strongly of the view that we need a world where everyone makes politics about what they do, not have done to them, and these are young people who have had lots of politics done to them. These are young people who have been victims of political decisions, such as austerity, where others have put them in a situation where, in many cases, they have fallen through the cracks in our society.
Having spoken to my clause 2 stand part notice, I will restrain myself from engaging at length with the other amendments in this group, but I will just very briefly note that it is interesting that, in the Representation of the People Act 1969, the extension of votes to 18—the first in the world—was generally uncontroversial and had broad cross-party support. Interestingly, it was thought at the time that it might actually slightly advantage the Conservative Party; how the world has changed.
None the less, I want to pick up a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, who said that 16 and 17 year-olds are more likely to vote than 18 and 19 year-olds, and that is the evidence that we have from other places. But we also have evidence that people who vote in their first election are more likely to keep voting, so we are actually engaging people at a point when they are more ready to be engaged, and that is something that will bear impacts decades into the future.
I also want to point to the Scottish Youth Parliament, which has been a leader in calling for equality of votes at 16 and 17, which, of course, they have enjoyed in Scotland for some time. I have to share a little story from the 2014 referendum. I remember hearing a BBC Radio 4 presenter on the streets of Edinburgh saying, “I am standing with 16 and 17 year-olds, and they are really informed and engaged”. The surprised tone in his voice said a lot more about the reporter than it said about the 16 and 17 year-olds.
Finally, I am afraid I do not really follow the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Udny-Lister, regarding Amendment 33, which proposes an
“Assessment of susceptibility of 16 and 17 years old to election-related disinformation and foreign interference”.
The noble Lord said he did not actually think that 16 and 17 year-olds were more vulnerable, so I do not really understand the argument for that amendment. But beyond that, I have absolutely no doubt that, if one did such a study, we would find there are an awful lot of people around the average age of your Lordships’ House who are terribly vulnerable and definitely need some education to reduce their susceptibility.
Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)
My Lords, I support Amendment 1. Just to pick up on the last statement that was made, the reason that young people are more susceptible to malicious actors is that they spend significantly more time online. It is a much bigger source of their news, and they pay far more attention to it than people who are older who normally have a broader reading palette and tend to read more from official sources, such as newspapers and the like. Having been a youth worker for over 35 years, I know that the young people I work with exclusively read about the world online. If you want to hide something from them, I suggest you put it in the Times, because they will never find it.
I support Amendment 1 because I do not think we should be using the ballot box as an engagement scheme for young people. This policy relies largely on an education piece, and it looks like the Government have put the cart before the horse. Surely, you should do the education piece before you give the added power—the new choice that young people would have.
This is not about whether I believe young people can have an opinion. I have been a youth worker for well over 35 years, and I have been at the wrong end of young people’s opinions and at the right end. I certainly know they can have that opinion but look what we are doing—the Government’s risk assessment is almost non-existent. They are about to turn school, the place that is safest for minors, into a political battleground. School is the safest place, particularly if you come from a poor community and particularly if your family is suffering. You go to school to be safe. Peer pressure in school is a very real thing. If you are going to expose our 16 and 17 year-olds to political peer pressure, you had better see what the effects of that are before, not after, you do that.
Lord Young of Acton (Con)
My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 20 in my name and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley. I declare my interest as the director of the Free Speech Union.
I draw your Lordships’ attention to a disconnect between this Bill and the Online Safety Act. At present, some content on social media platforms is age-gated, because of a child safety duty in the Online Safety Act that kicked in, in July 2025. That means that, to access content that the social media platforms deem to be suitable for adults only, the user has to prove that they are an adult, aged 18 or over.
However, quite a lot of political content has been age-gated as a consequence of this child safety duty coming into force. I could give numerous examples, but I know we are short for time, so I will give just one: a speech by Katie Lam in the House of Commons about the grooming gangs was age-gated by all the large social media platforms, which thought that it was unsuitable content for anyone under the age of 18. However, if 16 and 17 year-olds cannot access speeches being made in the House of Commons because of the age-gating in which social media platforms engage, how can they be expected to make informed decisions at the ballot box?
I am sure that noble Lords and Baronesses who have rightly emphasised the necessity of improving civic education if we are to lower the voting age to 16—I am thinking of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and the noble Lord, Lord Murphy—will agree with me that, if we are to improve civic education for teenagers, it is important that they can access political content, including speeches given in the House of Commons.
My noble friend Lord Bailey of Paddington rightly pointed out that, for most teenage children, social media platforms are the single largest source of news. That was corroborated by some research carried out by Ofcom; it showed that social media platforms such as TikTok are the primary source of news for 12 to 15 year-olds. So this is a potential problem. The Online Safety Act requires large social media platforms to age-gate some political content, so that it cannot be accessed unless the user can prove that they are aged 18 or over. At the same time, the Government are proposing to lower the voting age to 16, expecting 16 and 17 year-olds to make informed decisions without being able to access political content on their primary source of news.
Fortunately, there is a solution at hand. Sections 17, 18 and 19 of the Online Safety Act are keep-up duties. They require social media platforms to keep up content of democratic importance, news publisher content and journalistic content. However, it may not surprise your Lordships to learn that, while all the take-down duties in the Online Safety Act have been activated, not all the keep-up duties have, including Sections 17, 18 and 19, and that that they are not due to be activated until mid-2027.
There is nothing in those sections that means that they apply only to adults, so it is perfectly possible that, once those duties are activated, social media platforms will recognise that they have a duty to keep up content of democratic importance, news publisher content and journalistic content, to make it accessible to children as well as adults. That could be underwritten by the regulations I believe the Government intend to make at the beginning of next year, restricting access to social media for under-16s as well as 16 and 17 year-olds. The regulations could stipulate that those restrictions should not apply to content of democratic importance, news publisher content and journalistic content. That would be a way of ensuring that 16 and 17 year-olds, and younger teenagers who are beginning to think about how they will vote when they reach the age of 16, can access vital content such as speeches made in the House of Commons.
If the Government think that it would be a step too far to stipulate in those regulations that the restrictions should not apply to teenagers in general, they should at the very least stipulate that they should not apply to 16 and 17 year-olds, given that 16 and 17 year-olds are going to have the vote. My amendment simply asks the Government to carry out a review within 12 months of the Bill being passed to ensure that content that children will need to be able to access on social media to make informed decisions at the ballot box is not restricted, in particular for 16 and 17 year-olds.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, it is more than 50 years since we legislated to extend the franchise to allow 18 year-olds to vote in general elections. A great deal has changed in society since 1970 when those 18 year-olds cast their first votes, and it is right that we look again properly at the issue of the franchise.
The debates since 1970, including this afternoon, focus largely on the issue of at what age it is appropriate to do whatever people want to do. But the argument from the noble Lord, Lord Udny-Lister, that few people who are 16 or 17 in Scotland and Wales are registered to vote is not an indication that they should not be able to vote; it is an indication simply of how difficult it can be to be on the electoral register when you are a young person. That issue is addressed elsewhere in the Bill, but was sadly neglected over the last four Parliaments.
I accept that there are things we should not let people do as soon as they are 16. For example, smoking is self-harming, alcohol carries great dangers, gambling can be deeply addictive and purchasing fireworks, knives, crossbows and airguns should not be permitted to anyone under 18. But going down to a polling station or filling in a postal vote should not be seen as a harmful activity, any more than it is for older generations.
A 16 year-old in this country can consent to medical treatment, leave school for another form of education or training and consent to sex. With parental consent, that young person can join the Armed Forces, apply for a passport and get married or enter a civil partnership. Yet, under present laws, someone whose 18th birthday falls just before a general election may not get to cast a vote in one until they are 21 or 22. If politics is not for them when they are young, it may never be for them.
In 2003, in a debate on a Bill that would have reduced the franchise from 18, I argued that maturity and political understanding do not suddenly materialise on your 18th birthday. My view remains that it is wrong to suggest that everyone over 18 generally possesses sufficiently political wisdom to make choices, while no one aged 16 or 17 can properly decide whether to vote or who to vote for. My own experience with political research often involved me interviewing the interviewers who sought to discuss political issues with voters. The people they interviewed, who were entitled to vote because they were 18, frequently knew so little about the issues facing a democracy that the interviewers even said to me that they sometimes doubted the wisdom of the universal franchise.
Wisdom, political experience and judgment do not always come with being older. Younger people, in my experience, are sometimes ahead of older generations in considering long-term challenges such as climate change, alongside immediate priorities such as education, transport and housing. Amendments today seek to maintain the voting age at 18, or to reduce the number of young people who will be added to the voting registers. The suggestion is even made—I think it is preposterous—of having a national referendum before extending the franchise. Another referendum, and on this issue? We can only imagine what Brenda from Bristol would have to say about that.
Retaining the vote at 18 or pausing at an arbitrary halfway point of 17 ignores vital lessons from when the franchise has been extended in Scotland and Wales. Studies across both nations demonstrate that 16 and 17 year-olds living at home and attending school are embedded in a supportive social structure that actively fosters democratic engagement: a structure that 18 to 20 year-olds currently entitled to vote who are living independently often lack. In Scotland and Wales, and in other countries such as Austria, which led the way by lowering the voting age to 16 across all electoral levels in 2007, there was no meltdown of democracy. In fact, in local elections in Vienna, turnout among 16 and 17 year-olds reached 64%, compared with only 56% among 18 to 20 year-olds.
We on these Benches accept that the issue of enfranchisement cannot stand alone. We should look to research from Jersey, which lowered the voting age in 2008. It was demonstrated there that extending the franchise in isolation, without structured democratic education, failed to deliver sustained engagement, leaving young voters facing persistent confusion over candidates’ policy platforms and how democracy works. So, in a later group of amendments, we will argue that extending the franchise and strengthening citizenship education must be treated as twin pillars of a single coherent strategy, aimed at improving political engagement and the health of our democracy.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I have added my name to a couple of amendments, including Amendment 2 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, because I think it is valid to ask, “Why 16, not 17?” We could as easily ask, “Why 16, not 15?” This is overall an important group of amendments, not necessarily because anyone here is interested in overturning a manifesto pledge or getting stuck in a row about the maturity or otherwise of teenagers, but in order to probe how far the Government have considered the impact of these changes, what they mean for the adult franchise and the problem of inconsistency in relation to age when it comes to the way we view the age of majority.
My fear is that we are in danger of getting in a muddle about what adulthood means. The age of majority, according to law, is 18. Successive Governments have created fairly hard lines about what under-18s cannot do, as we have heard, including buying alcohol, nicotine products or vapes or gambling: all the sins, the harmful things. Under 18 year-olds are also deemed incapable of exerting full contractual capacity when it comes to loans or mortgages or doing jury service. I think that jury service is good and I hope that, by the time they grow up, there will still be juries left for them to be recruited to—but I put that to one side.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
My Lords, it is always a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, and her very considered remarks. I welcome the debate on this group, which explores the most unwelcome decision to bring children into the voting net. In particular, I welcome the amendments from the noble Lord, Lord Udny-Lister, specifically Amendment 301.
The wording of the government amendments, which no one has spoken of yet, requiring officers to investigate whether 14 or 15 year-olds live in a household, sends shivers down my spine—as does the concept of allowing this for children, whose rights in so many other areas of life are correctly postponed until they are responsible enough to use them wisely. We had this debate during Brexit, when the idea of 16 year-olds voting was mooted and discussed and then, quite rightly, dismissed. The point was made then— it is obviously true now—that there is substantial scientific evidence that a person’s capacity for reasoning, logical judgment and decision-making continues to develop up to the age of 18, and many would say thereafter. Although it is true that some basic cognitive capacity and logical reasoning can be reached at around 16, there are other areas where they are not.
In particular, studies highlight that resistance to peer pressure develops well beyond the age of 16. This is absolutely key, as my noble friend Lord Bailey of Paddington, who has unparalleled expertise and experience in this area, pointed out. Peer pressure is not just from others of a young person’s age, and it is not meant to imply Peers such as me who go canvassing. It is teachers and other influencers, particularly these days, as most young people have access to influencers whom they regard as incredibly important and relevant to matters that matter to them, such as fashion and sport. Maybe these influencers are skilled in fashion, sport and related areas, but it would be worrying if they persuaded people how to vote based on extremely limited understanding of the policies themselves.
Scientific research has found that someone under 18 might be just as capable as an adult of understanding an argument, processing information and reaching a logical conclusion, and I do not doubt that. But they are most certainly less capable of resisting peer pressure or emotional impulses. Can the Minister advise us whether the Government have undertaken any specific research in this field to be sure of the competencies of 16-year-olds? In particular, can the Minister explain whether such 16 year-olds will now be eligible for jury service? If not, why not—not forgetting, of course, that jury members are selected from the electoral roll? How will that work? Perhaps she can explain why, in July 2025, the Labour national executive committee decided to change the rules so that officers of local Labour parties have to be over 18.
Let us look at some other glaring inconsistencies. Sixteen year-olds need parental consent to join the Army or marry. Young people cannot order a drink in a pub unless they are 18, so if their side does win the election—possibly due to their vote—they cannot join in the celebrations in the pub or, like the Chancellor, exhibit their joy by inverting a pint glass over their heads. Not unreasonably, Labour refused to lower the drinking age to 16. Why? In Labour’s words, to protect children from harm. Labour says that under-18s are not capable of making that decision for themselves. Labour raised the age for buying cigarettes to 18 “to protect children”, according to the Labour Minister. Why? Because Labour decided that children were not to be trusted with this important decision. Likewise, under-18s are dealt with in different courts and cannot watch the same films as 18 year-olds, because the British Board of Film Classification requires a person to be 18 before being classified as an adult.
As we have heard, the same applies to buying fireworks, using sunbeds and even buying knives. Labour legislated that children had to stay in school or comparable education until 18. Why? Because they were not capable of taking the decision to stay or leave themselves—this has nothing to do with protection. Welsh Labour banned under-18s from tongue piercing, arguing that
“young people may be less likely to have the experience or knowledge”
to take that decision.
Labour does not trust children under 18 to have Botox or buy corrosive substances, and it does not trust children to place bets or even enter a gambling shop. The noble Lord, Lord Watson, then deputy leader, said:
“Those who gamble should be adults”.—[Official Report, Commons, 16/7/19; col. 721.]
So he confirms Labour’s view that under-18s are children. When Labour reduced VAT on children’s meals—another Brexit win—HMRC confirmed that under-18s are children.
What will these children use for voter ID in the polling booth? Few will have appropriate ID. For these reasons and many others, some 95% of the world’s democratic countries do not allow voting at 16; people have to wait until they are 18. Maybe it works in Nicaragua, Cuba or Ecuador, but it does not work here. We will be outliers, propelled by a Government rightly accused of attempting gerrymandering and, as I just demonstrated, abandoning all their past precedents and good practice on the altar of electoral greed—which may well backfire if those voters do not turn out to vote for Labour, as is now predicted.
In conclusion, will the Minister please tell us what research the Government have undertaken on my concerns, particularly about peer pressure on children, and whether she shares my concerns on some of the other issues I have raised? If the Government have undertaken that research, perhaps she could share it with us. If not, these amendments, which largely go to postpone the proposals, must make sense. A referendum would allow those who are closer to 16 and 17 year-olds to make this decision.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)
My Lords, I will make a couple of points. I wonder whether the noble Lord thinks that older people are not subject to peer pressure. I believe they are.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
Scientific research has shown that younger people are more subject to peer pressure than people over the age of 18.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)
What scientific evidence? We can come back to that some other time; I do not wish to waste time this afternoon.
On gerrymandering, I entirely refute that case. Recent polling suggests that young people are not more likely to vote for my party. We are doing this not to secure votes but because we believe that empowering young people is the right thing to do. I have some sympathy with the viewpoint put by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, and I look forward to the response from my noble friend the Minister. I agree with much of what the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said. Civic education and votes at 16 must go together, but we do not understand the depth of understanding of democracy among some young people. A couple of months ago, I went to a primary school in West Yorkshire where children between years 1 and 6 were elected to the school council. They all had to put forward a manifesto, and they patently understood democracy, voting and what everything meant. On civic education—to which we will return—this is not about influencing young people but about informing them so that they are aware of the rights they will be able to exercise.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I am pleased to have the opportunity to support the amendments in the name of my noble friend Lord Udny-Lister. I have a significant concern about the Government’s proposal, notwithstanding that it was in the manifesto—a manifesto, incidentally, supported by about 20% of the electorate, with the lowest turnout since 2001 and Labour polling at 33.7%, so one line in one manifesto needs to be taken within a broader context.
My concern is that a really robust case has not been made with real-world evidence. We are looking back to the halcyon days of the past. If young people—16 and 17 year-olds—were so concerned about being part of the franchise, then their close approximation, 18 to 24 year-olds, would have voted in significant numbers at the 2024 election. In fact, the turnout in that age group dropped from 47% to just 37%, so it was not actually a great vote-getter.
If you listened to the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, for whom I have a great deal of respect, you would believe that Wales was a hotbed of psephological excitement and exuberance. But in fact that is not the case: this May, barely 51% voted for the national Parliament of the proud Principality of Wales, and as little as 42% voted in 2011. So there has not been a significant change in the number of people taking part in the ballot.
The comments of my noble friend Lord Bailey of Paddington were interesting. In 1950, 84% of people turned out to vote. But it was a different world then. People were encouraged, principally by their families and their social background—it was often a battle between capital and labour—as well as by public meetings, newspapers and the radio, although obviously not television. My noble friend made the vital point that young people are sometimes deeply influenced by a monoculture of social media. We can have many debates about that, but it would be wrong and completely irresponsible to ignore the context in which 15, 16 and 17 year-olds are making important decisions about how they vote.
In the past, the number one determinant for how a woman would vote was how her father voted. I am not saying I support that, but that was a societal psephological fact in those days. We are in a different world now, one where people do not read national newspapers or watch terrestrial television news programmes. They are very much interested in what other similarly aged people are saying on social media, and that will be a factor.
The main point is consistency, as my noble friend Lady Coffey brought up. Lowering the age while other adult thresholds stay at 18 is incoherent; it does not make sense. My noble friend Lord Leigh of Hurley made some very important points, and I would be interested in the Minister’s comments about how what is good for the constituency Labour parties and the Labour NEC should be good for the franchise for young people as well. My noble friend Lord Udny-Lister made an important point. It seems incongruous and odd that you can vote in an election but not for someone who is the same age as you. That seems very strange. If you are given the franchise—the responsibility of choosing someone to represent you in Parliament—surely you should be able to vote for someone who is your age.
As for international comparisons, we have already heard that, in mature liberal democracies such as the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, they all set the voting age at 18. This reflects a widely accepted understanding of what adulthood is.
There is weak evidence on benefits. I have already talked about turnout, which has traditionally been very low, for many years, among 18 to 24 year-olds. That is a function of a wider democratic malaise about the faith and trust that young people have in politics and government. I fear that, in the absence of a coherent argument from the Government for why they are bringing this forward—other than out of psephological and electoral self-interest, in that they believe that thousands of young people will turn out and vote Labour—I cannot understand the evidential basis for this policy.
Public opinion does not support it either. The House of Commons Library notes that polling suggests that the public are unsupportive of lowering the voting age to 16. It is not just old or very old people—given where I am speaking, I will not define “old” or “very old” here in your Lordships’ Chamber—but all manner of people from 18 onwards who are, at the very best, lukewarm and in some cases hostile to these proposals.
We have talked about undue influence and interference, and my noble friend talked about foreign interference via the internet. I do not think it is wrong to focus on the issue of maturity. I know that there is not accepted definitive science about the development of the human brain among young people. Obviously, colloquially and anecdotally, one is told that people are fully formed—physically, mentally, emotionally and socially—at the age of 25, but I understand and concede that that will happen to different young people at different ages. I joined a political party at the age of 16, which made me rather an old weirdo, frankly—the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, would probably say that nothing much has changed. The fact is that I was atypical. Most people are not politically engaged and they get their information on political policies second hand, through hearsay and through close family and friendship groups.
I make one final point about Scotland and Wales, which are, of course, an integral and important part of our country. The fact that they have decided to go their own way, in increasing the franchise to 16 year-olds, does not mean that England should back into that. This is the sovereign Parliament of our unitary state—our one country—the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. It is for us in this Parliament to make the decision. I do not believe that our Front Bench will oppose the principle of this, but it is beholden on the Government, and disappointing that they have not done so, to bring forward a much more comprehensive, convincing and coherent argument for these proposals.
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, posed a question: do we want another referendum? Of course we do not, because, in 2011, there was a referendum where we asked the people whether they wanted to fiddle the franchise and mess around with the voting system, and the people said no by a very large majority. All noble Lords need to recognise that that is not the way we want to go.
I certainly agreed with the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, when he proposed his amendment about social media—something I will return to later, in group 9. I will not go under the bonnet now, save to say that I think he omitted, in thinking about 16 year-olds, to consider the attainers who will need to prepare to vote on their 16th birthday but may not be 16 yet.
I associate myself with the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, and my noble friend Lord Jackson, who has just spoken, about the muddle that we are in within our United Kingdom relating to the vote and to the franchise. The Bill ought to be the opportunity to bring an end to the hotchpotch of different arrangements in different parts of our United Kingdom. At Second Reading I spoke about the different systems. Clearly, there is first past the post, where the person who gets the most votes wins—easily explainable in the pub, although obviously there are no 16 year-olds there. There is the alternative vote, which now is just used for the Scottish Crofting Commission elections. There is the supplementary vote, with open and closed lists. The noble Lord, Lord Foulkes, who is not in his place, entertained us at Second Reading when he explained to us how he got elected to Holyrood without standing in that election. Then there are thirds and all-outs. The franchise is also different: in Scotland, any resident, of whatever nationality, can vote, but you must be English, from the Commonwealth or from the EU for local elections here. And of course Peers cannot vote at all.
I was taken by the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, who said that such arrangements risk the peace in our nation that flows from the Belfast agreement and the Windsor Framework. I am concerned that this is a slippery slope. The Prime Minister has already declared that he wants to review still further the voting system to consider proportional representation. We all need to be careful what we wish for, because PR will lead to more sectarianism, more minority voting and more campaigning in Urdu, where single-issue activists seek to hold the rest of us over a barrel, reducing trust in democracy and elections, and the institutions they serve.
I will consider Amendment 279, in the name of my noble friends on the Front Bench and the noble Lord, Lord Brady. Some months ago, I attended a Learn with the Lords session at the education service in Victoria Tower Gardens. I was surprised to be paired—I do not know why—with a load of gobby kids, each of them egging each other on, promoting and lionising the Tate brothers and, in my presence, voicing all sorts of unacceptable, misogynistic opinions about immigrants and women. It turned out that it was not Learn with the Lords but “learn from the kids”. I was really concerned.
This plays to the point of Amendment 279 and that which the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, has mentioned about where the boundary between childhood and adulthood is. I do not propose to go through another laundry list of the things you can do aged 16, although you can sell scrap metal to a dealer and you can get there on a moped—that would not be a big deal—or, in Scotland, get married without parental permission. I say to my noble friend Lady Coffey, who is in her place, that you may not be able to get a tattoo but you can certainly get a piercing. These are trivial examples, but it goes to the muddle we are in. When you are 18, you can fight on the front line, get a credit card, take out a loan, buy a pint and sit on a jury, as other noble Lords have said. You can make a will, buy land and property, hold a tenancy and rent an adult video—not that anyone rents videos of any sort nowadays. It illustrates the point that we must have the review contemplated by Amendment 279, to be fair not just to the adults in the room but—
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)
My Lords, it is true that one can join the forces at 16, but one does not fight on the front line, as the noble Lord put it, until one is 18.
Lord Fuller (Con)
That is exactly the point I was making, and I gave a list of the things you can do at 18. Let us move on.
We need to have this review not just because we must be fair to children and adults but because we need to be clear where the boundary sits. It is not at all clear now; it is drip, drip, drip, which leads to confusion and insecurity.
My final point is that, when we consider votes at 16, we have to prepare people—the attainers—who are either 14 or 15, in a further blurring of the line between childhood and adulthood. As another noble friend said, I do not suppose that the Front Bench will oppose votes at 16, as it is a manifesto commitment, but we need to know what we are getting into before we get there.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I think the most interesting thing in this debate is the things that were not said. When the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, and the noble Lord, Lord Jackson of Peterborough, went directly to the point that everyone else had been tiptoeing around and, slightly indelicately but deliberately, said this was a partisan Bill that was psephological in its content and was actually about advantaging one party over another, I watched very carefully the expressions opposite. The Minister did not swoon theatrically; there was no clamour of outrage, with people demanding that either of the noble Lords should withdraw. In fact, with the honourable exception of the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, who at least tried to reject it—she said she refuted it, but I am not sure she did—the reaction everywhere else was some studied looking at screens. The reason was that the noble Lords were not saying anything remarkable.
Lest that noble Lords think I am being partisan about this, this has been the case with every change in the franchise. In our entire long history, I cannot think of one Representation of the People Act that has not been manipulated for partisan advantage by every party at the time. It happened in 1832 and 1867, it happened in the 1884 and 1885 Reform Acts, it happened in 1918, and it happened when the voting age was last changed in 1969 by Harold Wilson. It happened when the Triennial Act was introduced in 1694, when the Septennial Act was introduced in 1716, and when the quinquennial Act was introduced in 1911. On every occasion, people have—perfectly understandably, because politics is politics—tried to game who would benefit.
As King Solomon said,
“there is nothing new under the sun”.
I will of course with great pleasure give way.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)
The noble Lord might recall that I was a history tutor, and I am going to disagree with him. In Wales, the first time—I think it was the first—that 16 year-olds voted, the Labour Party, which had been in power in Wales for over 100 years, was reduced to nine out of 96 seats.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Non-Afl)
I am always very grateful to hear from the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen. There is a reminder in what he said that you should be careful what you wish for and that it may just be worth considering what has changed in the opinion polls between when this measure was put in the manifesto and now. Of course, however, we do not need to worry about that sort of thing in our elevated position here.
What makes this one a little bit different from all those others is not the fact of the electoral calculation and manipulation, but the flagrancy. What I mean by that is the list we heard from the noble Lord, Lord Leigh of Hurley. It is not just that parties on all sides have agreed on 18 as the standard age for maturity: the age at which you can make a contract, use a credit card, get a mortgage, serve on a jury and stand as a candidate. It is that, in many cases, the age has been raised from 16 to 18 as the age of consent by the same people who are now saying we should lower the voting age.
One of the first debates I took part in as a newish Member of your Lordships’ House was on raising the age from 16 to 18 to get Botox treatment. It was supported on every side. People said, “Well, this is just closing a loophole. This, after all, is the age we already use to get a tattoo and buy a knife, a bottle of wine, a scratchcard or some fireworks”. Absolutely true. As we heard, the last Labour Government raised the age of consent for a lot of these things, and certainly voted for it when other parties did.
The difference is not that it is happening; it is the sheer brazenness and flagrancy of it. That serves to undermine confidence in the system. It makes people cynical, because it confirms all the negatives that people have about politicians. If we have decided, as a country, that people below the age of 18 are legally children, are we really going to say that they are not responsible enough to buy or knife, scratchcard, firework or pint of beer, but that they should have the right to decide whether anyone else can do those things? Is that a reasonable proposition?
Lord McCrea of Magherafelt and Cookstown (DUP)
My Lords, I listened carefully to what the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, said. He seemed to suggest that one of the burdens of this legislation was to increase the engagement and participation of people in the democratic process, and certainly that is important. But surely one of the basic, central principles in a democracy is the restoring of trust within the population. The noble Lord mentioned how, over the years, things have changed. I was elected to the other place for Mid Ulster for 14 and a half years. The participation rate of the electorate who came out to vote over those years, in all those elections, was between 70% and 83%. There was no lack of interest or engagement as far as the population was concerned, certainly in those elections.
I know things may have changed. For Northern Ireland, we have had a change. The central principle in a democracy is surely that everyone’s vote is equal. I heard a lot of talk about England, Scotland and Wales. The noble Lord, Lord Murphy, mentioned Northern Ireland in the context of different methods of election. For example, for the Assembly and the councils we have proportional representation. Every person’s vote in that electoral system was certainly equal. Across the United Kingdom, there were varied manners of electing people, yet when it came to Westminster, everyone’s vote was the same. In all those years—my participation in the other House was 25 years in total—everyone’s vote was certainly equal.
That changed in 2021. We now find that, when England, Scotland and Wales go to elect a Member of Parliament, they vote for a person who will legislate on the matters relating to their constituents. But, when it comes to Northern Ireland, that has changed. They can only legislate for some issues in their constituency. They can participate in all the other votes in the other House, for England, Scotland and Wales, but, when it comes to Northern Ireland, there is a plethora of laws that are now forced on the people of Northern Ireland that the United Kingdom Parliament cannot vote upon. Therefore, those who elected a person in Northern Ireland are going to endure legislation and laws forced on them that their elected representatives have never voted on. That is completely different from any other Member of Parliament. Therefore, the vote of a person in Northern Ireland is not the same.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, mentioned the equality issue; surely, there is an equality issue here. Therefore, I hope that, when she comes to the concluding wind-up, the Minister will tell us how the Government intend to explain to a 16 or 17 year-old in Northern Ireland, if they give them the vote, that their vote will mean less than the vote of someone else in the rest of the United Kingdom. Without that answer, we can change the age, but there is still a major problem. Therefore, when it comes to restoring trust in democracy, we should surely have Members of Parliament elected to be able to vote on the issues which their constituents are supposed to accept as the law of the land.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, we on these Benches strongly support the idea of votes at 16, for two broad reasons. First, we want this to be a citizen democracy: not one in which passive subjects wait for the Government to deliver things to them and are supposed to be thankful, but one in which people feel they share in government, local and national, and have a voice. We believe that bringing the voting age down to 16 will help to engage people in their democracy before they leave home.
We have heard a lot—as we did during today’s second Oral Question—about the need for a national conversation. In the strategic defence review last year, we heard about the need for a whole-society response to the threats we now face by engaging local communities, volunteers and the like. That requires people to feel that they are part of our political community and, therefore, that they share the need to decide what goes on with government.
The second reason is because we—as well as France, Germany and others—increasingly have a problem of demographic balance in our politics. Some 30 years ago, when I was in charge of writing the manifesto for my party for the 1997 election, I spoke to people writing the Labour and Conservative manifestos. Among the things I was told was that we were really writing for people over the age of 45. Those under 45 did not vote so often and did not care so much about the details, so our package needed to be oriented towards benefits for the older generation. That is a problem. It is a huge problem in France, for example, where old people resist any increase in the age of retirement. I spent some time last spring visiting secondary schools to see how 16 and 17 year-olds would respond to votes at 16. I have been very impressed by how serious the 16 and 17 year-olds I met were about politics, how much more they want to know and how keen they are to be engaged. It will take a shift in the way we approach education and provide information but it is worth doing.
We have been discussing extension of the franchise for 200 years, as the noble Lord, Lord Hannan, rightly pointed out. I am sure he will agree that there have been only two occasions on which the Conservatives have not opposed any extension of the franchise. The first, as he mentioned, was Disraeli in 1867, when he decided to take a gamble and discover what he called the angels in marble. The second was in 2022, following the Elections Act, when the Conservatives pushed through an expansion of the right to vote for overseas voters for their lifetimes. The noble Lord, Lord Udny-Lister, may note that that increased the number of voters by somewhere between 2 million and 4 million; we are not entirely clear on how many overseas citizens are entitled to vote. That was done without a referendum, without consultation with the other parties, and without thinking through what it meant for changing the way in which you delivered your vote and get postal votes out. Cynics even thought that it was more to do with making it easier for wealthy expats to give money than to increase the franchise—but never mind, it was done, and without a referendum.
There has been talk about capacity and focus. The young people I spoke to—I have no doubt the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, will say the same—are often very concerned about education and training, for obvious reasons, as well as climate change and sustainability, which tend not to concern our generation quite so much. If we are talking about capacity and interest in relation to the young, we might perhaps also think about the old. When I first went into politics, the local Conservative agent had an extremely good relationship with the matrons of the local care homes. I discovered that he would go round, talk to the matron and butter her up, and she would help the inmates to fill in their postal votes. It had nothing much to do with privacy but it was the way one did things at a local level. That was a long time ago, and I am sure that no Conservative agent would think of doing such a thing nowadays, but if we are to start measuring capacity then it is not just the under-18s whom we have to worry about.
On fiddling the franchise, I add that the 2022 Act changed the way in which we elect mayors, which meant that when the Mayor of the West of England was elected he got 26% of the vote—a good democratic thing. Fiddling with the franchise has been done on a regular basis by both major parties, so let us not pretend that we are doing that here as well.
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, before I touch on one or two other things, I just say to my noble friend—I do refer to him as my noble friend—Lord Wallace that I think he meant “residents” rather than “inmates” when he was referring to care homes.
I do not intend to cover ground which has been covered by a large number of other people, but my noble friend Lord Wallace also touched on the question of changing the franchise. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, is not in her place at the moment, but my noble friend was absolutely clear about the historical analogies. I was one of the people who fell within that range of the 1969-70 Act in terms of implementation, and there was no question about it: it was not broadly supported by the Conservative Party because it thought it would benefit from it, and I have a very clear recollection because I fell within that age group.
One or two important issues have been touched on, one of which is Northern Ireland. I have every sympathy with noble colleagues from different Benches who have referred to the implications of what is not an equality of power of vote, and that needs to be carefully considered. However, I was also impressed by the comments of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, about a category of people that is very small but which needs to be looked at incredibly carefully. A very close friend of mine is deeply involved in that community, and we have to remember that 40% of all the adult inmates in prison in this country come from care homes. It is a difficult task to deal with, and we therefore need to address the sorts of issues that the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, raised.
I take the point that the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, made, that this was in the manifesto. However, the trouble with the Bill is that very little else was in the manifesto. I have said to both the current Minister and to the noble Lord, Lord Lemos, that the Bill would be far better if the Government stuck to those parts of the legislation which appeared in the manifesto, rather than spending their time adding amendment after amendment and curtailing debate both in this House and the other House. If the Government came back with a Bill that dealt solely with manifesto matters, this House would have a far more coherent debate, and it would be logical and appropriate if it were considered on all sides on that basis.
I do not favour 16 and 17-year-olds having the vote. I could have cited many other examples of contradictions in our legislation, but they have been made over and over again, with the summary message being that what we are doing in the vast majority of cases is raising the age at which people should act in a certain way, whatever that action may happen to be.
In conclusion, I just make the observation that I am a former chief executive of the British Beer & Pub Association, and I will be quite happy to explain to my colleagues, who seem to think that 17 year-olds are not allowed to drink in pubs, that they are. However, that is for another date.
Lord Gascoigne (Con)
My Lords, cheers to that.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said moments ago that we have been debating franchise extensions for 200 years. As one of the last speakers in a two-hour debate, I begin to know what that feels like.
I support a number of amendments in this group, but mainly Amendment 2 in the name of my noble friend Lady Coffey, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. Perhaps I come at this from a different point of view, and perhaps I am a lone voice on this side, in that I support the Government in lowering the voting age, and I congratulate them genuinely on doing this. However, like many others, both noble Baronesses have highlighted many inconsistencies, and I think the phrase “It’s a bit of a muddle” seems to be correct.
I wish to refer to an inconsistency that I think has not been mentioned, and which I have raised before in Home Office Questions: criminal sentencing and our differentiating between adult and juvenile at 18. I know that this is incredibly complex, as is always the case in the legalities involved in international agreements, but a recent horrific case—which I questioned the Minister about at the time—highlighted, at least to me, why we should look at whether the balance will now be right. Personally, I think it needs to change.
I say that because, if we ought to lower the voting age—and I think we should—with that right has to come a sense of responsibility; and with that right, I would argue, your role in society changes. We should properly and carefully go through these issues. It is not just a right-wing thing to say that; in fact, it is not a right-wing thing to say that. President John F Kennedy best communicated it when he said:
“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”.
I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Carter of Haslemere, who was in his place earlier, for his Private Member’s Bill, which referred to citizenship lessons for younger people.
I do not want to stray too much into what I think is covered in group six, but I want to refer to an issue that is dealt with in some amendments in this group, and which has been touched on already. My fear is that in lowering the voting age, we are implying that we have simply achieved our aims overnight without debating what it means: how to build national unity and to allow for some political discourse, and what being a citizen in modern Britain means. What are your rights and your responsibilities, and how can you play your part in our country?
The points made by the noble Lord, Lord Young, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, on Amendment 20 are valid too. Looking at the issues associated with social media should not be scorned by anyone. I am the proud father of two very young daughters, and, trust me, when I put them to bed every night, there is a growing list of things in my head that they will face as they grow up in Britain, and which fills me with fear. However, we should consider what it means for young people to be engaged and receive this information, and how it happens.
I repeat that I support the Government, and my concern is not with the principle but with the insinuation that we are treating votes at 16 as an end in itself. As a few people have said, the Bill will pass and we will feel able to congratulate ourselves and say, “Job’s a good ’un. Mission accomplished. Let’s move on”, saying nothing about some of the things that many people really want fixed and want the Government to get on and support. If we genuinely want to strengthen democratic participation, lowering the voting age should be accompanied by an understanding of what citizenship is and what playing a part in our free, liberal, democratic society means and entails. There should be greater clarity to help make the system work—a system which engenders active, proud and patriotic citizenship. Otherwise, my fear is that we risk making a constitutional change without addressing the reasons for making it, and, arguably, undermining it.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I thought it might be worth saying, for accuracy, that in the Welsh Senedd elections in 2021, 16 year-olds were allowed to vote, despite what the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, said.
Baroness O’Neill of Bexley (Con)
I thank all noble Lords who have tabled amendments in this group concerning lowering the voting age to 16 years. I also thank everyone who has contributed to the debate, and I apologise in advance for anyone I am not going to name-check. I am particularly grateful to my noble friend Lord Hayward for clarifying the terminology used by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire. I certainly do not think anyone on these Benches would refer to elderly people—
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My apologies; I absolutely misspoke. Having spent some time with my mother and my godmother in care homes, I have spent much time visiting residents in them, and I apologise for misspeaking.
Baroness O’Neill of Bexley (Con)
I did think that was particularly distasteful.
As I said at Second Reading, this is a constitutionally significant Bill, and therefore deserves thorough scrutiny from your Lordships’ House. It may well be a manifesto commitment and therefore we will not oppose it, but we encourage the Government to seriously consider all the impacts of implementation, as my noble friend Lord Gasgoigne mentioned.
It is in that spirit that I address the amendments of my noble friend Lord Udny-Lister. Amendment 302 would require regulations to lower the voting age to go through the affirmative procedure, and Amendment 33 would require an assessment of 16 and 17 year-olds’ vulnerability to electoral disinformation and foreign interference. My noble friend is absolutely right that such changes need to be properly thought through and prepared before they take effect.
His Amendments 4 and 283 would require a referendum on lowering the voting age to 16. Referendums are of course not a requirement, nor are they legally binding, but they are used to decide major constitutional issues. They have been held three times nationally in the UK: once in 1975 on our membership of the EEC, in 2011 on changing the voting system and, of course, in 2016 on our membership of the EU. Lowering the voting age is significant, so it is reasonable to ask whether a referendum should be held. While we will not oppose a manifesto commitment, as my noble friend Lady Coffey said, it was one line in the Labour manifesto. I hope the Minister will clarify in exactly what circumstances this Government believe that referendums should be held. This is especially relevant after a senior Labour MP in the other place suggested that Brexit should be reversed without a referendum. Labour Ministers have refused to rule out rejoining the EU without a referendum, which was the will of the people. It begs the question: if this Government care so much about the democratic representation of the people, why would they ignore the way they voted in 2016?
Amendments 1 and 3, also in the name of my noble friend Lord Udny-Lister, would retain the voting age at 18 for elections to the House of Commons, on the grounds that this is in line with the age at which you can stand for election yourself, as well as for signing a recall petition under the Recall of MPs Act 2015. He raises an important point about consistency. If this Government genuinely believe that this policy is right, why not apply the same logic elsewhere? Indeed, this is why Amendments 22, 279 and 285 in my name and that of my noble friend Lord Jamieson would prevent Part 1 of the Act coming into force until the Secretary of State had undertaken a review of the consistency of age laws.
For example, the Family Law Reform Act 1969 sets the age of majority at 18. Full citizens’ rights and responsibilities are given at 18. Sixteen and 17 year-olds need parental consent before they can join the Army. They cannot drink, buy vapes, knives or fireworks or do many other things, as outlined by my noble friends Lord Fuller and Lord Hannan. As to the evidence that the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, requested from my noble friend Lord Leigh of Hurley, it came from the respected journal Developmental Psychology, published in an article by Professors Gardner and Steinberg. It showed that resistance to peer-pressure influence increases significantly from 14 to 18.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)
My Lords, the Representation of the People Bill opens up participation and strengthens the integrity of our democracy, ensuring that all eligible citizens can exercise their right to vote. It introduces one of the biggest changes to the franchise in half a century, with the enfranchisement of 16 and 17 year-olds, and moves us towards more automated voter registration. It reinforces trust by closing down opportunities for those who would seek to undermine our democracy, with stronger political finance rules and better protections against harassment and intimidation.
It has been a great pleasure to listen to the debate this afternoon. It has been the House at its best: 19 or 20 speakers—I am not sure I wrote them all down—debating the first part of the Bill, and we have heard differing views from across the House and some very detailed scrutiny of some of the provisions in the Bill, which I welcome. I would say to the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, that I know the Bill has had some additions during its passage, but it was always the intention that we would take account of the Rycroft review and introduce some of its recommendations as the Bill progressed. Philip Rycroft did an outstanding job on reviewing some of the key issues, particularly around political finance.
Lord Hayward (Con)
I thank the Minister for that clarification, but how does she make those observations stack up with the observation made by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, at the end of Second Reading and the comparison with the amount of time given in Committee for this Bill compared with the Elections Bill in 2022?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My noble friend Lord Rooker is raising the issue of scrutiny on every Bill. It is interesting that he put that process in place but has changed his mind. Scrutiny on all Bills is welcome. This is my sixth piece of legislation. I have welcomed the scrutiny that this House has brought to all those Bills. With this Bill, we knew there would be further additions during its passage. That is the point I was trying to make.
I turn first to Amendments 1 and 3 in the name of the noble Lord, Udny-Lister, and Amendment 2 in the names of the noble Baronesses, Lady Coffey and Lady Fox of Buckley. Our intended extension of the franchise will create consistency across the United Kingdom and ensure that young people have a voice at a local and a national level. But consistency is not the only or the most important reason for extending the vote to 16 and 17 year-olds. As I said at Second Reading—it has been repeated during this debate—the important question is not what else you can or cannot do at 16 but whether 16 is the right age to be able to vote. This Government are clear that the answer to that question is yes. We were elected on a commitment to make precisely this change.
We have heard many examples of things that you cannot do at 16—tongue piercing, gambling, purchasing knives, having tattoos or credit cards—and some points about criminal sentencing, which I hear with interest.
Lord Sherbourne of Didsbury (Con)
Can the Minister answer the question asked by my noble friend Lord Udny-Lister? Why is it right for a 16 year-old to be a voter in an election but not a parliamentary candidate or a Member of Parliament?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I am coming on to that point, if the noble Lord will bear with me. I want to pick up some other points first.
The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, spoke about votes at 18. We were the first in the world to do that. It would be unthinkable to go back on that. The first election that I voted in, in 1975, was the vote to go into the European Union. I have not changed my mind about that. I have changed it about some other things, but certainly not about that. When we talk about purchasing knives at 18, the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, mentioned things that might intimidate. I was not intimidated by the little stubby bit of pencil that I was given to cast that vote.
We believe that 16 is the right age to be able to exercise your democratic right. Extending the right to vote to 16 and 17 year-olds will allow them to have a say in the Government who shape their future and will set them up, as the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, said, for a lifelong engagement in democracy. I absolutely agree about the points on education and will come on to those in a moment.
I want to address the important points made in the debate on how we ended up at 16. We have looked extensively at how voting works around the world. We have looked at a number of places, including Austria and Malta, which have successfully lowered the voting age to 16. The step has been taken already in Scotland and Wales for devolved elections and more widely in the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey. Evidence from these places shows that those who vote at a younger age are more likely to continue voting as they get older.
By the age of 16, young people have already made important decisions about their own lives—whether to continue with their education, undertake training, pursue an apprenticeship or seek employment or volunteering opportunities. Even by the age of 14, they have decided what subjects they want to continue to study. Why is it the case that they should be considered old enough to make those decisions that affect the rest of their lives but cannot vote? We should not fear expanding the franchise to younger people. In 1969, the UK was the first country in the world to lower the voting age to 18. Extending the right to vote to 16 and 17 year-olds now is the next natural step in the evolution of our democracy. Young people are the future of our country. It is only right that they have a say over it.
I very much supported the points made about a serious programme of education. We will come to that in future groups, but I want to make some points now about education and what steps are being taken to support young people’s education. We want to break down barriers and drive participation. We know that engagement and education are a crucial part of implementing that policy. It is vital that young people understand and value the democratic process and feel that it is relevant to them. We are committed to ensuring that democracy education reinforces the importance and value of participating in our democracy and inspires greater democratic engagement. We want engagement to start at 16 and continue into adulthood by equipping and empowering pupils with the knowledge and understanding that they need. We will continue to work with the Electoral Commission, the devolved Governments and civil society on what additional measures can support schools, colleges and youth groups to roll out practical voter and civic education. It is vital that we also start that process with our youngest students. This is all aligned with the Government’s youth strategy of engagement of young people.
On the points made by the noble Lord, Lord Udny-Lister, about candidates standing in elections, there are very specific reasons why we have taken the decision not to include candidates at 16 and 17. The Government believe that the ages of 16 and 17 are a particularly important time to continue personal development and education. That is why rules in England require that those who choose to leave school at 16 must pursue an apprenticeship or work no more than 20 hours a week while in part-time education or training until the age of 18. The requirements of local government officeholders are a significant commitment. Having different age requirements for local and national office would be unnecessarily complicated. As such, the Government will not be changing the minimum candidacy age for any elected offices. I heard the points about the Labour Party NEC and constituency offices. I am sure that was a recognition of this, but there is definitely a very active engagement of young people in my party, as I am sure there is across all political parties.
The noble Lord, Lord Udny-Lister, has also tabled Amendments 4, 283 and 301, which seek to require a referendum on lowering the voting age to 16, with a majority vote in favour before the change can be implemented. However, as my noble friend Lord Murphy set out with his characteristic clarity, the Government were elected on a clear mandate that included a commitment to extend the right to vote to 16 and 17 year-olds in all UK elections. That is an important point about not having a referendum on this: we already have a mandate to introduce it.
As the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, said, I say to the noble Lord, Lord Leigh, that we do not carry out cognitive tests on any citizens before they exercise their franchise, no matter what their age. This point about cognitive ability is a difficult one for him to make. The Government have been very clear on this matter. We genuinely believe that young people are the future of our country, and it is only right that they have a say in the decisions that shape their lives.
As for partisan advantage, I have heard from the other side both that we are doing this as a gerrymandering exercise and that it will let in votes from smaller parties such as Reform and the Green Party. They cannot have it both ways. We are either gerrymandering or we are opening out the franchise to a wider group of parties. We are doing it because it is the right thing to do to introduce votes at 16 and 17, so a referendum is not necessary. It would be unusual to require a referendum before implementing a clear manifesto commitment on which the Government were elected and for which they have a mandate.
I will say to the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, whom I think was talking about some comments that a Labour Member had made about a Brexit referendum, that if every statement in the other place by a Labour Member became government policy, we would have an awful lot more work to do than we have already.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
I am grateful to my noble friend for clarifying the position, but I do not think she has really addressed the question of two groups of children living side by side, where one of the children will have the vote and the other will not. If she cannot address that now, perhaps she could write to me and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, afterwards, because there is concern about the impact that will have on the children who cannot vote.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I understand the point my noble friend makes, and I will be very happy to write to her or meet her to discuss that further. On the government amendments—
Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
I know the Minister has a lot to answer tonight, but will she say anything about Amendment 21, which was mentioned by a number of Peers?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I am not doing the government amendments because they are the last bit; I am doing them because this is where they come in the order of things. I will come on to other amendments.
Following the extension of the franchise to 16 and 17 year-olds, newly eligible young people will need to register to vote. Government Amendment 12 and consequential Amendments 275, 295 and 296, tabled in my name, will enable electoral registration officers to obtain information about 14 and 15 year-olds during the 2027 canvas. Registration officers will be able to use that information to invite those young people to register to vote, either as attainers or as electors, once the new franchise is brought into effect. This will help to get young people on the register and reduce the risk for our hard-pressed EROs of a large spike in registrations immediately before the first poll is conducted under the expanded franchise.
I turn now to Amendment 20, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Young of Acton, and the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley. The Government agree that extending the franchise must go hand in hand with ensuring that young people have access to reliable information and the knowledge they need to participate confidently in elections. However, we do not consider that this amendment is necessary. The Government’s proposed social media ban will apply to children under the age of 16, although they will still be able to access the online world for purposes including news and learning. Meanwhile, 16 and 17 year-olds will continue to be able to access social media, although additional default protections will apply to help ensure they can do so safely. The Online Safety Act already includes safeguards for content of democratic importance, recognised news publisher content and journalistic content on the largest user-to-user services. Ofcom is now implementing that regime and there is a strong case for allowing it to run its course before introducing a further statutory review requirement through the Bill.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
Can I just finish this section and then I will give way? However, regulation is only one part of the answer. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport is working with the Department for Education to strengthen media literacy in the new school curriculum, from primary up to age 16, from September 2028, including how pupils identify misinformation and disinformation. This is complemented by wider government activity, including the cross-government media literacy action plan, the You Won’t Know Until You Ask campaign and the Kids Online Safety hub, which help families build resilience to misinformation and disinformation and access trusted online safety information.
Lord Young of Acton (Con)
I thank the Minister for giving way. That sounded very positive, but can I just clarify whether the Minister was giving the Committee an assurance that, when those protections are in place, children under the age of 16 will be able to access content of democratic importance, news publisher content and journalistic content and that the content will not be restricted by the forthcoming regulations restricting social media access for under 16 year-olds?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
Yes, I think that is certainly the case.
The noble Baroness, Lady Hoey, has tabled Amendments 21, 278, 284 and 286. These amendments seek to require an equality impact assessment comparing the effects of the franchise change in Northern Ireland with Great Britain and to delay the commencement of Part 1 of the Bill until a formal report on the Government’s response to that assessment is laid before both Houses. The Government are committed to extending the franchise to 16 and 17 year-olds across the entire United Kingdom on an equal basis. The Bill ensures that people across the United Kingdom are empowered to participate in our democracy. Imposing additional statutory requirements on extending the franchise would create an unnecessary delay to delivering this commitment for young people across the UK.
The noble Baroness mentioned the Windsor Framework in relation to this amendment. The Windsor Framework was overwhelmingly approved by Parliament. It respects Northern Ireland’s place in the union and gives democratically elected Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly the ability to scrutinise—
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
Can I just finish? Then, if the noble Baroness still wants to come in, I will happily give way. It gives Members of the Northern Ireland Assembly the ability to scrutinise the rules that apply and the Government are committed to it. The Government are committed to equality across the country and lowering the voting age to 16 applies identically across all reserved elections, without distinction. The assessment comparing electors in Northern Ireland with those in Great Britain is unnecessary and would delay implementation of the measure.
Baroness Hoey (Non-Afl)
I thank the Minister for the detail with which she has responded, although obviously I do not agree with her. Can I just correct something that has been said by many noble Lords? The Windsor Framework was never voted on as the Windsor Framework either in the House of Commons or in the House of Lords. The only way that we have had votes has been on statutory instruments. The very first one was some months after 2021, when the protocol was brought in, and then the Windsor Framework. There has been no vote ever in this place or the other place on the Windsor Framework and the principle of it.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I will leave that comment where the noble Baroness left it.
Amendments 22, 279 and 285, in the names of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bexley, and the noble Lords, Lord Jamieson and Lord Brady of Altrincham, would require a report explaining why the voting age should differ from the age of majority set out in the Family Law Reform Act 1969, which is 18. A similar amendment to this was tabled in the other place, and I can only reiterate today what my ministerial colleague said in those debates. The Government are working to build and maintain a democracy fit for 2026 and beyond. The central question before us is not whether the voting age aligns with every other age threshold contained in statute. Rather, it is whether 16 and 17 year-olds should have a voice in the democratic decisions that affect their lives and their future. The Government’s view is clear: young people have a direct stake in the future of this country and extending the franchise will enable them to participate in shaping policies and institutions that will have a lasting impact on their lives and can help establish the habits of democratic engagement that will build the foundations for lifelong participation in our democratic system. I hope that reassures noble Lords that the Government have carefully considered this matter, and we remain committed to delivering this important reform.
Lord Udny-Lister (Con)
I thank the Minister for her comments, but I plea that she takes on board the education point that a number of people in the Committee have raised. However, I accept that this is a manifesto commitment, and therefore I withdraw the amendment.
Lord Frost
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment, and others in the name of Lord Frost, seeks to make the Representation of the People Act 1983 franchise, as amended by this Act, the franchise for all statutory elections, referendums and polls in the United Kingdom, except City of London ward elections. It would abolish the Scotland-only and Wales-only franchise variants and make the franchise a wholly reserved matter.
Lord Frost (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I shall move Amendment 5 and speak to Amendments 7, 30 and 31 on the Marshalled List.
In considering the Bill, we are going to be considering some major changes to how we conduct our elections in this country. We will spend a lot of time considering the “what” of these changes and their justifiability, but we are not going to spend much time considering the “who”: who has the right to make, or not make, the changes that are being brought forward? I want to discuss that question and particularly the consequences of the devolution of the electoral franchise for all but national elections, and to suggest, as my amendments suggest, that these arrangements need to be looked at again.
I emphasise the franchise; I am not looking at the electoral system, for there has always been variation on that within the country. I am not looking at the merits of voting at 16, Commonwealth voting or anything like that. We will be coming to some of those issues where we have not discussed them already. This is about the wider consequences of allowing the devolved Governments to change the electoral franchise and the knock-on effects that that has for the wider system and the rest of the country. That is why I thought it right to table these amendments; they are probing amendments designed to get the matter discussed. Their effect would be to make the electoral franchise a reserved matter and the same in every part of the UK. In other words, they would restore the constitutional system on that point as it existed before 2013.
I will speak briefly on how these amendments would work. Amendment 30 would establish two common franchise categories: it would establish the parliamentary franchise, described as for Westminster elections and UK-wide or nationwide referendums or similar; and it would establish the local government franchise, which would apply for almost everything else. The amendment would therefore replace Scotland’s and Wales’s wider nationality qualifications. It would remove Scotland’s short-sentence prisoner exception, and it would make inconsistent legislative provisions ineffective.
Amendment 31 would go on to prevent the devolved institutions from subsequently recreating different franchises once again. It would expressly reserve for Westminster the voting entitlement in Scottish Parliament, Senedd and local elections and referendums, and polls in Scotland and Wales.
Amendments 5 and 7 seek to make the necessary consequential changes concerning detained young offenders. Amendment 5 would remove the England-only restriction on their disqualification from local government voting, and Amendment 7 seeks to delete the Northern Ireland modification that is rendered unnecessary by the earlier change. So that is how they would work.
I will say a word about the history and how we got to this point. As I noted, the devolution of franchise setting is hardly something from the dim and distant past; it is not a long-established and well-accepted part of our constitution. It goes back all of 13 years. That is why I want to examine this history in more detail.
I take Scotland first. The original devolution settlement left the franchise reserved in 1998, and the then Labour Government defended that explicitly. Lord Sewel explicitly said that the Scottish Executive
“cannot mess around with the franchise; that remains reserved”—[Official Report, 23/7/1998; col. 1077.]
That statement was not regarded as controversial, at that point. The genie was let out of the bottle only with the SNP’s determination to give itself the best chance of winning the 2014 independence referendum, and the Government consented to votes at 16 for that referendum under a special arrangement, and then agreed to it permanently in 2015.
After the referendum, the Scotland Act removed the general reservation on all but UK Parliament elections in 2017. Controversially, your Lordships’ Constitution Committee said at the time that devolving constitutional powers, including the franchise,
“risked introducing variation where there should be none”.
It identified possible differences in the enfranchisement of non-British residents and British citizens abroad—not merely the question of the voting age. It also warned that changes in Scotland could, in the end, pressure Westminster into matching them, rather than having a prior, wider, UK-wide debate on how the system should work. Those warnings were correct, but they were ignored. In 2020, the Scottish Government extended the franchise further not just to short-sentence prisoners but to all foreign residents in Scotland for everything other than national parliamentary elections.
Lord Murphy of Torfaen (Lab)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Frost, will not be surprised to learn that I do not agree with him on these issues. I understand the difference between franchise and the whole business of elections and the institutions to which we elect people, but we have to be extremely careful that we do not undermine a devolution settlement that was set up not just by Act of Parliament but by referenda in Northern Ireland and Scotland, and, in Wales, by two referenda. To do that would be seriously damaging to the devolution settlement.
In Northern Ireland’s case, I had the privilege of chairing the Good Friday agreement talks that dealt with elections. There was an agreement among all the parties in Northern Ireland involved in those talks, and the two Governments of course, to ensure that the final Good Friday agreement would command consensus right across the board. If we start interfering with that, we are in deep trouble. The 1998 settlement was agreed in Ireland by a referendum in the north and south. I am not saying that we cannot change it, but those changes need to be made with the devolved Assembly itself.
In terms of Scotland and Wales, one of my predecessors as Welsh Secretary once said that devolution is a process. I did not agree with him at the time, but he was probably right. It is a process, and over the last 30 years that process has meant that the relationship between the United Kingdom Government and Parliament and the devolved Governments and Parliament has developed to a very sophisticated degree. If you interfere with that, you can seriously interfere with the devolution settlement. Although in some ways there is some merit in thinking that the franchise should perhaps be universal, the only way you could agree that is by having consensus with the devolved Administrations, and they would have to agree with it.
I am not a great lover of proportional representation; I have always been a first past the post person. I really believe in a link between the elected Member and his or her constituents. I do not particularly agree with the settlement we have in Wales with the 96 Members on a closed-list system—I am not sure that anybody really understands it all that much—but I agree with the right of the Senedd to be able to establish that system. Therefore, we ought to be very careful indeed about how we deal with these amendments.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I am pleased to support my noble friend Lord Frost. I put my name to his Amendments 30 and 31, and the two consequential amendments.
I listened very carefully to the noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen. I thought I was the only person who was not keen on the d’Hondt system of voting. He put his finger on a very important point—that system does not allow the voters to hold a particular person or even party accountable. We have seen from recent evidence in the Welsh Senedd that someone can change their political affiliation and refuse to give way, even though they have de facto been elected as a party member rather than as an individual, as a candidate in a set constituency.
I support the amendments because their practical effect will be to create administrative consistency across the franchise rules of all elections, referenda and polls in the UK. In an era of fractiousness and bitter division in politics, which is growing stronger, having multiple election systems—which reduces the ability of the average voter, who is not engaged, to engage in the political system and to see that their vote has a consequence and that the person they voted for is likely to be elected—only adds to an undermining of the sense of common purpose and social solidarity and continues to make different parts of our country more fractious and divided.
It is perfectly possible to support these amendments and, broadly speaking, to agree with the concept of devolution. A country such as Scotland had a separate legal system and education system and a proud history, not least in building the British Empire many years ago. It is different from England, and I respectfully say to the noble Lord, Lord Murphy, that the people of England never had a vote on whether they wanted to set up the Welsh Assembly, as it then was, or the Scottish Parliament. Therefore, their ability to make key decisions was undermined—albeit he would probably say that the Blair Government had a mandate and were re-elected after the establishment of those two devolved Administrations.
My noble friend made some important points, which I will not belabour. A single nation state should have a common framework for democratic membership. The United States is many times bigger than the United Kingdom and has many more people, yet it has the same voting system. We will see whether it works tomorrow in delivering the votes that people want in the mid-term elections.
Lord Hayward (Con)
This is not intended to undermine the coherence of my noble friend’s overall argument, but, as a pedant alert, my noble friend said that the 50 states of the United States operate on the same electoral system. They do not. There are differences between a host of different states, in one form or another.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
I bow to my noble friend’s greater knowledge. I was referring to national ballots. I understand that for rat-catcher, county sheriff and other roles there will be local differences, but, for the election of, for instance, a governor or members of the House of Representatives and the Senate, they are generally the same.
Lord Wigley (PC)
My Lords, I apologise that I was not able to attend Second Reading, but my noble friend Lady Smith of Llanfaes contributed on behalf of Plaid Cymru, and I hope she will continue doing so as effectively.
I oppose the thrust of this group of amendments—which is hardly a surprise to anybody. I do not believe that we are a single nation state. We are not. We are a multi-nation state. While I acknowledge that there is a valid argument that an election to any chamber of government should be on a uniform, consistent franchise basis throughout the area covered by that chamber, there surely can be no valid reason for Westminster to tell Wales or Scotland that we cannot, in our devolved Parliaments, allow our young people to vote at 16 because it does not happen to suit Westminster. Devolution exists to allow us to do things differently in the nations of Wales and Scotland. Indeed, if Westminster acts to take the vote from young people in Wales and Scotland, I cannot imagine a stronger lever to drive those two countries towards independence. I invite the Committee to think very carefully before doing so.
Our experience in this regard in Wales in last May’s election was wholly positive. The degree of interest amongst young people was impressive. I saw it for myself in canvassing during the election, in talking to young people in my home community and to friends of my grandchildren in other parts of Wales, and while acting as a booth agent for Plaid Cymru on voting day in my home village. The turnout in May’s election in Wales was the highest in any devolved election in Wales. Yes, it was a bit over 50%, and we are going to ask why it was not higher in previous elections, but it was a step in the right direction in getting young people involved. It involved not only young people but, very often, their parents, who got to understand what was going on and perhaps participated, whereas in the past they had not done so. There also exists in Wales the Welsh Youth Parliament, a highly respected body which helps the development of young people’s political thinking on an all-Wales level.
Further, the PR system in Wales ensured multi-party voices in our Senedd, which must be a good thing for democracy. I point out that, if we had suffered a simple first past the post system in our present Senedd, and voting patterns were the same as they were in May, the 96 seats would today have given Plaid 66 and Remain 30. I suggest that, in Wales, we have a sensible system that respects multi-party democracy.
The logic of these amendments is based on the assumption that we live in a nation state. We do not. That is why we have developed into the system that we have today, and we should respect the principles on which devolution was founded.
Lord Deben (Con)
My Lords, I am very much opposed to a system other than first past the post, but it seems peculiar that we have a devolved system and then we are to say that people in the devolved Administrations cannot decide how they choose their Government. I find that a very odd argument. The fact of the matter is that Wales has an odd system of election. It is not one that I would campaign for, but the Welsh have decided that it is the one they want. I find it out of all proportion with the world we live in today. We are a country made up of a number of countries. Yes, of course, we are the United Kingdom, but the Welsh—and I speak as someone who had a Welsh-speaking father—are different from much of the rest.
However, where one party tends dominate election after election, there cannot be anything but the suspicion, at least, that that party will use its dominant power—to use the words of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, in another context—to fiddle the constitution.
Finally, this is important not just for transparency but consistency. The Government, in their Explanatory Notes, refer to the importance of consistency as one of the reasons for this Bill. If we are to be consistent, we should ensure that the franchise is consistent across the country.
Lord Pack (LD)
My Lords, this group provides us with a choice between devolution or top-down centralised uniformity. I acknowledge that the noble Lords, Lord Frost and Lord Jackson, are perhaps surprising voices for enforcing centralised uniformity on a range of nations, regardless of the views of those nations, but that is in effect what these amendments would do. However, as the noble Baronesses, Lady Bennett and Lady Smith, pointed out, this is not quite the case, because a special privileged position is given to the City of London. It is a position that may be justified for some of the reasons we heard earlier, but which these amendments would not grant to the people of Wales or Scotland. As a Londoner for nearly all my life, and who is very proud to often argue the corner for London, I think giving the City of London a special place above and beyond Scotland and Wales might be going just a bit too far.
Lord Harris of Haringey (Lab)
On the important issue of the City of London, if you give it its name as the City of London Corporation, and you treat it as essentially a trading estate which happens to have 14,000 people living on it, then maybe the electoral arrangements it adopts are indeed a matter for that trading estate rather than for the rest of us.
Lord Pack (LD)
It is an interesting point but, as the noble Lord said, there are several assumptions leading up to its inclusion, all of which I would share.
We have also heard the argument that the ability of Scotland and Wales to make their own choices might result in pressure on us here in Westminster. In a way, that is quite an advantage. After all, if Scotland or Wales decide to do something and it works, that is a good bit of pressure that we should welcome. Of course, if it fails, it achieves the exact opposite. Seeing how variation plays out is not a bad thing to be scared of.
Indeed, there is much more variation than perhaps the noble Lord, Lord Jackson, is aware of. He made reference to the United States. I point out that the voting system for Congress varies between states, and two of them use preferential voting. I very much hope that all sides of this Committee will pay more attention and maybe learn from the States in that respect.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
The noble Lord pre-empts my response to my noble friend. For clarity, I checked, and he is quite right. I stand partially corrected, in that the states of Maine and Alaska have ranked choice elections, one for governor and senator and the other, I think, just for senator. I am touched that he is interested in those issues. My general point is that the vast bulk of elections are based on the same kind of electoral system across the United States.
Lord Pack (LD)
Indeed, but variation is present. There are many other examples of variation. The argument was made that there are some administrative burdens in allowing variation. I would simply observe that with devolution we have the ability to vary things such as speed limits and tax rates. If one is going to take seriously the argument that there are problems with variation, one should be up front and say, “That is an argument against devolution full stop”. It is not possible with powerful logic and consistency to argue that variation for the franchise is somehow a problem while variation for, say, tax rates, is acceptable. That goes to the argument about constitutional logic. The constitutional logic argument works exactly the other way: the very constitutional logic of devolution is that different people end up being able to make different decisions. That is the inescapable logic of devolution.
Finally, on the point about gerrymandering, some slightly more politic phrases were used earlier. I always think it very unwise to attempt to set rules for elections on the basis of partisan self-interest—partly, obviously, for the reason of principle, but also because it so often backfires. Returning to the United States, we may see some Republicans rueing what they thought was very clever drawing of boundaries when the election results come in tomorrow. Of course, all of us will have to be here bright and early on Wednesday morning, so we will not be able to stay up quite as late as we may have wished to watch those results coming in.
Fundamentally, this is a question about devolution: about whether we believe that it is right for different places which have powers devolved to them to make different decisions. I join with those who have argued in this debate that, yes, that variation is right. Therefore, on this occasion, I very much hope we will not be hearing warm words from the Minister in due course, but that she too will defend the rights of different parts of the United Kingdom to make their own decisions under devolved settlements.
Baroness O'Neill of Bexley (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Frost for his probing amendments, including those supported by my noble friend Lord Jackson of Peterborough. This has been a much quicker debate, but worthy no less, and I thank all those who have contributed to it.
These amendments seek to standardise voting eligibility across the UK, with the exception of the City of London ward elections, as has already been said. The SNP in Scotland and Labour in Wales have already given the right to vote in devolved and local elections to all foreign residents. Those decisions were not minor technical differences between the UK’s constituent parts, and they are deserving of debate at national level.
This issue also relates to automatic voter registration. While Wales has conducted four automatic registration pilots, it did not have to verify the nationality of an elector as a result of the changes at a devolved level. I am sure we will debate the security of automatic voter registration in greater detail in due course.
In addition, we are concerned about the consequences for UK political donation rules as a result of the changes made by the two devolved Administrations giving voting rights to every foreign resident. This has given foreign citizens the right to make unlimited donations to politicians and political parties across the UK, opening the door to foreign finance as well as direct electoral influence. For example, a foreign student resident in a Scottish university can legally make political donations to any political entity.
At Second Reading, the Minister, said that this Bill will
“reduce the risk of foreign money entering our politics … The threat to our democracy from foreign influence and hidden sources of political funding is an ever-growing danger—one that we cannot afford to delay tackling”.—[Official Report, 14/9/26; col. 971-72.]
Will the Minister therefore commit to closing this loophole without delay? If not, why is there an inconsistency when it comes to foreign interference?
This debate has touched on fundamental questions. The balance of devolution matters, but so does citizenship. It is not meaningless, as so many of those residents who have proudly chosen to become citizens can attest. I look forward to the Minister’s response.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Frost, would also apply the electoral franchise currently used for local elections in England and Northern Ireland to all elections in Scotland and Wales. In practice, this would mean that some foreign citizens would no longer be able to vote in local elections in Scotland and Wales, or elections to the Scottish Parliament or Senedd Cymru. For completeness, I also note that the noble Lord has tabled multiple amendments, some of which would remove Commonwealth citizens’ voting rights as well, although these would not.
The idea that because people move around the United Kingdom they will, somehow or other, be fogged by the fact that there are differences in its different countries seems very odd. I happen to think that the history of electoral arrangements in Northern Ireland—and in Ireland in general—have not been very happy, but the fact of the matter is that it is for Northern Ireland to decide how it is to be governed, as far as its own devolved position goes.
That is also true for Scotland. I dislike the Scottish nationalists; I think they are the worst Government in the United Kingdom. They have done terrible damage to Scottish education and to Scotland generally, but in the end it is the Scots who have to decide how their own Government are elected. The idea that we should take back to the United Kingdom Government the decision about how we do that seems to undermine the whole concept of devolution. I believe in devolution because the closer that people are to the decision-makers, the more they are likely to feel engaged and that they are their Government.
I hope very much that this House will not go backwards by suggesting that we should force other people to choose their Governments in the way that we like. It is right that everybody shall vote the same way for the central United Kingdom Government, but it seems, frankly, very old-fashioned and out of date to suggest that we should go back on what we do now.
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow and almost entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Deben, although I do not accept his label of the current Welsh system as odd. I am otherwise in 100% agreement. It is also a great pleasure to admire the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wigley.
The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, said that this group of amendments would be a check on devolved power. It would be a check on the representatives chosen by the people in their own nations. I say to those who wish to defend and maintain the union that they should realise that denying and removing rights is no way to maintain it. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Frost, would accept that devolution is about difference: different choices in different nations. We have different languages that are protected and relied on in those nations. We have different rules about the management and treatment of land—we will park the Crown Estate in Wales on the side for the moment. We have different kinds of politics and those nations have made very different political choices. I do not think there is any evidence that a change in franchise has made a significant impact on the political choices that those nations have made.
However, I will mostly address a particular element of this group that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, did not address in his introduction, but perhaps he might in the wrap-up. There is an exception. We are talking about every election being under the same franchise, except for the City of London’s ward elections. I point noble Lords to my Amendment 269, which we will undoubtedly get to much later. It would abolish the business vote for the City of London Corporation elections. My amendment would end the nation’s last rotten borough. It would finally introduce the principle of one person, one vote in 2026.
Lord Deben (Con)
The noble Baroness kindly said that she liked following my speech. May I say to her that what she said is nonsense, and there is no reason at all to change what happens in the City of London?
Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)
I am delighted to allow the noble Lord to say just that. I am sure there are many people in your Lordships’ Chamber who would agree with him. In fact, I will point Members to a book that I was at the launch of last week. It is called The Assetocracy and is about the composition of the House of Lords. Noble Lords might find it of interest with relevance to the relationship between this House and the City of London.
Coming back to where I was, I am not going to cover fully the points that I will raise on Amendment 269. However, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Frost, to justify saying, in this context, that everything else has to be the same except the City of London. If you are going to impose uniformity, why have this odd little black hole in the centre of the City without democratic control? Why is that being excluded?
Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)
My Lords, I will speak briefly, as my noble friend Lord Wigley has covered some of the most important points. It is also a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. It is interesting that there is the exception in these amendments for the City of London but not for whole nations, so it would be interesting to hear more about that in closing.
The only points I wanted to raise was that the Welsh Parliament, Senedd Cymru, is the people of Wales’s Parliament. Therefore, it is only right that the people of Wales decide how it is run. The same goes for Scotland and the Scottish Parliament. These amendments are, essentially, an unnecessary power grab. Why is it the business of this Parliament how the people of Wales and Scotland decide to be represented in their Parliaments there?
On the point in relation to different electoral arrangements and whether people understand those when you vote at 16, I want to share the story that during a lot of engagements with younger people across Wales, a lot of them raise how they understand the different systems, particularly because of what happened during the Covid pandemic. During that pandemic, Wales and England made different decisions on whether schools were open. They also made different healthcare arrangements. The younger people of today have experience and knowledge of that; they understand the systems and what the different Parliaments make decisions on. It is really important to share that and rebut what was said in earlier speeches; because of those experiences, they know those differences of opinions.
We take a different approach on matters, and that is devolution. I end by saying that this is a matter, in my opinion, for the Welsh Parliament and the Scottish Parliament only.
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
My Lords, I support these amendments in the names of my noble friends Lord Frost and Lord Jackson. I do so because it is important for this country and its constitutional arrangements that we have these changes. This country has always been a unitary power. It is one of the oldest unitary powers; it is also one of the most stable political democracies. That second characteristic matters as much as the first, and its nature, both being old and unitary and being a stable democracy, means they are linked to each other.
Constitutional change is for the whole country. First, it has historically involved the whole country through broadsheets and with long debates and public discussion. For all these Parliament has been, as Churchill once said, the forum for the nation. It was Samuel Johnson, I think, who made Parliament popular for the public by being the first person to report systematically its proceedings—he was long the precursor of Hansard.
Secondly, it is important to avoid sectional politics in constitutional decisions. One cannot help escaping the feeling that in some decisions taken by other assemblies in Wales and Scotland, there is the hint of political considerations in determining these grave constitutional matters. It is much harder to break the mould of one party’s popularity and, for that reason, it is not a particularly bad thing that we have constant changes of political parties in this country. It is very good for democracy and stability that the other people have a chance.
The Government will not support these amendments. The Government are committed to maintaining and defending the devolution settlements. Allowing the Scottish and Welsh Parliaments to set the electoral franchise for their own elections, as well as for local offices, is a fundamental part of those settlements. The Government see no clear benefit to changing that position, one that has held for many years. I say to the noble Lord, Lord Jackson—who I think answered his own question—that there was indeed a mandate for the devolution settlements through the 1997 general election.
Lord Frost (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I thank the Minister. I am disappointed, but not entirely surprised, to hear that she will not support the amendments. I thank those who have supported them. I also thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for raising the problem of the City of London. Actually, I slightly sympathise with what the noble Baroness said, but I did not want to increase the complexity of these particular amendments by getting into that slightly niche problem. I do not want to dwell too much on what has been said. I felt that we drifted slightly into a discussion of age limits and electoral systems, which I am sure we will come on to later.
This has been an interesting discussion because it revealed fundamental differences of view about what the United Kingdom is as a country. Is it, as some seem to be saying, a collection of nations—a sort of mini-EU—or is it what it legally is: a unitary state which has devolved powers to devolved nations? Because the United Kingdom is the latter, and because it has devolved powers to devolved nations, there must be a power for the Westminster Parliament to consider whether that settlement is correct in every detail. Of course there can be variation, but it must be the role of the centre to ensure that the variation is in the interests of the whole of the country, not just a sectoral interest in one of the devolved nations. I contend that that has been the risk of devolving the franchise, and the variation in that.
My worry is that “devolve and forget” will one day become “dissolve and forget”. I do not want that to happen, which is why this Parliament must remember the United Kingdom is a devolved country; it is not an aggregate of nations that have voluntarily come together. I am sure that we will come back to all those issues, but for now I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
Lord Fuller
Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment provides for registration at age 15, rather than 14, as registration at 15 gives sufficient notice for young people to register to participate in elections.
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, it is a pleasure to lead this debate; I have the first two amendments in this group. Turning first to my Amendment 8, I think that registering to vote a year before the possibility of voting would give election officials sufficient time to draw up the register at the annual canvass. It is not as if many will be able to vote on their 16th birthday. By arithmetic, that excitement will be restricted to just 1,917 youngsters, who can then celebrate by going down to the scrapyard on a moped to sell some metal—two of the rites of passage that are permitted at that age, alongside piercing and opening a bank account without telling your mum. I do not agree with votes at 16. I will not repeat the reasoning here, but, if that is the proposal on the table, then registration at 15 seems to be quite sufficient. After all, we have an annual canvass for a reason.
If there is a theme to the Bill as it relates to young voters, it is that the Government have failed to integrate these attainers aged 14 and above into the existing registration system. The propensity for these attainers to move around is much greater than for the older population: they churn schools, colleges, jobs and apprenticeships, while some leave home for the first time. My Amendment 8 does not seek to fetter democracy or deny anybody access to the vote; it is aimed simply at reducing the administrative burden of collating the register, and it works along with the existing pattern of electoral registration and administration in this country.
That leads me to my Amendment 9, which looks at the mechanics of how a person under 16 can unambiguously be identified and authenticated by the electoral registration officer before they come on to the register as attainers. These youngsters may not have a passport, and they certainly will not have a credit card. Inevitably, they will not pay an electric or council tax bill, or any tax for that matter, to identify themselves—as you or I might. In the world as it is today, you register to vote by providing your national insurance number. Whether you use the centralised online form on GOV.UK or download a paper copy or form issued by the local council, you need to provide your national insurance number; if you do not, they want to know why. That is because there is a secure automatic authentication system that uniquely matches a person to a national insurance number across the HMRC, the DWP and other databases. It protects the register’s integrity and, in theory, helps identify duplicate entries.
Even in Scotland you need to give your national insurance number—although, helpfully, if you do not have one, the ERO invites applicants to provide a utility bill. Call me old-fashioned, but I do not know how many 14 year-olds pay the electricity bill, which is normally paid by their parents, but we will put that to one side.
If you cannot supply an NI number, it triggers a complex and intrusive manual validation system. Local officers are working hard enough as it is without more handwork burdens being thrust upon them. Today, I spoke to one electoral registration officer, who is a returning officer. As it is today, when somebody cannot provide a national insurance number, two hours over several weeks per person—which may lead to an attestation in court—is needed to finally authenticate them and validate their application to come on the register. Put simply, the 14 or 15 year-olds who do not have this NI will not be easily identifiable through the usual channels because these youngsters do not have the normal sets of identifiers.
Google, summarising the ONS census statistics, tells me that there are 1.4 million 14 and 15 year-olds in the UK who will be admitted to attain on their 16th birthday. They do not have NI numbers, so these youngsters are in a bind. How will they prove their identity? The electoral registration officer will not be any the wiser after; there is no standard administrative method. These young people will not have a driver’s licence—only certain 16 year-olds will have a moped—and they may not have a passport or gas bill, so how do they prove their identity without reinventing the entire wheel of administrative process that goes on in getting them on to the register?
Consider the child from a broken home. Perhaps he lives with mum on Acacia Avenue during the week and with his dad in a city apartment at the weekend. I am trying to prevent the introduction of duplicates into the system. It is possible that the mum and dad live in different electoral areas. The parents would think it was their duty to register their child and are not necessarily forced to tell the other. We have the prospect of automatic registration, perhaps by reference to the school roll. The child might want to register himself—after all, if he is trusted to choose a Government, he ought to be capable of filling in the form.
In this example, there are two EROs, two addresses and possibly two different names, because some children will assume double-barrelled names. Perhaps some of them are relatives of my noble friend Lady O’Neill—is that with or without an apostrophe? Multiple registrations of youngsters is not a possibility but a certainty, with all these people looking after the interests of the little boy, falling over themselves to duplicate him on the register—and the ERO will not have a clue about how to weed out the duplicates. I ask the Minister: who will be responsible for cases of double registration and, still worse, double voting by the child who did not realise that others were usurping him? Without my amendment to change the rules to issue national insurance numbers at 14, this is a ready excuse for ballot stuffing and family voting.
The impact assessment covers none of this, and it should. Although streamlining voter registration using other government services might be possible for those over 18, it is fraught with difficulty with those under 16. Why did the assessment not calculate, as I have done, that just registering 14 and 15 year-olds will take 2,000 extra local government staff for this provision alone?
We have an identifier already: the national insurance number. My amendment proposes a review so that the Government consider reducing the age of issuance of NI numbers to 14 under Regulation 9(3) of the Social Security (Crediting and Treatment of Contributions, and National Insurance Numbers) Regulations 2001—SI No. 769 of that year. This is an integral part of the voter system. No IT systems need to be changed and no new interfaces need to be created. It is the same system that the ERO can use to dedupe the surplus records. Critically, it will maintain the integrity of the register. I call for a review because it is the integral part that will reduce duplicates and ensure confidence in the register.
As I will explain on group 9, issuing national insurance numbers will significantly simplify the muddle that Ofcom has got into in trying to identify youngsters for social media. Its proposals include four different methods that put regulators and parents in an impossible position. Let us sort it out. Let us issue national insurance numbers at 14 and if it helps the children themselves think more closely and carefully about the world of work then that cannot do any harm either. I have said enough. I beg to move.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, in looking at this group of amendments, we all have a duty to try to discern which of them might be considered to be motivated by partisan considerations. My view is that Amendment 8 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, is simply about reducing the number of people legally entitled to vote who are registered and therefore able to vote. I cannot see how it can be anything other than partisan to reduce the number of people legally entitled to vote who are able to do so.
Amendment 48 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill of Bexley, again seems to be a deliberate barrier to registering people who are legally entitled to vote but would not be able to do so because they would not be registered. Is that not a partisan consideration? Other amendments seek to block, delay or make the registration process weaker and less effective. I therefore consider those amendments partisan. The amendments in my name—
Lord Fuller (Con)
I cannot see how any of my proposals would be discriminatory in any way, shape or form because they provide that everybody would be given—not have to apply for but be given—a national insurance number, not at 16 but at 14, which is the age at which the Government propose these attainers would come on to the register. There is nothing discriminatory; it is actually enabling because it would get the state organised and individuals waiting to get that number so that they can get on to the register. I am sorry, but the noble Lord has misdirected himself as to the effect of my proposals.
Lord Rennard (LD)
The noble Lord’s proposal is actually what I proposed in previous Parliaments, and his Government resisted tooth and nail any suggestion about registering people at the point that they got their national insurance numbers. My understanding of the noble Lord’s Amendment 8 is that, rather than beginning the registering process with 14 and 15 year-olds, you would start only at 15. Surely that would mean fewer people being registered, but if I have misunderstood, I apologise.
I am concerned with the approach in general and how I think Amendments 49, 50 and 52 are all about improving the health of our democracy, because democratic elections cannot fully take place without people being registered to vote. Many groups of people who are legally entitled to vote are often not registered to vote under our current arrangements.
When individual electoral registration was introduced, many of us warned that, without extra measures, millions of young people, students and people who move home frequently would fall off the electoral rolls. Perhaps that was the intention of the proposal among some people. I believe that it was. I know that it was a great preoccupation of the now noble Lord, Lord Cameron, when he used to meet his deputy to discuss constitutional issues. He was determined to drive this process through. Had it been implemented as he intended, registration levels would have fallen from the level of the mid-1980s to about 60%, according to the Electoral Commission.
The Electoral Commission briefing for this debate shows that as many as 8 million people who are legally entitled to vote are not correctly registered and therefore would be unlikely to be able to take part in the democratic process. The commission says that it strongly supports the principles of what is commonly known as automatic voter registration and is described in this Bill as “registration without an application”. The problem that it seeks to address involves young people especially. The commission’s previous research indicated that, although 95% of those aged over 65 are registered to vote, only about 65% of under-25s are included on the voter lists. There are similar problems with people who rent privately, or who come from diverse backgrounds, missing from the registers.
My biggest concerns about the processes in the Bill are how the plans for registering without application will take too long and the Government are proceeding too cautiously. It will be too late to have many more people who are legally entitled to vote registered for the next election and too late for the next review of parliamentary consistency boundaries, which will draw on data from 1 December 2028—hence my support for Amendment 67, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, my noble friend Lord Pack and others.
The first and most obvious way in which we can address the underrepresentation of young people is by registering them when they are notified of their national insurance numbers. The House of Lords Select Committee that reviewed the impact of individual electoral registration unanimously recommended that this be done, and I am delighted that the principle had the support of the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, whose expertise is very widely regarded in this House.
When debating the idea during consideration of the Elections Bill on 23 March 2022, the noble Baroness, Lady Hayman of Ullock, then speaking from the Opposition Front Bench, said that
“people are already written to ahead of their 16th birthday with their national insurance number. If we can do that, why can we not at the same time have an automatic registration to vote? We have the means to do it, so why do we not just get on with it?”—[Official Report, 23/3/22; col. 1058.]
That is the question that I ask today.
A little later I won a partial victory on the issue when the noble Lord, Lord True, eventually accepted from the Government Benches that a reference to registering to vote could be made with a notification of national insurance numbers. But it was a very unpressing reference, and the process should not now require specific application if the qualifications for registration are satisfied. That is the aim of my Amendment 50.
A second crucial point at which we can get many more young people registered is when many of them enter higher or further education. From the Labour Front Bench, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall of Blaisdon, championed the cause of registering students, with her usual great skill and determination, during the passage of the Higher Education and Research Act 2017. The noble Baroness demonstrated how easy and simple it was to have data-sharing agreements between higher education and further education providers and local registration offices. This would enable students to be enfranchised and help to make their legal entitlement to vote a reality. We are trying again to have that principle adopted by Amendment 52.
Finally, I will speak to my Amendment 61. The issues of electoral registration and constituency boundaries are inextricably linked, although the tight drafting of the Bill means that we are not properly allowed to consider that link. I draw the attention of the Government and others to this connection. There should be consideration of how the measures in the Bill will change the data from which the electoral registers are drawn. The data will change as a result of measures in the Bill, and it will affect the process of revising the constituency boundaries, which will begin in two years. The electoral registration data forms the building blocks from which the Boundary Commissions must create constituencies; they are obliged under the rules to create constituencies with a very narrow and inflexible margin of difference in the size of the electorates for each of those constituencies. A slight change to a single constituency’s boundaries is likely to cause widespread disruption to many other constituencies, breaking them up into pieces.
The failure in the last series of Parliaments to address issues of the missing millions from electoral registers has distorted the map of constituencies. Millions of young people, private sector tenants and people from diverse communities were left out from the registers. We are now trying to address that. Whether it happened inadvertently or deliberately, the effect of the last boundary review was that many more constituencies were created that would be likely to vote Conservative, and fewer were created that would be less likely to vote Conservative. Registering many more of these groups will address that unfairness. The Government must now consider whether we need to allow the next boundary review to take more time so that it is able to work with the most accurate and complete electoral registers. Every year, according to the Government’s impact assessment, registration levels will rise by around 1.7%, so I hope there will be time for the changes in the Bill to feed through to the next boundary review.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I am delighted to speak to my Amendment 51. I find myself almost wholly in agreement with Amendment 61 from the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, although I am bound to ask rhetorically: if the last boundary change was engineered to gerrymander a stonking Conservative victory, how did that go? But seriously, I think there is a meeting of minds between him and my noble friend Lord Fuller on national insurance numbers and the registration of younger people. I think there might be a consensus on that. My noble friend made a powerful and compelling argument for that age group.
To go back to Amendment 61, Clauses 17 to 19 give rise to long-term changes in electorate sizes. The current obligations of the boundary commissioners do not really take into account what sizeable changes will happen as a result of automatic voter registration or registration without application. The noble Lord is right to pinpoint that issue. That goes to the heart of my Amendment 51, which is to ensure that we proceed in an incremental way if we are to have automatic voter registration and not put a huge obligation on electoral registration officers. Clause 17 is quite wide ranging anyway in giving proactive powers to electoral registration officers to register people as they see fit.
The reason I am seeking to remove Commonwealth and Irish citizens is not because they do not value their right to vote or to have the franchise but because we should focus on the endemic problem that has been identified for many years under all parties and Governments: poor registration of younger people. That happened under the coalition Government, and it has happened under the Labour Government and under Conservative Administrations. That seems to me the kernel of the issue that we need to look at here.
I am quite straightforward in saying that, as other countries do with their own citizens, I do not think we should be ashamed to prioritise British citizens in this clause. If we have limited resources, we should do so. I can debate the situation with the Republic of Ireland and its voters, but it seems an odd situation that you would not wish to prioritise your own citizens, who have constitutional, social and economic links that are stronger than some others—indeed, the citizens of a foreign country, albeit a very long-standing neighbour and friend of the United Kingdom, the Republic of Ireland. That is what my amendment seeks to do.
Under current electoral law, qualifying Commonwealth citizens and citizens of the Republic of Ireland can vote in parliamentary elections. Qualifying means meeting normal age, residence and registration requirements, and they will have permission to enter or remain in the United Kingdom. Specifically for your Lordships’ House, this amendment would not change who is legally entitled to vote. However, it would restrict who is automatically registered without an application to those with the strongest constitutional links to the UK. This would reduce the risk of eligibility verification errors, which would automatically register individuals who are not legally eligible to vote. It might be the case, for instance, that those on technically non-qualifying visiting visas may very well be swept up in the system of automatic voter registration. Perhaps the Minister might reassure the Committee on what specific efforts the Government are making to ensure that the correct people are registered under automatic voter registration. Additionally, the introduction of automatic verification is a novel and untested feature of the Bill. This amendment seeks to ensure that it is introduced cautiously to prevent accidental scope creep and ensure that its first implementation is thorough and effective in registering only those with the genuine legal right to vote in UK parliamentary elections.
For those reasons—time is of the essence—I am delighted to propose Amendment 51. I also support the amendments in the name of my noble friends.