Representation of the People Bill
Wednesday 4th November 2026
(2 days, 3 hours ago)
Lords ChamberRepresentation of the People Bill 2024-26 View all Representation of the People Bill 2024-26 Debates Read Hansard Text Watch Debate Read Debate Ministerial Extracts Amendment Paper: HL Bill 47–II(a) Amendments for Committee (Supplementary to the Second Marshalled List) - (3 Nov 2026)
Lord Fuller
“(2A) A local authority in England, Wales or Scotland must ensure that information given to relevant young people relating to registering to vote in an election is neutral or politically balanced and not designed to favour one outcome or party over another.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment is intended to ensure that all sides of the argument are presented to relevant young people under clause 15 regardless of the local authority's political control.
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, I have Amendments 18 and 19 in this short group. Both are related to the way in which looked-after children are encouraged to register to vote and the information that has been provided to them to inform that choice, and they would ensure that party politics can play no part in that decision if there is automatic registration, so that one political outcome was not unduly influenced over the other. Both my amendments relate to the entirety of the United Kingdom, with Amendment 18 referring to Great Britain and Amendment 19 the mirroring provision for Northern Ireland. It is the local state in Great Britain—the councils and their agents—that has responsibility as corporate parents for looked-after children, the “relevant young people” referred to in these amendments. In some cases, that corporate parenting responsibility lasts all the way up to the age of 24.
There are some things that should be apolitical, but it is an inescapable truth that councils are political organisations. While this amendment does not suggest that councils behave politically in every decision they take, given the importance of this Bill to the underpinning of democracy in the United Kingdom, the amendments take a belt-and-braces approach to being explicit that, in encouraging young people to come on to the register, that choice cannot, or should not, be tainted or otherwise influenced by party-political considerations. We must remove the temptation for anyone to improperly influence the register by tilting the balance so that only some cohorts are registered but not others.
Nothing in this group is meant to imply that councils are seeking to act improperly. We have to recognise that councils now engage with certain external organisations, such as private care homes, privately run caring establishments or even charitable bodies, to deliver their caring and corporate parenting responsibilities. They may be within the council’s own territory or in another part of the country. Together, my amendments would ensure that the duty of neutrality would be extended to not only the local authorities or health boards but those in that wider care ecosystem that benefits children and is paid for by local government wherever they are. Those organisations, councils or care homes, are in an extraordinarily influential position in the care of relevant young people. They provide food and accommodation, are responsible for health and welfare and all the other issues of day-to-day life.
By definition, without the guiding hand of their natural parents, these children are more socially vulnerable and susceptible to undue influence. These amendments therefore provide an additional level of certainty and assurance to ensure that such vulnerabilities are not taken advantage of politically by the council, through its policies, or more subtly by the political predispositions of individual care workers, wardens or other members of the professional staff on the front line, as well as by that ecosystem of contractors and charities. It is as simple as that. I beg to move.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, in speaking to my Amendment 18, I will also touch on issues raised in the similar amendments, Amendment 43 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and Amendment 44 tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle.
We are very much concerned that the reduction of the age limit to 16 has to be accompanied by a real effort at proper civic education. As a Liberal, I would say there should be a much greater effort at civic education anyway. The extent to which our young are not taught about British values and the rights and obligations of British citizenship is profoundly worrying and needs to be overcome.
Others will speak about some of the surveys that have been done on the thinness of civic education in schools. I went around three schools in the spring, one in Yorkshire and two in London, just to see from a very unrepresentative sample what they were doing, and was shocked, even in the public school I attended—one of Britain’s best public schools—at how little time was spent on this. I was given the lesson plan by the head of PSHE at one school for all the things she had to teach in one hour a week each year, including sexual behaviour, financial education, disease, and heaven knows what else, and of course, with political education fitting into that. All the teachers I spoke to said, “This is simply not possible to achieve; we need to have more time”. That is part of the message we want the Minister to give us some answers on: that the current curriculum review recognises this and that it will be expanded.
For Liberals and for people who believe in liberal democracy, the teaching of citizenship is a fundamental part of teaching people how to take their part in a democratic society. I am well aware that there have been many, particularly in the Conservative ranks, who are doubtful about the possibilities of teaching people political education, particularly in state schools. As a historian, I have read a number of debates from the early 19th century in which Conservative Peers doubted that education as such should be provided to the working class, because it would give them ideas above their station. Education is, of course, subversive. It teaches people how to question the conventional wisdom and how to think for themselves. That is part of what we should be doing.
In the United States, we have seen recently an even more fundamental attack on liberal education in the Trump Administration’s attack on American universities as unavoidably left-wing and liberal institutions, because they are concerned about evidence, doubt, argument and a number of things that the Trump Administration appear not to like. I hope none of us here share such a view.
As we see in some amendments in this group and later, there has been some concern about the possibility of neutrality. I declare an interest as someone who spent much of my career teaching politics and international politics in various universities. Of course, we all come with our biases, but we try to teach people how to think for themselves. At the London School of Economics, I had a number of Hong Kong and Singaporean students. The hardest job I had with them was to persuade them that they were supposed to disagree with their teacher. I see the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, nodding in agreement.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, my Amendment 43 seeks to ensure that the extension of votes to 16 year-olds, as argued by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, is accompanied by the necessary citizenship education to prepare young people to exercise their new rights and responsibilities as citizens. A number of noble Lords emphasised this in the debates about 16 and 17 year-olds on our first day in Committee. The amendment calls for a catch-up programme of political and media literacy and citizenship, supported by teacher training, with particular attention to the needs of student groups who face socioeconomic disadvantage or most lack electoral confidence, including girls and young women.
I should say that the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett of Manor Castle, who supports my amendment, asked me to give her apologies that she cannot be in her place to speak to her Amendment 44, which would place responsibility for citizenship education on the Electoral Commission; otherwise, it is very similar in its tone to my amendment.
I applaud the extension of the franchise to 16 and 17 year-olds, but I am well aware, from research that I was involved in as an academic some years ago, that some young people, not surprisingly, lack confidence about voting. Professor Bryony Hoskins of the University of Roehampton—who has conducted more recent research and whose assistance I am grateful for—tells me that
“young people approach their first election with unequal access to political learning, unequal confidence and different opportunities to practise making their voices heard. Without action to address these differences, there is a risk that the reform will disproportionately benefit those already equipped to participate”.
This underlines the importance of good citizenship education. I was a member of the Select Committee on Citizenship and Civic Engagement, the spirit of which lived on in the recent QSD in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Norton of Louth. The committee emphasised:
“Citizenship education has a crucial role to play in helping to build active citizens”.
Its importance is all the greater in the context of the extension of the franchise to 16 and 17 year-olds.
More recently, the APPG on Political and Media Literacy—supported by Shout Out UK, to which I am also grateful for its help—has pointed to
“a growing body of research indicating that young people who receive structured political and media education demonstrate higher levels of civic engagement and greater resilience to misinformation”.
They are more likely to become first-time voters, which increases the chances of them voting subsequently.
With regard to gender, Professor Hoskins’s research shows that even though girls tend to outperform boys in civic knowledge, they demonstrate lower confidence in their ability to understand and engage in formal politics. Longitudinal research in England shows that the gender gap in political confidence widens between ages 11 and 16, precisely the years preceding the proposed voting age.
When it comes to socioeconomic disadvantage, the IP-PAD UK adolescent study found that civic confidence diverges sharply by place. Its report suggested that
“'democratic confidence is shaped not only by age, but also by socio-economic experience”.
Another study, by Dr James Weinberg at the University of Sheffield, underlined the current fragmented state of democratic education in England, with stark disparities between private schools and state schools serving affluent communities on the one hand and state schools in economically deprived communities on the other. More affluent parents are more likely to talk to their children about politics and to feel confident doing so. It is perhaps not surprising that other research found that, when they had access to it, disadvantaged students often gained more from citizenship education than their more privileged peers.
Research undertaken by Professor Hoskins for G-EPIC—Gender Empowerment through Politics in Classrooms—has developed and evaluated teaching approaches designed to strengthen political confidence, particularly among more disadvantaged girls. Its research should inform the kind of catch-up programme envisaged in this amendment. Indeed, ACT—the Association for Citizenship Teaching, which has done so much to press the cause of citizenship education—is currently promoting these teaching resources.
I welcome the Government’s appreciation of the importance of citizenship education, especially to newly enfranchised voters, as expressed, for example, by my noble friend Lady Smith of Malvern in winding up the recent QSD.
I have a number of questions for my noble friend the Minister. First, how will the Government ensure that newly enfranchised young people receive appropriate citizenship education before their first opportunity to vote? Secondly, how will that provision address the gender and socioeconomic inequalities in political confidence that I have raised? Thirdly, what teacher training and resources will support inclusive delivery? Fourthly, how will implementation be evaluated to establish its success in benefiting young people facing the greatest barriers to political participation?
In concluding, I stress the urgency of the kind of catch-up programme envisaged in this amendment. In its briefing on the Bill, the Electoral Commission notes:
“We’ve long recommended improvements to democratic education in schools, and the lowering of the voting age makes this more pressing”.
As my noble friend Lady Smith of Malvern said at the end of the QSD:
“This is a pivotal moment for citizenship education”.—[Official Report, 19/10/26; col. 545.]
The need to act quickly was emphasised by my noble friend Lord Blunkett, the honorary president of ACT, who regrets he cannot be in its place. He warned that, if we fail to revise the curriculum so as to inform, educate and equip young people to take on voting at the ages of 16 and 17, it will be a dereliction of duty. Can my noble friend the Minister reassure us that we will fulfil our duty to the young people who will exercise their rights and responsibilities as citizens for the first time—I hope—at the next general election?
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)
My Lords, I will briefly speak in favour of Amendments 23 and 43. Following on from my noble friend Lady Lister, I know that my noble friend Lord Blunkett would say that the new curriculum, in which citizenship will be made a compulsory subject for primary schools, with a stronger emphasis on the subject in secondary schools, should be introduced in 2027 rather than 2028. Can my noble friend the Minister say whether it might be possible to change the curriculum and introduce the changes in 2027?
I understand that the citizenship GCSE is really rather good and I encourage all schools to ensure that the maximum number of students can study for that GCSE, but I know that there is a dearth of citizenship teachers. Can my noble friend the Minister say what we are doing to ensure that there are more teachers qualified to teach citizenship? As the noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, said, that is the way to ensure that it is properly taught, and taught impartially.
Lord Farmer (Con)
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendment 24, to which my noble friend Lady Meyer added her name, as well as my Amendments 280 and 287.
At Second Reading, I spoke against plans to lower the voting age to 16 on three grounds: evidence on brain development; the confusion that these plans bring to our policy approach to maturity; and the Government playing to the imperative to give ever more stuff to voters, in this case young people. Young people face far more pressing issues which are far harder to resolve; progress on these would lead to much more substantive and beneficial change.
Today, I will focus on the first of those grounds. I tabled Amendments 24, 280 and 287 partly in response to the Minister’s reply. I am grateful that she found time in her closing remarks at Second Reading to refer to my speech, but what she said concerned me as to how clear I had been. She mentioned the scientific evidence I gave against 16 and 17 year-olds being able to vote, saying that
“we do not give people the vote based on their intellectual or cognitive abilities, and that applies to 16 and 17 year-olds—as it does to all our voters”.—[Official Report, 14/9/26; col. 1058.]
I had not at all been arguing to restrict voting to those with sufficient cognitive and intellectual ability: that would be elitist. I was not talking about what a 16 year-old understands. My remarks were exclusively about maturity. I mentioned how staff across the Youth Custody Service always refer to 16 and 17 year-olds as “children”, not because of their cognitive ability but to remind themselves of their relative immaturity.
Neuroscience has quantified and plotted on a graph what brain maturation looks like at 16. I cited the much-respected developmental psychologist Professor Laurence Steinberg, whose studies have found that, across all demographic groups and both sexes, resistance to peer influence increases in a linear fashion between the ages 14 and 18 and seems pretty set for the majority at the end of that period. Hence, typically, by 18 most young people have developed the capacity to stand up for what they believe and withstand peer pressure.
I highlighted other studies of the brain’s control system or executive functions, which enable young people to regulate their emotional reactions, perhaps to a shared reel or video short, and make independent judgments. They stabilise to adult levels only in late adolescence—at 18 to 20 years old. As the researchers of a key study say:
“Results provide a canonical trajectory of executive function maturation that demarcates the boundaries of adolescence”.
Lowering the voting age tramples these boundaries and appears evidentially indefensible.
Baroness Meyer (Con)
My Lords, I rise to speak to Amendment 24, tabled by my noble friend Lord Farmer, to which I have added my name. This amendment asks for something entirely reasonable: proper assessment of the evidence on the decision-making capability of 16 and 17 year-olds, compared with those aged 18 or over. Surely, before lowering the voting age, Parliament should have that evidence.
This is not about questioning young people’s intelligence or enthusiasm. It is about whether, at that age, they have developed the maturity and independence of judgment to understand the long-term consequences of their decisions. The scientific evidence is there. To give an example, Professor Sallie Baxendale, a clinical neuropsychologist at UCL, explains that, during adolescence, the brain undergoes extensive rewiring. The connections responsible for rational judgment, impulse control and assessing long-term consequences are still developing. In other words: at 16, the brain is still very much a work in progress.
Research also shows that teenagers are particularly sensitive to emotions, immediate rewards and peer pressure. This is particularly so in today’s world of social media, influencers, foreign interference and online campaigning. Of course, many 16 year-olds are intelligent and politically engaged. But intelligence is not the same as maturity. Most of them are still at school, living at home, and have yet to experience real independence.
Voting is not just about expressing an opinion; it is about choosing who governs us, who taxes us and who makes decisions affecting our future. We already recognise that young people need protection. Both the Children Act and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child generally recognise that those under 18 are children. As noted before, in England, people cannot marry, buy alcohol or tobacco, serve on a jury or stand for Parliament until they are 18. I remind the House that the Mariage and Civil Partnership (Minimum Age) Act 2022 passed with cross-party support, including from Labour. It raised the minimum age of marriage to 18, even with parental consent. Why? To protect children from forced marriage and family coercion. If we protect children from family coercion over marriage, should we not be equally concerned about pressure from parents or other adults enticing them to vote in a particular way? Surely, the principle is the same: protecting children from coercion.
Only a few months ago, the Government announced plans to restrict children’s access to social media in order to
“give kids their childhood back”.
But how does involving children in political decisions give them their childhood back? Is it not bizarre that the Government consider 16 year-olds to be still in need of protection from TikTok yet old enough to choose who will govern the country?
The Bill proposes bringing children into the electoral registration system before they are even old enough to vote. When questioned the other day, the Minister told us that,
“Even by the age of 14”,
children
“have decided what subjects they want to continue to study”,—[Official Report, 2/11/26; col. 1390.]
as a reason why children at age 14 should be involved. Surely choosing school subjects is hardly comparable to choosing who should govern our country.
Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)
My Lords, I do not know whether the noble Baroness was in the Chamber when we discussed these issues only two days ago, but all the arguments which she has quite rightly addressed this afternoon were indeed rehearsed then. They have been discussed and debated very widely.
Baroness Meyer (Con)
I was basically talking to the amendment, which requires evidence. That is why I was talking about how we do not have the evidence, and that the evidence we have shows us the contrary: that children under the age of 18 are probably not mature enough.
Surely choosing which subjects you study at school is not comparable with choosing who should run our country. This is where a lot of noble Lords before me questioned whether the Government think that this measure will encourage young people to vote for them. I suspect that, if the figures were different and young people voted for the Conservative Party, we would have a very different argument at this stage.
Baroness Meyer (Con)
I am sorry, but changing the voting age should be a matter of principle, not electoral advantage.
I am particularly concerned about vulnerable children, including children in care, who, evidence tells us, are more susceptible to pressure or manipulation. Surely before extending the franchise to younger and potentially vulnerable people, the Government should establish whether they have the maturity and independence of judgment to exercise that right without undue influence.
Lord Balfe (Con)
As someone who grew up as a child in care, I can assure the Committee that I did not fit into the description put forward by the noble Baroness.
Baroness Meyer
The Government point out that, in Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, Jersey and Guernsey, children aged 16 can vote in certain elections. However, UK general elections determine who takes responsibility for our national defence and security, and so are quite different from elections in those smaller countries and areas. These are decisions on war and peace.
If the Government are confident that 16 is an appropriate voting age, surely they should welcome a proper assessment and explain why they are prepared to disregard scientific concerns about maturity and independent judgment—or is political advantage the real reason behind this proposal? I ask the Government to look at this amendment and bring forward some evidence. Frankly, some of us might even question whether we have fully acquired the maturity needed to vote at the age of 18.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I share some of the worries summed up by Amendments 18 and 19, in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, about ensuring that all sides of the argument are heard by our newly enfranchised 16 year-olds, especially looked-after children.
I have noted Amendment 43, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and Amendment 44, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, which both focus on the role that education can play in preparing young people for voting. As a former teacher, I always welcome more knowledge-based education, but I am concerned, for a number of reasons which I raise now.
First, this would put an undue burden on teachers. As we know, every time there is a social problem in this country, somebody says that education will solve it, and teachers are tearing their hair out every time they hear that. Secondly, how on earth might we trust that, if this is the main source of information that young people are going to get before they vote, it is suitably impartial?
In an earlier group, there was a very important discussion in which concern expressed about undue influence on voters, sometimes from families, sometimes women being coerced, sometimes from religious groups, and so on and so forth. We all took that seriously, as it is an important debate. Here we have to ask whether young voters could be unduly influenced, and by what. I am concerned about how we ensure, when talking about education and linking it directly, as these amendments seek to do, to 16 year-olds being prepared to vote, that it is based on impartial information.
As noble Lords will note, my concern in relation to votes for 16 year-olds is about their dependence on state bodies, as people who have not got the majority, because I want to protect the notion of the independence of all voters. It seems to me that we are going to have a group of voters who, by the nature of the way society is organised, are not independent. That most expresses itself, funnily enough, in school or in instances of looked-after children, dependent on the state or local councils, as the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, explained.
I have a general concern that the whole discussion could lead to the politicisation of schools, and that really worries me. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, made the point that education is subversive. It absolutely is, and, to be fair, I am a great fan of being subversive—I try to make a habit of it. However, linking the idea of education as subversive with saying, “You must now go out and be a responsible citizen and vote”, could get us into some difficulties.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
The noble Baroness referred to my amendment and has concerns about it. I remind her that I made the point about training and resources, because it would have to be adequately resourced. Does the noble Baroness not agree with the whole concept of citizenship education, because that seems to be the tenor of her remarks?
Baroness Fox of Buckley
I am about to explain my concerns about the amendment of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. I think citizenship education can be excellent, and a
“catch-up programme of political and media literacy”
sounds like a sensible, impartial and pragmatic intervention. But I have concerns, and I am raising them. I am not opposing the amendment; I am probing.
In recent years, citizenship education has, in my experience of going into schools and working in educational settings, become somewhat muddled in its agenda, and is often a vehicle for social justice campaigning, when you actually look at what is going on. To use one example, there is a call in the amendment for
“experts, charities and civil society organisations”
to give advice to the Government on citizenship education. We are talking about charities—what could go wrong with that?—civil society organisations and NGOs, but we all know that, very often, they are highly politicised, highly partial and there are all sorts of controversies around them.
To take one recent example, during the Black Lives Matter period in relation to George Floyd, many schools invited NGOs, charities and organisations to help them sort out how they should best deal with the response to Black Lives Matter. We ended up with quite extensive and, in some instances, toxic examples of the introduction of critical race theory into classrooms, unconscious bias training, children accusing others of having white privilege, off-the-scale decolonising of the curriculum and so on. We have to be careful that charities and third parties, in relation to educating children for elections, are not just a vehicle for political propaganda.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
My Lords, I am doing my best to follow the logic of the noble Baroness’s argument. Is she saying that civic education is fine but that no social justice should be taught?
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
I am suggesting that a particular reading of social justice is one-sided and political. We need to show some caution. Civics education per se is one thing. This is an argument that civics education should be used to prepare young people to vote in elections, which is a different thing. We must show some caution. I am going to come back to this, noble Lords will be delighted to know, in a later group.
I finish with one example that might illustrate my point. I was on a panel for a debate on education after the last election. A head teacher on the panel shared with the audience, with horror, that a citizenship studies mock election in his school had seen some pupils stand as Reform candidates. Even worse, they won—overwhelmingly. He used this as an example of the dangerous radicalisation of youth and the need to tackle extremism and that the school was now working on ensuring that pupils who exhibited such traits would be introduced to ideas that would counter them.
I make no party-political point here, but this raises the kinds of issues that I am concerned about. How dare the head teacher see a political party in this country as the wrong political party. I was shocked and argued back, as noble Lords can imagine. With voting for 16 year-olds on the horizon, we must ensure that such political prejudices do not become undue influences on political decision-making by 16 year-olds who are being told that they are being treated as adults in making up their own minds. If we depend on schools to shape their minds around the political issues that they will have to choose around, then we are in trouble.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
My Lords, it is always a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, in the debate on this Bill. I will speak to two amendments. On Amendment 24, I congratulate my noble friends Lord Farmer and Lady Meyer, who know a huge amount in this field and are experts in this area. I am very grateful to them for their contributions and their amendments today.
The area I want to focus on is peer pressure. The noble Baroness, Lady Royall, is right; we did discuss this two days ago. But this is a slightly different perspective. When I raised the issue of peer pressure last time, the Minister responded by saying that the Government do not go into cognitive development and do not wish to, which I accept. But this is a different issue; this is about peer pressure.
Last time, again, the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, challenged me on the scientific evidence I cited, and my noble friend Lady O’Neill gave an answer, which was independently confirmed by my noble friend Lady Meyer. The expert in this field, Professor Laurence Steinberg of Temple University, has written extensively, both on his own and with others, about peer pressure and the inability of children to resist it. It gets better for children as they reach the age of 18 and beyond. That raises important questions. I say this in a co-operative spirit: the Government need to recognise that there is a potential problem of peer pressure for voters aged 16 and take steps to ensure that children are able to make decisions without that peer pressure.
The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, after he had gone into the internal machinations of the Conservative Party, which is one of his favourite subjects, made the very good point that it is vital that voters make independent decisions based on their own experiences and determination. My fear is that there will be gangs and influencers, and in certain communities extensive family pressure on people to cast their vote a certain way. The earlier response from the Front Bench—that there is always peer pressure—is fair, but we are saying that there is evidence that 16 to 18 year-olds are more susceptible to peer pressure than people over the age of 18. What steps will the Government take to ensure that they are protected?
Lord Fuller (Con)
My noble friend has just mentioned people who are aged 16 to 18 and can vote, but the Bill throughout assumes that people aged 14 or above, as attainers, are going to prepare to vote. I wonder whether my noble friend might think a little bit about not just people who have reached 16 but also those who are under 16 and even more susceptible to peer pressure?
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
I could not agree more. I did not want to go down that route, because the counter argument would be, “We are only giving the vote to 16 year-olds”. But who knows? In future, it might be 14 year-olds. My noble friend Lord Fuller is absolutely spot on.
In the absence of my noble friend Lady Berridge, I want to address Amendment 44A. I am very worried about this. I have done a lot of canvassing. I have canvassed in every election since 1979—all for the same party I hasten to add—and not always with much success. Nevertheless, I have been out there regularly in a multitude of constituencies. Regularly, particularly in my own constituency of Queen’s Park and Maida Vale, which was previously Westminster North, I have found myself canvassing people who literally speak no English. When I knock on the door and try to communicate with them, they immediately pick up the phone and speak to their spouse or someone—I do not know who—and ask for instructions on what to say.
That is one issue, but the particular issue in Amendment 44A is about protecting children. Again, as a canvasser—I am sure that all noble Lords have done their share of canvassing—in the past, when the door is answered by a 16 year-old, one has simply said, “Can I speak to your parents?” Now, we will have to engage with 16 year-olds, which presents some challenges.
I am not particularly comfortable with the idea of having to knock on the door and engage in conversation with a 16 year-old to try to persuade them to vote for my party. I just do not want to be in that position. I am comfortable with an 18 year-old; I am not comfortable with doing that with a 16 year-old. Indeed, the Government recognise that 16 year-olds have to be protected. If I want to interact with 16 year-olds at the various schools with which I am involved, I have to be cleared to do that. I cannot just rock up at the classroom without having various checks, but as a canvasser, I can knock on the door and engage with a 16 year-old without any checks. I am not worried about me, but I am worried about other people.
Let us take this to not an absurd but a logical conclusion. What is to stop predators identifying children now on the electoral roll and going to see them, supposedly to canvass them but actually with other purposes in mind? I am very worried about this. They can justify to the authorities that they are entering into a dialogue with a 16 year-old because, they will claim, they are out canvassing, but they have an ulterior motive. I want to know from the Government what protection they plan to give in those circumstances.
It gets a lot worse if we are saying that 14 and 15 year-olds need to be educated. What happens if someone says, perhaps with some credibility, “I want to go and talk to 14 and 15 year-olds because they need to be persuaded to vote for my party”? Heaven knows what is going to happen on the doorstep. When I go canvassing, I am regularly invited in to discuss the subject over a glass of wine, a cup of tea or whatever. I always refuse because that is the guidance, but that does not mean that other people will. We are giving people the opportunity to enter vulnerable people’s homes and, if children are on their own at home, to have a discussion with them, supposedly about political matters—but who knows?
I do not have the answer to this problem, but I can see that it is a real problem, and I would be grateful if the Minister could address it now or later.
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, as a young person, I was so susceptible to subversive influences such as BBC television news, Radio 4’s “World at One”, which I listened to every day, and the Guardian, which I bought daily, that by the time I was 14 I was treasurer of my branch of the Liberal Party, and by the time I was 16 I was secretary of the constituency. I do not suggest for a moment that that is normal for a teenager, but my point is that people are very different and should be treated differently.
Turning to these amendments, the most publicised aspect of this Bill is that which we debated on Monday—the principle of extending the franchise to 16 and 17 year -olds—and I do not wish to go over those arguments again. However, I do wish to say that the good intention of seeking to encourage the engagement of young people in political processes will fail unless we do much more about citizenship education. I accept that there are greater risks to our democracy, especially in the internet age, as most young people rely on information obtained online. The All-Party Parliamentary Group on Political and Media Literacy, of which I am an active member, says in its briefing that foundational political and media literacy education is crucial to the health of our democracy. It warns that simply changing the voting age will not in itself encourage more civic responsibility or more sustained participation in democratic processes. I mentioned on Monday how Jersey lowered its voting age to 16 in 2008, but it was not such a successful experience because of the lack of civic education to support it.
The research compiled by the academic advisory group to our APPG reveals both an overwhelming desire among young people to engage and a troubling structural deficit in how our current school system prepares them for it. Young people rely heavily on social media. They are therefore more vulnerable to digital misinformation and less educated and equipped with critical media literacy tools that should be part of citizenship education.
The noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett, quoted the excellent research from Dr James Weinberg, who studied information from over 3,000 teachers across over half of all secondary schools. He found that at present, less than a third of secondary schools offer weekly lessons in political or citizenship education and over a quarter provide no democratic education whatsoever. The noble Baroness also drew attention to how state schools serving economically deprived communities provide significantly less political literacy education than private schools or state schools in affluent areas. Democratic confidence must not remain the preserve of the privileged. The danger of ignorance among the most disadvantaged represents a threat to the principles which should underpin a democracy.
Lord Pack (LD)
My Lords, as several noble Lords have illustrated in their speeches and in their amendments in this group, it is important that we get the information and educational framework right. That would be the case even if this Bill did not contain a change in the voting age, but it is all the more so given that it does. I hope we will hear some positive noises from the Government in due course on that important topic.
As we all know, whether we agree with it or not, the decision that this Bill legislates for, to reduce the voting age to 16, was a manifesto commitment from the party that won a clear majority under our voting system—and I know some noble Lords near me are particularly keen on that voting system. The Labour Party won an overwhelming majority with a clear manifesto commitment. I am therefore not sure how good a use of time it is—given the many other important issues we need to get stuck into in Committee—to be continually relitigating that basic point of principle, which was a manifesto commitment that has been debated extensively already. Having said that, I will follow my own advice and bring my remarks to a close.
Baroness O’Neill of Bexley (Con)
I will start where the noble Lord left off. I am grateful to all noble Lords who have contributed to this debate. The amendments in this group raise many important questions about the responsibilities that accompany the Government’s proposal to lower the voting age to 16. It is a manifesto commitment, we accept that, but there are responsibilities that go alongside that and things the Government need to be aware of and address, because there is no doubt that people out there will be asking about this.
We should all agree that young people ought to understand how our democracy works, how to register to vote and how to exercise their democratic rights, but we must consider whether the Government have put sufficient thought into the education and safeguards necessary if the change to the franchise is to go ahead. My noble friend Lord Fuller’s Amendments 18 and 19 would sensibly require politically neutral and balanced voter registration to be provided to young people. These amendments seek to prevent local authorities run by any particular party from influencing election material one way or the other. We must not forget that councils are fundamentally political organisations.
My noble friend Lord Fuller has accurately identified that looked-after children are socially vulnerable and at risk of being influenced by the authority that looks after them. We should be aware of that fundamental point. Information provided by public authorities must be impartial, especially when it concerns young people who may be engaging with the electoral system for the very first time. Can the Minister explain what safeguards will ensure that registration information provided by local authorities, and the relevant bodies in Northern Ireland, is politically neutral? How will be compliance be assessed and monitored?
I welcome my noble friend Lord Farmer’s Amendments 24, 280 and 287, concerning the decision-making abilities of 16 and 17 year-olds. I congratulate my noble friend Lady Meyer on putting the case for considering the safeguards around that as well. These amendments ask the Government to assess the evidence before implementing a significant constitutional change. They are not saying that that change is not going to happen but that they should consider it beforehand. Can the Minister explain what assessment the Government have undertaken of the decision-making abilities of 16 and 17 year-olds, and will she commit to publishing that evidence before the new voting age comes into effect?
The amendments concerning citizenship education and political literacy are also relevant. Amendment 43, in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, proposes a programme of education and citizenship in secondary schools. The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, has also raised that the Secretary of State should report on progress in the changes to citizenship education. Thus, there is clearly a shared recognition across your Lordships’ House that extending the franchise cannot be considered in isolation from the education that young people receive—everyone is in agreement on that one.
However, I must respectfully disagree with Amendment 44, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, albeit that it was not spoken to. While I welcome the underlying suggestion that children should be educated about their duty to vote, we should not single out groups of children and educate them based on supposed groupings. Different children must not be educated differently about the vote they share. As we saw in the fruitful debate on ballot secrecy, we must be careful that political education does not become political persuasion. Can the Minister tell us what guidance will be provided to schools and teachers to ensure that such education remains balanced, and what additional resources will be made available to deliver it?
My noble friend Lady Berridge is, unfortunately, unable to be in her place today. My noble friend Lord Leigh of Hurley referred to her Amendment 44A, in which she raises a very valid point. I think most of us in this Chamber have canvassed and knocked on doors. When we see a young person, we generally say, “Can we speak to Mum and Dad, or your carer?” We will now have to assess what age that young person is and maybe engage in conversation with them. We really need to consider that as a consequence of this proposal as canvassers will be engaging with younger voters.
My noble friend raises whether there will need to be necessary safeguarding guidance for political campaigners engaging with children. We should be thinking about that particularly important issue. If political parties and campaigners are to engage more directly with younger voters, appropriate safeguards must be in place. Will the Minister explain what guidance will govern contact between political campaigners and those children, and whether the Government intend to consult safeguarding professionals before the relevant provisions commence?
As I have said in earlier debates, electoral reform should strengthen public confidence in our democratic system, not introduce uncertainty about the protections on which it depends. The Government have chosen to lower the voting age as a manifesto commitment. It is therefore incumbent upon them to demonstrate that young people will receive impartial information, sufficient education and appropriate safeguarding. They should be properly prepared and protected when exercising that right. I hope the Minister will address these questions in detail and provide reassurance that the practical consequences of this change have been fully and properly considered.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (Baroness Taylor of Stevenage) (Lab)
Before I respond to the amendments, I must correct a date I gave in the debate on the previous group. I said that the tabling date for amendments for the next set of Committee groups was 9 November, but it is 17 November. My apologies for that. The amendments in those groups will be tabled then.
I want to say at the start that the Government are committed to ensuring that everyone who is entitled to vote is able do so, and that they should supported and encouraged in that. The provisions we are making are designed to ensure that vulnerable people who are eligible to vote are enabled, but it is quite right that all young people must be prepared for this change to the electoral franchise. The Government are already working with the Electoral Commission, devolved Governments, the electoral sector and civil society organisations to raise awareness of the franchise change among young people to help prepare them to exercise their democratic rights. I will go into a bit more detail on schools provision in a moment.
I thought it might be helpful to say to noble Lords that we have carried out extensive research, both quantitative and qualitative, speaking to those aged 14 to 17. A total of 32 focus groups were conducted over two stages, followed by a nationally representative survey of more than 3,500 respondents, utilising online and offline data collection. The key headlines from that research were really interesting: most young people have a form of valid voter ID; most regard voter ID as necessary; the education system is seen by young people as a good way to learn about these topics; and the majority feel that their voice would matter more if they had the vote at 16. Those were the key headlines, but it was a big piece of research.
The other thing that slightly surprises me is that the debates on Monday and today have taken a direction that I was not expecting. It is a shame that significant doubts have been cast on teachers’ impartiality, and we now appear to have doubts being cast on the BBC and on those responsible for looked-after children.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
Only two weeks ago, the Government intervened in the problem of the lack of impartiality among teachers on the Israel-Gaza-Palestine conflict. At the time, I congratulated the Government on taking a stance on the difficulties of that issue. The Government were clear that we have to be very careful. I cast no aspersions in general. The Government noted the particular issue of the rise of antisemitism and the politicisation of that war in schools, and they rightly intervened. I congratulated the Government then, and I congratulate them now. I did not think the Government were casting aspersions on all teachers; they were not, and neither were the rest of us.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
These issues have to be tackled when and as they arise. The point I was making is that making general points relating to that is not helpful.
I will now address the amendments. I understand and share the intention of the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, for young people to receive impartial information, as expressed in Amendments 18 and 19. I assure him that Clauses 15 and 16 are deliberately narrow in scope. They require local authorities in Great Britain, and health and social care trusts in Northern Ireland, where the system is different, to raise awareness of the registration arrangements that apply to relevant young people and to help those young people register. This is about factual and practical electoral registration information and making sure that young people who are or have been in the care system understand how they can register, and, where necessary, helping them to do so. I therefore assure the noble Lord that we fully recognise the importance of political impartiality, but I do not consider that an additional statutory requirement of this kind is needed.
I turn to Amendment 23 from the noble Lords, Lord Wallace and Lord Rennard, and the noble Baroness, Lady Prashar. I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, on bringing such sartorial elegance to the Chamber this afternoon. It brings some panache to our debate at the end of the week.
Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)
I apologise; it is rather eccentric. The Parliament Choir is performing this evening, and the dress rehearsal starts at 4 pm—I have said that I will be late.
I add that there is strong scientific evidence that collective singing in schools improves social cohesion and concentration. I am not sure that the last Government accepted that scientific evidence—they did not act on it. But if we are talking about scientific evidence in schools, singing matters as well.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I wish the noble Lord well for his rehearsal and look forward to coming to one of the concerts in due course.
Noble Lords may recall that a similar amendment to this one was debated in Committee in the other place. Our position remains that a statutory reporting requirement is not the right way to approach this issue. The amendment would require the report to cover three areas: raising awareness, civic education and electoral registration. I will address each in turn.
First, on raising awareness, I agree with noble Lords that young people need to be aware of their new democratic rights. The Government are already working alongside the Electoral Commission, local and devolved government, the electoral sector and civil society organisations to make sure that young people are aware of the changes. Raising awareness will be a collective effort, involving organisations with different roles and responsibilities. A report from the Government would not provide a complete picture of that work. It would also not be right for the Government to report on behalf of other organisations involved in this work, particularly the Electoral Commission, whose independence from government is so vital and which already publishes its own research and analysis on some of the areas covered by this amendment.
Secondly, on civic education, I have no hesitation in agreeing with noble Lords on the vital importance of preparing young people to exercise their democratic rights. This is an area where we will continue to work with the devolved Governments and other partners. The Department for Education leads on education policy in England, while education is devolved in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. All partners will need to work together to support young people’s democratic engagement. I will say more on that when I respond to my noble friend Lady Lister’s amendment. Given these different roles and responsibilities, I do not believe that a statutory report from the UK Government is the right mechanism for assessing progress in this area.
Finally, on electoral registration, substantial information is already publicly available. The register to vote performance dashboard provides aggregate data on applications to register to vote, including breakdowns by age. The Electoral Commission has also conducted studies of electoral registration trends, and the Government are separately planning to monitor and evaluate the implementation and impact of votes-at-16 measures, which will assess evidence related to the awareness, education and registration of young people. We do not believe that a further statutory report is necessary. I hope I have reassured your Lordships that the Government share the underlying objectives behind this amendment and are already taking forward work to support young people as the franchise is extended to 16 and 17 year-olds.
I come to Amendments 24, 280 and 287 in the names of the noble Lord, Lord Farmer, and the noble Baroness, Lady Meyer. I point out to noble Lords that these amendments would prevent voting rights being extended to 16 and 17 year-olds until the assessment has been published. The noble Lord raised similar concerns about the maturity and decision-making capabilities of 16 and 17 year-olds during the Bill’s Second Reading in this House. Indeed, he quoted my response to him at the time, which I still hold to—that we do not give people the vote based on their intellectual or cognitive abilities. That principle applies to 16 and 17 year-olds as it does to all other voters. I am sorry to repeat back to him what he has already quoted, but that is the case.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
Can I just finish responding, then I will happily give way? Our focus is on delivering this manifesto commitment—on which this Government were elected—which recognises that 16 and 17 year-olds have views that deserve to be represented and that young people should have a say in decisions that affect them. I simply cannot agree that young people at 16 and 17 do not have the cognitive reasoning to make decisions that impact on their lives. Indeed, as I set out on Monday, we have already asked them to do so. The question is not what else you can or cannot do at 16 but whether 16 is the right age to vote.
The point of this process of engagement is to introduce the concept of critical thinking. Indeed, young people of this age now have grown up having to develop their own ability to filter a whole plethora of social media in a way that my generation certainly did not.
Lord Farmer (Con)
I was not talking about cognitive ability. That was what the Minister mentioned at Second Reading, and I was trying to say that I was not talking about that. I was talking about the maturity of young people to withstand peer pressure and to make a reasoned decision. As we have heard today, electing a Government is a very important and responsible decision. We had the evidence from Professor Laurence Steinberg that it is at 18 that young people are able to make their own judgments, withstand things such as TikTok and peer pressure at school and make a reasoned political judgment independently. It is maturity I am talking about, not cognitive ability.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I have heard what the noble Lord has said. In my view, requiring such an assessment before these changes can be implemented would introduce a completely unnecessary additional step and could delay the delivery of a very important manifesto commitment on which, as I have said, we have done a good deal of research with young people.
The noble Lord, Lord Leigh, made some points around safeguarding and political canvassing. We have taken steps within the Bill, as he will know, to say that attainers—14 and 15 year-olds—will not be canvassed by EROs, but I understand that the point he is making is around political canvassing. I am sure that political parties will be developing their own safeguarding response to the provisions in this Bill.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
We are not talking about cognitive development or about taking tests. We are talking about what steps the Government are taking to protect people from peer pressure. So far, the answer is none, which is not very satisfactory.
Secondly, in respect of what happens on the doorstep, the Government cannot rely on political parties. My whole point is that there will be individuals who claim to be canvassers and will knock on doors and get entry into doors and into conversation with 16 year-olds under the pretext of being political campaigners. They will identify such people from the electoral roll. One cannot expect political parties to vet every single canvasser. It is up to the Government, if they are going to introduce eligibility for 16 year-olds to vote and to receive canvassers, to take steps to protect them.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
There are all sorts of people who knock on our doors. I understand what the noble Lord is saying and I will take those points away, but I seriously think that the point of the education process is to teach young people to have that critical thinking capacity to make their own decisions about things. I am more than confident that our young people at 16 and 17 have the faculties to do that.
I will now talk a little more about the education process, which is important in this.
Lord Leigh of Hurley (Con)
When the Minister says that she is more than confident, is she refuting the evidence of Professor Steinberg?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I hope I will have an opportunity to speak to Professor Steinberg at some point, but I think we need to move on and talk about what we are going to do in terms of education.
I thank my noble friend Lady Lister for tabling Amendment 43 and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, who is not in her place today, for Amendment 44. I recognise the motivations of these amendments and I share the ambition to ensure that young people are supported to exercise their democratic rights and build lifelong engagement with our democracy. A fundamental point in all this is that we know that engaging young people at a much earlier age encourages that lifelong engagement with the democratic process.
This is a priority for the Government. We are already working to strengthen democratic education and engagement, including in response to the independent Curriculum and Assessment Review. Citizenship is already a statutory national curriculum subject at key stages 3 and 4 in maintained schools, covering parliamentary democracy, electoral systems and how citizens can influence decisions. The Government’s wider curriculum reforms will strengthen this further, including through clearer teaching of democracy, media literacy and active citizenship. We are considering what transitional support may be needed before those reforms take effect, including practical, non-partisan voter information, adaptable teaching materials and support for teachers on issues such as political impartiality and misinformation.
Alongside this, the Electoral Commission is undertaking important work to support young people’s democratic education. It is developing a democratic education framework in partnership with organisations across the education and youth sectors, providing practical resources to help educators and young people understand and participate in democracy. This is currently being piloted, and a formal launch is planned for March 2027, which I hope answers my noble friend Lady Royall’s question. The commission also runs Welcome to Your Vote Week, an annual campaign which provides schools, colleges and youth organisations with opportunities to help people understand elections and build confidence in participating.
Further, my department has established the democratic engagement fund to support politically neutral projects that help people understand, engage with and participate in democracy. I recognise my noble friend’s concern about young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and politically underrepresented groups, including girls and young women. The fund provides an opportunity to support projects that help break down barriers to democratic participation and ensure that more young people have the opportunity to make their voices heard.
I will comment on some of the points made about political impartiality in schools. Schools are already subject to clear legal duties on political impartiality. They must prohibit the promotion of partisan political views and take reasonably practical steps to ensure that, where political issues are brought to pupils’ attention, opposing views are presented in a balanced way. The existing Political Impartiality in Schools guidance makes it clear that these duties apply to public displays, including banners and posters, as well as school communications.
We will continue to work with the Electoral Commission, devolved Governments and civil society organisations to consider what additional measures can support schools, colleges and youth groups to deliver practical voter and civic education. I hope I have given my noble friend reassurance on these points, and to the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, on the role of the Electoral Commission. I entirely recognise the importance of education and engagement in making votes at 16 a success, but I do not believe that further legislation is needed.
Finally, on Amendment 44, the Government recognise the importance of safeguarding young people, and the Bill provides strong protections where those are needed—for example, on data protection. In addition, 16 and 17-year-olds, and those who will turn 16 before polling day, should have the same opportunity as any other voter to hear from candidates and political parties to form an opinion before casting their vote.
We completely agree with the importance of appropriate conduct during campaigning. We welcome the Speaker’s Conference recommendation to establish a code of conduct for campaigning and have committed to work with the Speaker, the Electoral Commission and political parties to support the development of a code which is fit for purpose. I hope this responds further to the concerns of the noble Lord, Lord Leigh. As part of this work, we have the opportunity to consider the specific issue raised in this amendment, regarding the safeguarding of young people in campaigning. We therefore do not consider this amendment is likely to be necessary.
Baroness O'Neill of Bexley (Con)
I am grateful for that last point. I must admit that, as a council leader previously, when the point about campaigning was raised with me, it sent shivers down my spine because we know how important safeguarding is. It might be worth a conversation at the all-party group, so it is put out through all the different parties and they are aware of it. I am sure many of them may not have considered it, and it is worth sharing that information.
I have another point I would like to put across the Minister’s desk. The Minister says they have had a lot of research done. Is it possible to share it with the Committee?
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
To save my noble friend the Minister having to bob up and down, I have a couple of questions, which she could perhaps write to me about afterwards. One is about the teacher training and resources that will support the kind of citizenship education we have been talking about. The other is about evaluation, particularly from the perspective of disadvantaged groups and those who lack political confidence and face the greatest barriers to political participation, such as girls and young women.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, makes a good point about the political parties panel, and I will take that back. I have some brief information about research, but I will write to her on that, if that is okay.
On the comments made by my noble friend Lady Lister, we are looking at this transitional support on how we make sure we have adaptable teaching materials and support for teachers on issues such as political impartiality and misinformation, and I am happy to update her once that work has gone a bit further.
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, it has been an interesting debate, and I of course entirely support the comments from the Front Bench, that we understand that votes at 16 is a manifesto commitment. But what this last hour and 20 minutes has shown is how much the consequences of that manifesto commitment are going to mean for the safeguarding of children, the impacts on education and for people who have not really had to participate in economic society before. These are unintended consequences and we are going to have to iron them out, not just for the 16 year-olds but for those attainers from 14.
For all the warm words about strengthening democracy and improving transparency, which are littered throughout the impact statement, when it comes to amendments that would give effect to those noble causes, what I think I heard the Minister say was that they are prepared to leave it to chance: we are not going to cast aspersions, but we are going to address these issues—
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
If the noble Lord would kindly give way for a moment, I did not say we are leaving it to chance. I said that we welcome the Speaker’s Conference recommendation to establish codes of conduct on this subject, and we have committed to work with the Speaker, the Electoral Commission and political parties to support the development of a code which is fit for purpose.
Lord Fuller (Con)
I thank the Minister, and I accept those words entirely, but earlier on in the wind-up, when referring to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox of Buckley, the suggestion was made that we were casting aspersions on teachers and social workers, and that the Government would address those as they came along. I just do not think that is right. The Bill should be explicit about neutrality, particularly for schools and for looked-after children’s environments, so there is no risk. We must remove the temptation for those in positions of authority over some of the most vulnerable people without supportive natural parents to do it. If it is not a problem because there is no prejudice, then there is no problem in introducing it into the Bill.
I was very taken with the other comments about—
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I am sorry to intervene on the noble Lord again—I do not like to do this—but I made it clear that schools are already subject to clear legal duties on political impartiality, and I gave the details of that.
Lord Fuller (Con)
That is covered in group 6, which we will return to later.
I was taken with the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, about schools. This has really been a debate not so much about schools but about young people more generally. I associate myself with the comments of the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, about the practical preparation, and the watchword of this part of the Bill, the protection of minors.
This may be something we return to on Report, and we need to catch up time, so I will beg leave to withdraw my Amendment 18. But we really need to think about some of these practical consequences before we get to Report, and I hope the Minister will meet with me and others in furtherance of that objective.
Lord Frost
“Part 1ANationality qualification for votingNationality qualification for voting and registration(1) A person is not entitled to vote as an elector at a relevant poll unless the person is—(a) a British citizen,(b) a citizen of the Republic of Ireland, or(c) a protected EU elector in relation to that poll.(2) Subsection (1) applies also to entitlement to be registered, or to remain registered, for the purposes of a relevant poll.(3) A person is a protected EU elector in relation to a relevant poll if—(a) the person meets the requirements in subsections (1)(a) to (d) of section 203B of RPA 1983 (meaning of “EU citizen with retained rights”) , disregarding paragraph (e) of that subsection, and(b) under the law governing the poll, apart from this Part, the person would satisfy the nationality qualification otherwise than by virtue of being a Commonwealth citizen.(4) For the purposes of subsection (3)(a), section 203B of RPA 1983 (meaning of “EU citizen with retained rights”) is to be read as if it extended to the whole of the United Kingdom.(5) In this Part “relevant poll” means—(a) an election for membership of the House of Commons, the Scottish Parliament, Senedd Cymru or the Northern Ireland Assembly,(b) a local government election anywhere in the United Kingdom,(c) a City of London ward election, and(d) any other election, referendum or poll held under an enactment at which entitlement to vote is determined by reference to a register of parliamentary or local government electors.(6) This section applies to entitlement to sign a recall petition under the Recall of MPs Act 2015 as it applies to entitlement to vote at an election for membership of the House of Commons.(7) In this Part—(a) references to registration include inclusion in a City of London ward list, and(b) “enactment” includes an Act of the Scottish Parliament, an Act or Measure of Senedd Cymru, Northern Ireland legislation and subordinate legislation. (8) Other voting rights provisions are to be interpreted consistently with this section.”Member’s explanatory statement
This new Part and its consequential changes would remove voting and registration rights based solely on Commonwealth citizenship throughout the United Kingdom, while preserving those of British and Irish citizens and the existing non-parliamentary rights of the pre-2021 EU retained-rights cohort. It provides for registration review and appeals, and protects the new provisions from modification by the devolved legislatures.
Lord Frost (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I will speak to my Amendments 25 to 29, 288 and 289, and 299 and 300 on the Marshalled List. Before I explain the thinking behind these amendments, I will give a brief explanation of how they work from a technical point of view.
These amendments form two alternative packages rather than a single scheme. I will explain why. Amendments 25 and 26 would end voting and registration rights based solely on Commonwealth citizenship across the UK, while preserving British, Irish and retained EU citizens’ rights. Amendments 27 to 29 offer a reciprocal alternative: one where Commonwealth citizens retained eligibility, but only where their country gave British citizens similar, exercisable rights at corresponding elections. Obviously, Ministers would have to designate those countries through regulations approved by both Houses, publish the assessment and review periodically.
The amendments are designed to focus on the Commonwealth issue, which is why they keep the existing non-national elections rights for the EU cohort and for Ireland. I will come to those points, although they merit debate at some point. Both packages also cover parliamentary devolved and local elections. The noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, who is not in her place, would be pleased to hear that they cover City of London ward elections, relevant referendums and other acts of democracy. They are drafted to be consistent with the amendments I put forward earlier in our discussions on devolution, although there is much room for debate about how far down the hierarchy of elections these provisions need to extend.
To complete the technical introduction, Amendments 288 and 289 would bring the relevant administrative and designation machinery into operation, with the first draft regulations required within 12 months. Finally, Amendments 299 and 300 would require the substantive nationality rules to start on the same day throughout the UK, at least six months after the regulations, unless polls and petitions were already under way.
I put forward these two alternative routes because they are probing amendments designed to provoke discussion about the nature of the franchise in this country. That is very much worth discussing. The only point I will make at this stage on the distinction between them is that the reciprocal arrangements require much more process. There is much more complexity. They require a system under which the Government have to review whether reciprocal arrangements exist and whether they have changed, report on them, and then, of course, feed that through to the electoral register. Such a system has to exist if a reciprocal arrangement is to work. It is more complicated and more likely, I guess, to be got wrong, but it is a possibility.
I will move on to the thinking behind the amendments. Once again, we come back to a “who” question: who gets to vote in the arrangements that we are describing? I find, when I discuss this issue, that most people assume that the franchise in a country is limited to citizens of that country. People are often extremely surprised when you tell them that is not the case in the United Kingdom—that we extend the franchise quite considerably. They often literally cannot believe it when they are told about the arrangements for Commonwealth voting, which illustrates to me that this is an issue that needs addressing.
The technical provision is that “qualifying” Commonwealth citizens are allowed to be on the electoral register. The word “qualifying” is really not very qualifying at all. Such qualifying Commonwealth citizens do not need to be permanent residents. Any permission to enter or stay in the UK would do, whether it is time-limited, conditional, student, worker, family member or whatever. The Electoral Commission spells it out:
“Any type of permission to enter or stay is acceptable, whether indefinite, time limited or conditional”.
So you can have a situation where a student here on a short visa could help elect a Government who could have a life long beyond the individual’s time in the country. Indeed, the Electoral Commission’s definition of “qualifying” is so wide that it is not obvious to me that it would not capture tourists or casual visitors—after all, we issue six-month visas and it is quite possible to register and vote over that period. It is not entirely obvious whether it would be possible, under the arrangements, to pick up and distinguish permanent residents from people who are here for a short period.
This means that our franchise is, in principle, open to 2.7 billion people around the world: the entire population of the Commonwealth. Any Commonwealth citizen who reaches Britain on any of the bases I have just described is able to vote here. That is the extraordinary breadth of the entitlement that exists in our law and deserves to be discussed.
My amendments are designed to provide for exactly that discussion. They maintain the provision under which Irish citizens will be able to continue to vote. It is a logical consequence of the Northern Ireland settlement, which recognises the right of its people to identify as British, Irish or both, and I suspect this is not the moment to open that question. Moreover, it is reciprocal: British citizens can register and vote in elections in Ireland. My amendments also retain the existing rights of EU citizens with settled status to vote in local and some other elections. In some ways, that is questionable and will probably need to be debated and dealt with at some point—but not now.
Commonwealth entitlement is quite different, and very hard to defend in its current form. For one thing, it is a complete anomaly internationally. No EU country allows non-citizens to vote in its national elections, with the exception of Ireland, through the reciprocal arrangement with us, and Portugal, in the arguably somewhat similar case of Brazilians. You cannot vote unless you are a citizen in national elections in Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Australia—with a small, technical exception—and the United States. What we do is very unusual. The only real exception is New Zealand, which allows all permanent residents to vote—all, not just a subset. That at least is logical. What we do in our franchise is extend the right to vote to a group of countries and their citizens, mostly but not entirely on the basis that Britain governed them half a century ago. This does not make logical sense in the world as we now have it.
These arrangements would be easier to defend if they were reciprocal. The problem is that they are not at the moment. Only a small number of Caribbean countries and a couple of relatively small African countries allow British citizens to vote. Even then, they generally have to be pretty permanent residents.
Indians can vote in Britain, but no British citizen can vote in India. It is the same in Pakistan, Canada, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Nigeria—I could go on with an extensive list of important countries with large populations. I do not blame them, though. Those countries rightly regard choosing their Government as the business of their citizens, and I think they are right in that. The argument is around why we do not do the same.
This is a bit of a hangover from the empire. The voting rates reflect the relationship that existed 50, 60 or 70 years ago; they are in law a legacy of the original expansive discussion of who could claim to be a British subject. The Representation of the People Act 1948 originally provided that citizens of newly independent Commonwealth countries were still to be regarded as British subjects for the purposes of nationality and voting. That provision has been tightened up a lot since then, and so has the definition of citizenship, but the legacy voting rights remain. They have nothing to do with citizenship of modern nation states as we now understand them. Of course, we all value the Commonwealth and our friendships with its members, but they are different countries, and that has to mean something.
Lord Mackinlay of Richborough (Con)
My Lords, I have followed this debate over the last couple of days. I give huge congratulations to my noble friend Lord Frost on bringing this forward; this is an area that has exercised me for some years. I pay tribute to the House of Lords Library for extracting a lot of information on this to try to bring out where reciprocation exists—and I have to say that the reciprocation arrangements within the Commonwealth are very skinny indeed.
The Government have opened up Pandora’s box with this Bill, because at its heart is the franchise, which the Government are attempting to expand to 16 and 17 year-olds. If the Bill before us is trying to change and tidy up things, and widen the franchise, then surely it is the right Bill to consider a wider franchise, which has not been considered since the Act in 1969.
We have to consider this against the backdrop of CHOGM, which is in progress at the moment in Antigua. As a huge supporter of the Commonwealth, I am somewhat saddened that, in the post-Brexit world, we have not made a better arrangement with our friends around the Commonwealth to create a new friendship and trading arrangement on preferential terms. I hope those sorts of issues are being discussed at CHOGM as I speak. But the electoral franchise is surely very odd. We have vast countries, with huge populations—India, Pakistan, Nigeria and Bangladesh, to pick out a few—of probably 1.5 to 1.8 billion people between them. A transfer of such people to this country, as temporary workers, students and all those good areas, is to be welcomed, but surely to come on a student visa for a short time and then be allowed to vote is a very strange situation.
I might consider that to be fair and reasonable if there was a reciprocal arrangement with those countries. As my noble friend Lord Frost has said, perhaps that is quite complicated to achieve. It would require a department of the Home Office to keep an eye on electoral franchises in those countries of the Commonwealth. Perhaps Amendments 25 and 26, proposed by my noble friend, are cleaner. Perhaps this is the time to make that breakaway, which most other countries have considered to be proper and correct, and say one has to be a British citizen.
As we know, British citizenship can be obtained. One of the reasons some people never bother obtaining it, even though they have lived here for a very long time, is the cost and aggravation, but it is achievable and doable. One has to pay the fee and do the Life in the UK Test, and then, lo and behold, one can become a British citizen, with all the rights and duties that come with citizenship. The powerful point behind my noble friend’s suggestions is that feeling of being part of this nation—one cannot just up sticks and return back to the country where one holds citizenship.
The Australian situation is rather odd. I believe it was Australia’s 1984 Act that made quite a separation between the new country and what might be called the old country. At that date, Australia decided that one could vote in Australia only if one was an Australian citizen. As my noble friend alluded to, a British citizen who had lived in Australia prior to 1956 but had never taken citizenship could still vote there.
The anomalies around the world are few and far between. As the Government have opened up the franchise for discussion, it is time that we use this Bill appropriately to consider the franchise of Commonwealth citizens. It is a throwback of yesteryear and, much as I like yesteryear, we are not there any more. We are in the modern world of 2026, and the day is done for the old colonial arrangements that those on the Benches opposite would like to throw off as rapidly as they can. We cannot have this subsisting into the future. I hope we can have cross-party support for this measure, and I look forward to the Minister’s comments as to why it is unacceptable. I would have thought such a provision would more likely come from that side of the Committee than from this, strangely.
I hope that the Government will listen to this. I know my noble friend said that this was merely a probing amendment, but I think it deserves to be more than that. I would like to see this beefed up for Report, when we can perhaps vote on such measures.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I am pleased to support my noble friend Lord Frost’s amendments, particularly Amendments 28 and 29.
As we meet this afternoon and consider the American elections that took place yesterday, we can look back and think about the sanctity of the franchise and how important that is. We are very fortunate in this country that we do not, for instance, have gerrymandered electoral districts; we have independent Boundary Commissions. We are also fortunate in this country that most people believe that the franchise is clean and safeguarded and that the electoral process is one of integrity, honesty and transparency—and that is because, broadly speaking, it is.
Your Lordships will know that, in the United States, the Jim Crow laws and the residency, literacy and numeracy laws were used to ostracise and discriminate against African Americans and others. Thankfully, they are a thing of the past, but that goes to show how important it is that we protect the sanctity of our electoral process, which my noble friend Lord Hayward rightly mentioned.
The current Commonwealth voting right is outdated, as my noble friend said. It is anomalous and indefensible, and it is time to bring our legislation up to date. As has been said, the vast majority of Commonwealth nations do not have reciprocal voting arrangements with British citizens. There are around 1 million Commonwealth citizens living in the UK, 66% of whom are qualified and registered to vote, as at March this year.
The beauty of these amendments is that they are not harsh and draconian. They do not remove, with ministerial or statutory fiat, the right for Commonwealth citizens to vote. They are incremental, permissive, probing amendments that invite the Government to think about the reciprocity between countries. In so doing, they recognise how important the familial and friendship relationships we have with countries are, as my noble friend alluded to. The other thing is that they are colour-blind. They do not make reference to ethnicity, religion, background or gender. They talk about nations such as New Zealand, Nigeria, Ghana, Australia, Canada, Suriname—I think—Guyana and others that are members of our Commonwealth family.
Although the number of Commonwealth nationals residing in the UK and the percentage of Commonwealth citizens registered to vote in the UK have been estimated, the Government have been unable to produce accurate figures concerning the number of qualifying Commonwealth nationals in the UK. That is a very significant knowledge gap. If you are fighting a general election in good faith, you really need to know who the people are who are going to be able to vote for you. If you do not have a cumulative estimate nationally of how many of those Commonwealth citizens are able to vote, you may very well rather cynically feel that you are appealing to a nobbled jury. You have to be sure of who the electorate are.
Voting tied to citizenship is the global norm for a good reason. Elected representatives adopt significant responsibility to act in their electors’ best interests. If electoral accountability is to function properly, the electorate must be stakeholders in Britain’s long-term future. Unless this is robustly the case, representatives, be they mayors, MPs or councillors, will not be bound to deliver genuinely prudent decision-making. Allowing those who are not British citizens to contribute to electoral outcomes risks undermining the quality of that representation by detracting from candidates’ requirement to appeal to people who fundamentally care about their nation’s future.
This is the thin end of the wedge. If we do not get a handle and focus on that philosophical issue, we could quickly slip into the realms of divisive identity politics. We have already seen the beginning of that in our country, as we have in many parts of the world, and we wish to avoid that happening. At its worst, it may encourage political short-termism or the dilution of the representatives’ accountability away from the interests of British citizens and towards the interests of merely current residents. This is a nuanced yet important distinction. It is a fact that Britain is and has been for some time experiencing a sizeable growth in immigration, including from Commonwealth nations.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
My Lords, I too support these amendments, and I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Frost for making sure that people of Irish citizenship can definitely continue to register. I have heard other people ask: why displace the Commonwealth and not the Irish? We have a very different relationship with Ireland and the people of Ireland, and that is why I hope we see these amendments come back on Report.
Lord Pack (LD)
It is worth starting by paying tribute to the many Commonwealth citizens who, in both peace and wartime, have made very many significant contributions to our country. But it is also right, as several noble Peers have mentioned, that the Commonwealth is the creation of an unusual set of historical circumstances. If we were starting completely from scratch, maybe with a new written constitution for the country, we might take a slightly different approach to some aspects of it.
In the spirit of the noble Lord, Lord Frost, saying that these are probing amendments, there are two points worth highlighting. One is that some restrictions exist on which Commonwealth citizens are able to register to vote. The combination of the requirements under the RPA 1983 and the linked requirements under the Immigration Act 1971 does not provide the fully open door that was perhaps touched on in some of the speeches earlier. Also, this is only one part of a wider question, because one could similarly reasonably ask why, when it comes to the local government franchise, somebody who is living in this country for decades, legally here and diligently paying their taxes every year, and who has no criminal record, is not allowed to vote for their local council.
I use that as an example of how there are many related issues. It would be wrong to single out Commonwealth citizens as the only part of that complex picture, as if they are the only group about whose right to vote we should in some way feel concerned. If the Government decide to look further at this issue, I hope it will be in the spirit of seeing it as part of a wider, more complex issue, rather than there being a specific problem that means we should single out Commonwealth citizens above and beyond all those other aspects of the issue for consideration.
Baroness O'Neill of Bexley (Con)
My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Frost, for tabling these amendments and giving us the opportunity to have this important discussion on the voting rights of Commonwealth citizens. I also thank my noble friends Lord Mackinlay of Richborough, Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Lady Coffey for their thoughtful contributions.
It is right that the right to vote in our parliamentary elections and choose our Government is restricted to British citizens, although there are some exceptions for those with close historical links to our country. I have already spoken about our concerns in relation to the consequences of devolved arrangements in Scotland and Wales. The exceptions that I mentioned and that noble Lords have discussed during the debate are long-standing provisions that were implemented to reflect the special status of Irish and Commonwealth citizens in particular. I suppose I should declare an interest here, as both my parents were Irish. I do not remember them ever voting in Irish elections, but they always voted with pride here.
The arrangement we have with the Republic of Ireland precedes the EEC and the EU. It stems from the establishment of the Irish Free State in the 1920s and the administrative agreement on the common travel area. The two countries have broad, reciprocal voting rights. I appreciate the concerns that have been raised today about Commonwealth citizens’ eligibility to vote—especially what was said earlier, which is difficult for anyone to justify. However, these matters are complex, and we should be careful about rushing into changes without wider consideration of broader government policy on citizenship and integration.
No changes to election laws should be rushed, and we will be discussing the consequences of doing so throughout this Bill. I thank noble Lords for raising this issue and look forward to the Minister’s response.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, we always welcome probing amendments; they generate interesting discussions in this House. However, it may not surprise the noble Lord, Lord Frost, that the Government will not support these amendments.
Amendments similar to these were tabled in the other place during earlier Bill stages, and the Government’s views on the topic have been made very clear. The entitlement of resident Commonwealth citizens to vote reflects our very close historical ties with Commonwealth countries. The noble Lord, Lord Pack, referred to recognising the contribution from those countries. From the selfless sacrifice of Commonwealth forces who fought side by side with British troops in the two world wars, to the Windrush generation who made Britain their home and contributed to our society, community, culture and public services, the ties which bind Commonwealth citizens to the UK are inextricable. Those rights must be respected. Commonwealth citizens’ voting rights are not and have never been based on a quid pro quo. To be clear, a qualifying Commonwealth citizen who is only visiting the country and has no home here would not be eligible to vote. The Government will not be removing Commonwealth citizens’ voting rights.
On reciprocity, each Commonwealth country determines its own electoral franchise. Reciprocity is not a condition of the UK’s long-standing arrangements. As I have already set out in relation to the noble Lord’s Amendments 5, 7 and 31, the Government are also committed to maintaining and defending the devolution settlements.
Baroness Coffey (Con)
Does the Minister think that Commonwealth voters aged 16 should also be voting in the elections?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
The same voting rights will apply across the franchise.
Lord Frost (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response; as she said, I am not entirely surprised by it. I thank those who have spoken in this short debate. It has been worth having, and I do not think that the issue will go away.
I apologise to my noble friend Lord Mackinlay for not mentioning that he was the only noble Lord to raise this issue on Second Reading. He has followed it for some time and, as his intervention showed, he knows a lot about it. He mentioned Australia, which has an extremely restrictive policy generally. It restricts voting and candidacy to citizens, and it prevents dual nationality entirely as a condition for being a member of the legislature. Australia may be at one end of the spectrum; we are definitely at the other. The international norm is that only citizens vote and only citizens are candidates: I find it hard to see how one can defend any other position. Of course, citizens of many other countries in the Commonwealth and outside the Commonwealth have made huge contributions to this country, but that is not how we determine voting rights.
I have one last comment, for the noble Lord, Lord Pack. I entirely understand, and in some ways sympathise with, his asking, “Why should somebody who has lived here for a long time not get to vote in local elections?” That point is worth discussing, but national elections, referenda and questions are not the same as local questions and issues. It is something worth thinking about, but if one went down that road it should be for everyone, or at least for logically defined categories, not a hangover from the Commonwealth.
I will stop there. I thank noble Lords for a good discussion. We will reflect on what we will do on Report. It will probably be worth having further discussion and reflection on this. Meanwhile, I beg leave to withdraw my amendment.
“Members of the House of Lords: entitlement to voteA person aged 16 or over who is registered as a parliamentary elector is entitled to vote at a UK parliamentary election, unless disqualified from voting by virtue of sections 3 or 3A of the Representation of the People Act 1983.”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment would allow sitting members of the House of Lords to vote in general elections.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I rise to move Amendment 32 on behalf of my noble friend Lord Blunkett, who regrets that he cannot be in this place. I have never really understood why noble Lords are disfranchised when it comes to general elections, so I look forward to my noble friend the Minister’s explanation.
I will focus my remarks on Amendment 41 in my name, the purpose of which is to extend the right to vote in general elections to UK residents who have settled status or indefinite leave to remain, and on Amendment 42, which would extend the right to vote in local elections to all residents with a form of legal immigration status. The amendments would do no more than bring UK elections into line with those in Wales and Scotland, both of which use the legislation that enfranchised 16 and 17 year-olds to extend the vote to foreign residents. I understand the extension is working well in those countries and administrators have not reported problems with implementation.
At present, there are 4.4 million foreign residents who cannot vote in UK general elections and 1.2 million who cannot vote at all in England and Northern Ireland. The case for my amendment is simple. It is undemocratic and unfair that so many residents contribute to this country in various ways, including but not limited to taxation, yet have no say in how it is governed and on decisions that affect them.
This would simplify the voting system considerably. The current voter eligibility rules are very complex, depending on nationality, date of arrival in the UK, whether the country of origin has a bilateral voting rights agreement with the UK, and which nation of the UK the person lives in. Only 66% of eligible EU and Commonwealth citizens are registered to vote. The complexity involved in understanding who can vote means that many who are eligible do not register. Extending the right to vote would improve turnout among those migrant residents who currently have the right to vote.
There is also a case on grounds of social cohesion. Democratic participation gives residents a stake in the future of their society and allows them to feel they are equal contributors. This could be particularly important when the franchise is extended to 16 and 17 year-olds, as I am told that some teachers are expressing concern about how they will discuss in school the fact that some pupils will get the vote while others will not. The Migrant Democracy Project, which brought this issue to my attention, has rightly said that
“democracy works best when it is inclusive for all who it serves. All those who call the UK their home have vested political and social interests in how their communities and country are governed”.
As I noted at Second Reading, the Lord Chancellor, the right honourable Alex Norris MP, tabled an amendment to legislation on similar lines in 2022. We now finally have an opportunity to achieve what he aimed for and catch up with Wales and Scotland. It is surely in line with the principles underlying the Representation of the People Bill. I hope therefore that my noble friend will accept the case, which I believe to be strong. I beg to move.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
My Lords, Amendment 37 in my name seeks to consider the consequences of the two major changes proposed in the Bill on the size of constituency and council ward electorates, which could be significant. Improvements to voter registration are designed to make the electoral roll more complete. In some areas of the country, the difference between the number of people registered for health services and the number on the electoral register is stark. For instance, the Electoral Commission estimates that only 70% of 18 to 34 year-olds are registered. For those in private rented accommodation, the figure is as low as 66%, and for those who are in homes at social rent, it is 80%—so the electoral register is skewed against the young and those in rented accommodation. That discrimination obviously has an impact on election results, but also on the size of constituencies and then constituent council wards.
The other major change proposed in the Bill is the addition of 16 and 17 year-olds to the register. The House of Commons Library has a very helpful breakdown of people in each age group in every constituency. Adding 16 and 17 year-olds to the register has a disproportionate effect on constituency electorates and hence ward electorates. For example, Birmingham Ladywood has 5,070 16 and 17 year-olds, while Bradford West has 4,236. Both constituencies will then have more than 81,000 electors. The upper limit at the last boundary review was 77,000, so they will easily break the 5% tolerance criterion that was applied at that stage.
The additions then impact on ward electorates. In my council of Kirklees in west Yorkshire, based on the data, there will instantly be an additional 10,000 electors in the 16 to 17 year-old age group. On average, this will add 450 voters to each ward. However, in the Dewsbury part of the borough, there will be 600 additional electors per ward. Kirklees wards are already expected to have 15,000 electors. Some wards will then have nearly 16,000—and this is before attempts to improve registration have been included.
Unlike parliamentary constituencies, wards across the country are not required to have a roughly equal electorate. In many unitary authorities, there are fewer than 3,000 electors per councillor, whereas in others, such as my own, there are more than 5,000. This inequality of representation needs to be discussed. Is it fair on citizens that some are more equal than others?
Hence my Amendment 37, which requires the Secretary of State to lay a report before Parliament within six months to review what effect extending the franchise will have on the size of constituency and ward electorates. Will the Minister, who is not in her place, provide the estimated increase in electors for each constituency—it is possible to do it, given the figures in the House of Commons Library, certainly for 16 and 17-year-olds—and say whether that inequality is acceptable in a democracy? Will she also consider whether the wide disparity between ward electorates contributes to the equal access to democracy which this country is pledged to provide?
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, I am very taken with the points just made by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, about the distorting effects on existing boundaries from extending the franchise to 16 and 17 year-olds, but I think she could have gone further. The way in which automatic registration, which is also part of this group, takes into account the universities will have a further distorting effect, particularly on urban constituencies, in another insult to the country mass. This Government are always focused on the imbalance in the cities, but this particular case puts the rural areas at a disadvantage because, if a student from out of town is registered at home but is automatically registered at university, that person has two votes, which will disproportionately affect the concentrated urban situations.
I am sure the Minister, when she returns to her place, will dismiss the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, as wholly unnecessary and say this is nothing to be worried about, but I would like to give a lesson from history. The noble Baroness, who is returning to the Chamber, and I participated on some of those Covid calls during the pandemic in 2020, and there was a rush from the city to the countryside. People who lived in London, for example—but other cities are available—chased to north Norfolk in particular.
I see my noble friend Lord Prior on the Bench in front of me; he was a Member of Parliament for North Norfolk in a previous life. These people were not registered with the NHS and were not registered to vote, yet they consumed all the services in North Norfolk. My concern is that automatic registration will not reflect the reality. It is not just distorting the boundaries, important though that is, and the electoral numbers. The degree of automatic registration could distort the access to services that just do not keep up with these registers. So, I support the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. She has identified more unintended consequences from the double whammy of extending the franchise and automatic registration.
That leads me on to my Amendment 45 in this group, which is a probing amendment that asks how, with automatic registration, the electoral registration officer will know when a person is eligible to be registered, or just passing through, or has indefinite leave to remain, or is just a tourist. It seeks to say that, if you are not a British or Commonwealth citizen, you have to apply under individual electoral registration and demonstrate your eligibility, as you do at the moment. The duty is on these overseas electors to provide absolute proof of entitlement to vote, rather than pressurise the electoral registration officer to make guesses. The chances are that these people will not have national insurance numbers and will not be present on many UK databases.
How on earth is the ERO to know? How will he know to prevent a duplicate when a wife keeps her maiden name for professional purposes but has already registered for a married name? Just because there is a Mr Smith who pays the council tax, it does not mean that Mrs Smith is eligible if she happens to be a foreign-born spouse. I think the Committee can start to see quite a lot of different practical complications here.
I mentioned Mr and Mrs Smith, but there are some cultures where the husband and the wife have different surnames. I am thinking particularly of President Zelensky in Ukraine, whose wife is Mrs Zelenska. Neither of them is eligible to vote in our elections, but that is an example of the way in which foreign cultures have different mores to ours. Each ERO, if there is to be automatic registration, potentially of foreign subjects, will have to understand all these peculiarities. That is an unreasonable burden on the ERO.
My amendment is a small one, but it seeks to probe the burdens we place on the electoral registration officer to register people who have no legal or digital footprint in this country and who cannot be validated or authenticated. It would make it clear that if you are not a British, an EU or a Commonwealth citizen, and you are entitled to participate in our democracy, you must apply just as you do today. Let these people make their case with the appropriate documentation, so that the registration officer can scrutinise rather than make guesses. If the register is based on guesswork, it undermines the integrity of our democracy and, with it, trust in the democratic process and the institutions that flow from it.
Lord Jackson of Peterborough (Con)
My Lords, I do not really understand the amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, because she will know that local government boundaries are essentially informed as a result of physical or natural features and community links. Her amendment would have been more coherent if it had linked the delivery of key public services within an expanded ward which was the result of a greater registration of 16 and 17 year-olds, but I fail to see the point of producing a report saying, “There are going to be more people in this ward vis-à-vis other wards”.
If one is talking about the delivery of public services, that is a fair point to make. But equally, in places such as Christchurch, Worthing and Hove, you would also therefore talk about the delivery of services for older people, where there is a greater preponderance of them. Unless I am being particularly obtuse, I cannot see the point of the obligation she is seeking that the Government produce a report on the number of 16 and 17 year-olds, which numerically we will already know.
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
The whole purpose is so that we have a democracy that is based, first, on one person, one vote, but then on having boundaries for our electors that are more or less equal in size. Whenever there is a constituency boundary review, there are always parts of the country—in areas such as the highlands or the Isle of Wight—where reflecting the geography of the place means that it is better to have something outside the tolerance of the criteria that have been set to try to make constituencies of a similar size. That is because each is going to elect one person to Parliament to make decisions on behalf of their citizens. To have some representing 82,000 or 83,000 and some at the other end of the scale currently representing fewer than 70,000 leads to inequalities, which is why we have regular boundary reviews.
Within a local authority area, the number of wards is determined, which leads to the number of electors in each ward. In Kirklees, each ward has 5,000 electors per councillor, whereas 3,000 electors or fewer is the norm in London boroughs. If local authorities were required to have wards of a similar size, there could be more equal representation in those areas. That is my argument. We can do it for constituency boundaries, so why are we not doing it for local authority council wards?
Lord Rennard (LD)
My Lords, I support the principle behind Amendment 32 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, just as I previously supported the principle when the noble Lord, Lord Naseby, introduced a Private Member’s Bill in 2020 and when the noble Lord, Lord Dubs, introduced an amendment to what became the Elections Act 2022. The ban on Peers voting in general elections belongs to bygone times when the House was entirely hereditary and had an absolute veto over legislation, and when Members of this House were often Prime Minister. We no longer have an absolute veto on legislation; we have no say at all over financial measures, including the Budget; and we have no say on who is the Prime Minister, because that is determined solely by MPs.
The amendment is far from being our priority, however, when elsewhere in the Bill we are addressing issues of considerable importance, such as the many millions of ordinary people missing from the electoral registers who are therefore unable to vote. I also consider it ironic for Members of this House to claim the right to elect Members of the House of Commons without equally supporting the right of the people to have a say in who sits in this Chamber.
Lord Frost (Non-Afl)
My Lords, I will briefly speak to Amendments 41 and 42 in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. These amendments arguably ought to have been in the previous group, because they raise very similar questions. For reasons of time, I will not run equal and opposite arguments to the ones I just ran in the other group, but I want to make two points.
First, the effect of Amendments 41 and 42 would be once again to extend the franchise beyond citizens, but in a different way. Once you do that, you lose a firm grounding for the principle you are trying to apply. In this case, it would extend the franchise to anyone with EU settled status or anybody with indefinite leave to enter or remain, which is something that can be changed quite quickly. As we have seen this week, it is relatively easy to change ILR conditions. If these amendments ever came into force, you could have two citizens identical in every respect except that one was a care worker and one was not. Under the proposals announced this week, one would get the right to vote five years earlier than the other. I use that example to show how fluid the electorate can become if they are not soundly grounded on the objective fact of citizenship.
The other point that I want to make that is relevant here is one that my noble friend Lord Jackson made in the previous group. He alluded to the fact that residents do not necessarily have the same interests as citizens; they are not completely substitutable—citizenship means something. In local elections, that may be less so, but with national-level issues, it seems reasonable to think that residents will have different interests on certain important questions—on trade policy, trade links, visas and travel, for instance, or even on defence policy, and which country we choose to be allied with. Those are questions that citizenship and a commitment to a country affect. Of course, constitutional issues are the last one; the sense of legitimacy about a vote on the constitutional future of the country, or an aspect of it, really depends on whether you are legally committed to that country or merely living here. If we extend that situation and make it even more disconnected from citizenship than it already is, we risk undermining the legitimacy of some really quite important votes, because people can see that residents from the EU or elsewhere do not necessarily have the same interests and views as citizens. For those reasons, to come back to the point that I made earlier, citizenship is the only safe basis, and any attempt to extend it for any less satisfactory criterion is inevitably going to work out less well.
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, I shall comment briefly on one or two aspects of the debate. I first make the observation that I have a group of clause stand part debates later on, and it was my error that probably caused the officials serious concern when briefing the Minister as to why I wanted to have stand part debates on Clauses 18, 19 and 20 but had not included Clause 17. I shall leave that aside.
I have two other observations. One is in relation to the comments and amendment from the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock. I have strong sympathy with her on the size of local government wards and the burdens imposed on some councillors in some parts of the country and not imposed on others. There appears to be no logic behind the position that we have from the size of one council or another. I could understand it if one was talking about large geographical areas—that is a perfectly good reason for saying that a councillor has difficulty in serving an area. The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, referred to Kirklees; there are other metropolitan authorities where the number of voters per councillor is substantially less than in places such as Kirklees and Birmingham—the noble Baroness cited London. There is no logic to that whatever.
I shall not go on to the question of parliamentary boundaries, because I referred to it during a debate earlier. I merely make two other observations. One is that Clause 17, in new Section 12A(1)(c), refers to
“the person appears to the officer to be of voting age”.
I am not sure that I am happy with that phraseology. Equally, my noble friend Lord Jackson referred in passing to Christchurch, and I am not happy about that reference either, although the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, because of his experience in winning the by-election that crushed my candidacy, would probably get more pleasure out of the reference than I did.
Lord Pack (LD)
My Lords, I was about to say that I would pick up where the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, finished, but I shall skip over Christchurch and come to the points that my noble friend Lady Pinnock made about her amendment. There is one important knock-on factor that has not yet been raised in this debate. The age profile of the population varies significantly across the country and hence varies between parliamentary constituencies and councils, but it also varies significantly within many councils. There are in many councils areas of, on average, much older population and, on average, much younger population. Therefore, it is very plausible that the extension of the franchise to 16 and 17 year-olds will have a very unequal effect on different council wards around the country as to the electorate in those wards. Hence there is a knock-on effect on councillor workload, the ability of voters to get a good service from their councillor and that fundamental democratic principle of trying to give everybody an equal vote. There is also a knock-on in terms of, for example, the work of the ongoing local government boundary reviews, which needs to be tied into giving 16 and 17 year-olds the vote. I hope that we will be able to hear from the Minister what thought has been given to how that process will be properly integrated with the potential knock-ons from this Bill.
In turning to some of the other amendments in this group, I simply observe that Amendment 32 from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, would be an excellent amendment to a Bill that introduced democratic elections to this place, and I hope that we have a chance to debate such a Bill in the near future.
On Amendment 45 from the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, I simply observe that there are some datasets in which EU citizens and Commonwealth citizens absolutely are present, which may turn out to be usable depending on how the automatic voter registration pilots continue to play out. I would not quite describe that group of people as completely unmoored from the data that is available.
I perhaps slightly pre-empt Amendment 55 from the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, because I think there is a useful point to highlight here. I can understand why that amendment seeks in particular to prioritise providing information in writing. It certainly was the case in the past that being written to was a gold-standard form of communication that, rightly, was often prioritised: if something was legally important, it had to be in writing. It is, however, reasonable to say that we have moved on quite a long way from that, and for two reasons. The first is, sadly, the decline in the reliability of postal delivery services, whether it is Royal Mail or alternative delivery mechanisms. Saying that you are sending a letter to somebody does not have the same guarantee that it used to. Secondly, conversely, people receive information in a wide variety of other ways now. I take the example of HMRC. Every time I log in to its website, to do my tax return or to check things, HMRC is keen to encourage me to switch to having legally required notices about any tax return I might have to do sent to me electronically in future. Many people choose that. I happen to find it more convenient to have those notices sent to me the old-fashioned way so that I can scribble on them and so on, so I have not opted in yet, although I am sure that the incessant notifications will wear me down at some point. That illustrates why it is important to have a range of options available for providing information. Embedding in legislation that it must be in writing is not necessarily the best course. It is a regular feature of secondary legislation at the moment. It is something for which I think the Government should be given credit that we regularly see SIs come to this place that require legal notification to be given in some way and the Government put in quite modern wording that provides flexibility to use modern forms of communication, where appropriate.
Finally, on the right to vote, the split of amendments between this group and the previous group illustrates the point that I made earlier that there is an issue that may be worth looking at, but it should be looked at in the round, as a whole. There is a risk that, if we always single out particular groups of people who we are worried might get registered when they should not be, or who we think maybe should not have the vote, it can give the impression of being unduly fearful of, or uncomfortable with, those groups if we are not at the same time looking at the full, rounded picture. That is much the better way to proceed.
Baroness O'Neill of Bexley (Con)
My Lords, this has been an interesting debate on a variety of issues, and I thank noble Lords for their contributions. Amendment 32 from the noble Lord, Lord Blunkett, would allow sitting Members of this House to vote in general elections. Our disenfranchisement can be traced back centuries in common law as well as to a Motion passed by the other place in 1699 which stated that,
“no Peer of this Kingdom hath any Right to give his Vote in the Election for any Member to serve in Parliament”.
As Members of your Lordships’ House, we have a voice in Parliament. It is right that we do not also have our voices heard through elected representatives in the other place.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Blunkett for tabling Amendment 32, moved by my noble friend Lady Lister, which seeks to allow sitting Members of this House to vote in UK parliamentary elections.
I remember I had a fascinating conversation with my MP, Kevin Bonavia. He was talking about voting, and I said, “I’m sorry Kevin, I’m not going to vote for you”. He was a bit horrified and stepped back. He had not realised that I could not vote because I am in here. Of course, if I had been able to vote, I would have voted for him.
I recognise that the noble Lord has raised this issue before and that he wishes to address the difference between the voting rights of sitting Members of this House and those of other electors. However, it is important to recognise the particular role that we, as Members of this House, have in Parliament. We can participate in debates, introduce and scrutinise legislation, and ask Parliamentary Questions. As such, unlike other voters, we have the opportunity to represent our views directly in Parliament, rather than relying on an elected Member of the other place to do so. This is the basis for the long-standing restriction—I think the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, said it goes back to 1699—on sitting Peers voting in UK parliamentary elections, and the Government do not believe there is a case for changing these arrangements. Of course, this does not mean that Members of this House are excluded from voting altogether. We can vote in local and devolved elections, where we do not have the same direct role. I hope that explains the Government’s position on that amendment.
Amendment 37 appears to require the Secretary of State to report to Parliament within six months on the impact of extending voting rights to 16 and 17 year-olds on the number and boundaries of council electoral areas. The Local Government Boundary Commission for England is already considering how to incorporate newly enfranchised electors into its electorate forecasts and does not anticipate that the changes will require a different approach to electoral reviews.
The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, asked me a question about local government reorganisation. Most of the proposals that were put forward for LGR did not involve boundary changes. Those that do will of course be subject to review by the Local Government Boundary Commission.
I know the noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, has raised these issues before about the variability of ward sizes, and I am happy to continue that conversation with her. But I am sure she knows that this is really a matter for the Local Government Boundary Commission, so we do not see a clear need for a separate review by the Secretary of State. I thank my—
Baroness Pinnock (LD)
I am sorry to interrupt, but unfortunately, it is not the role of the Local Government Boundary Commission to make those decisions. That is the point I hope to make. The determination is made by the council. If there is no guidance to councils—as there is not—on seeking to create wards of a similar size across the country, the existing disparity will continue and get worse.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I am very happy to carry on that conversation with the noble Baroness. I feel that, in the end, we are going to come up against local determination versus national determination, but we can have that conversation.
On the amendments tabled by my noble friend Lady Lister, and the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, let me be clear that the Government recognise the enormous contribution made by people from other countries who choose to make the United Kingdom their home. However, the Government do not believe that lawful residence alone should confer voting rights. Citizenship restrictions, rather than residence alone, are the norm for participation in elections in most democracies. The Government have no current plans to extend voting rights to further nationalities or to introduce a residency-based franchise.
There are, of course, different choices within the United Kingdom. Scotland and Wales have chosen to extend their devolved franchises more widely. We respect their right to take that approach within their devolved competence, just as it is right for this Parliament to determine the franchise for elections for which it is responsible.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, for his engagement, via Amendment 45, with the Bill’s provision for improving voter registration. Although I would never wholly dismiss his points and he has been very calm today, he needs to calm down a bit sometimes. His points on Monday suggested that democracy was in imminent danger of collapsing because the EROs and the computers that assist them could not recognise an apostrophe, and today he is worried about the duplicating Mr Smiths. Our EROs already deal with all these issues. Under long-standing rules, to be registered to vote in a general election you must be a British, Irish or qualifying Commonwealth citizen. In England, qualifying EU citizens are also able to register to vote for certain elections, such as for local councils, although not for UK parliamentary elections. The Government have no plans to change this. I do not think that it would be fair to establish an automated voter registration system in which some eligible citizens cannot be directly registered or their details directly updated. The noble Lord referred to President Zelensky and his wife having different surnames. Actually, our Prime Minister and his wife have different surnames. EROs are very used to dealing with these situations.
I turn to Amendments 46, 53, 54 and 55, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, and the noble Lord, Lord Jamieson. The Government agree that direct registration must operate accurately and with appropriate safeguards. Clause 17 already secures those outcomes. New Section 12A requires a person to appear to the registration officer to be both of voting age and entitled to be registered before a person is directly registered. New Section 12B also requires a person to appear to the registration officer to be both of voting age and entitled to be registered before the notice is sent. This requires the officer to assess the available information and reach a view on whether those conditions are met.
As well as making the point in the amendment, the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, raised the phrase “appears to the officer”. This is established language in electoral registration law. Section 10ZC of the Representation of the People Act 1983 uses the same formulation for registration following an application. This clause preserves that test with respect to direct registration. Schedule 2 to the Bill will preserve that test while distinguishing the existing application-based process from the new process without an application. As now, registration officers will remain under a statutory duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, that everyone entitled to be registered is registered and no others.
Finally, new Section 12B(3) already expressly requires a notice to be given in writing to a person before they are directly registered. The power concerning how it may be given relates only to the method of delivery—for example, by post, by hand or electronically. Therefore, the amendments would add no further protection to the safeguards already contained in the Bill.
On Amendments 56 and 57, Amendment 56 raises an important consideration that is already envisaged by the Bill. If an electoral registration officer leaves their role, their successor in the job would hold the records until the end of the retention period. This helps to ensure that people who have opted out of direct registration during the response period do not receive further notices, even if their electoral registration officer changes. I can also clarify that retention of direct registration notice records for five years will ensure that those people who have responded to a notice and subsequently claimed an exemption will then not receive another notice during that time. However, they will be liable to be invited to register by an electoral registration officer. If they remain unregistered after five years and still appear to be eligible, they will be sent another notice. The Government believe this to be an appropriate length of time and it is consistent with the period the Electoral Commission holds copies of a register, which in turn aligns with the maximum length of a Parliament. I hope this provides sufficient reassurance on these points.
Lord Hayward (Con)
Could the Minister further consider her comments on the point I raised? The Minister referred quite rightly to legislation that is now in effect that is some 40 or 50 years old. In those days, the vast majority of people did not have a passport, a driving licence with a picture on it or virtually any other form of proof of identity. Therefore “appearing to be” was a judgment that one made in those days. We have introduced voter ID and all the associated requirements with it. Given that this legislation intends to modernise and bring up to date our election law, could I please ask that the Minister give that further consideration?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I thank the noble Lord for those comments. I am always happy to give things further consideration. Under new Section 12B, the registration officer has to be certain that a person appears to be of voting age and entitled to be registered before they send the notice. Voter ID is another reassurance once they get to the polling station. I will reflect on his comments.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
My Lords, I thank noble Lords who have contributed to this debate on this rather eclectic group of amendments, and I do so on behalf of my noble friend Lord Blunkett —who I sense has got the bit between his teeth on this, so I think we have probably not heard the last of it.
I must admit I was not convinced by the arguments against the amendment. As the noble Lord, Lord Rennard, pointed out, we have rather changed since 1699. We are a very different House than we were then. It did strike me that the argument used by my noble friend could just as well be used to say that the Members of the other House would not have the vote—they have got all that influence.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
I thank my noble friend for giving way. The point is that MPs stand down when the election is called, so they are technically not MPs when they go to vote.
Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)
I thank my noble friend for that correction. However, I suspect my noble friend Lord Blunkett will not be convinced and will be back with much stronger arguments than I have at present.
I accept the arguments that have been put on my own amendments. It is a shame that we cannot follow Scotland and Wales. It may be that, in time, the evidence from there will show that citizenship is still taken seriously even if the franchise is extended in that way, but I will not go into that now. I shall not try to cover all the points that were made in what was an eclectic debate, so I beg leave to withdraw the amendment.
Lord Fuller
“Age-appropriate election informationThe Secretary of State or Electoral Commission must take steps to publish neutral and impartial information relating to the conduct of elections on social media channels, which is suitable for those who may be a “relevant child” under section 214A(2) of the Online Safety Act 2023 (power to require providers of internet services to prevent or restrict access by children to internet services), but who are registered to vote and may be under 16 years of age.”Member's explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to ensure that politically impartial information is published suitable for 15 year olds who are registered to vote and who will have never voted before.
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, I am calming down. This group, in which most of the amendments are mine, is related to the third group but there is more detail this time. I am trying to put your Lordships’ House in the shoes of the 16 year-old casting their first vote on their birthday. Statistically, 1,917 16 year-olds are likely to be able to go down to the polling station and vote on their birthday, and I am thinking of them. This cohort will not have voted before. There is a serious need for neutral information about the mechanics of the election for those whom the Government want to vote for the first time.
My Amendment 34, which goes with the rub of the Bill, proposes that the Electoral Commission is given a special statutory duty to design media that appeals to the inexperienced cohort about how elections work, how you prove your identity, how not to invalidate the ballot paper by marking it with your initials—a mistake I once made as a youngster—and so forth. I spoke to the noble Baroness, Lady Benjamin, earlier; times have changed since we were young. We were brought up on “Play School”, “Blue Peter”, “Bagpuss”, “Crackerjack!”, and Kate Adie and Alastair Burnet reading the news. Nowadays, news is consumed in snippets on social media, phones and tablets—at home or on the go—and youngsters are not interested in what the BBC says any more, still less than the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. It is important that the information produced by the Electoral Commission is not just produced in an age-relevant manner but distributed appropriately, and that means online.
That brings me to the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act 2026 and the amended Online Safety Act, which give the Secretary of State powers to restrict access to social media for those under 16. We understand the reasons, but sometimes legislation requires a trade-off to prevent a greater harm. The Act gives powers to segment that ban by age and material, so I am not proposing something revolutionary that would nullify Parliament’s decision. I want to use the powers in the Act to carve out an exception for people under 16 who are, importantly, registered to vote, allowing them access to election-related materials on social media in advance of an election. This would include those who will vote on their 16th birthday, who would otherwise have been excluded up to and including the day before.
How can these children be expected to form a view of whom to support at the ballot box if they cannot see in advance the full gamut of election materials through social channels, including practical information from the Electoral Commission about how the mechanics of the vote work? My probing amendment seeks to bring into focus the obvious dichotomy that, on the one hand, youngsters are mature enough to play their part in choosing the governance of our nation but, on the other, they are so immature that they need to be shielded from the messages on which that election depends. This is the consequence of the muddle that this Government have created in blurring the boundary between childhood and adulthood.
My amendment says that a social media ban that keeps youngsters away from the candidates, and more particularly from the Electoral Commission’s information, would be the greater harm, by undermining the democratic foundations of our nation. Technically, Section 214A of the Online Safety Act 2023, added by Section 70 of the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Act, would be amended—if you are registered to vote, you would be able to join the social media revolution. The Government say that they want to improve young people’s engagement in democracy; I cannot think of a stronger recruiting sergeant for democratic involvement than incentivising youngsters who are preparing to vote by giving them access to the socials. That is why I suggested in group 3 on Monday that the age of voter registration should be set at 15, not 14, partly because 15 would be an appropriate age as those who had registered could access social media. I am sure that we will return to this on Report.
However, there is another second-order consequence of my proposal. We currently have no definitive method to authenticate somebody under 16 proving their age for the purposes of the Online Safety Act. Ofcom is getting in a right muddle, trying to think of four different ways by which youngsters can prove their age. If they were registered to vote, they would be on the database and that would be enough, so there are some other areas in which this would enable internet service providers to fulfil an identity and age check. At a stroke, it would lift a weight from parents, who are subject to intolerable peer pressure from their children and their friends to let them have a social account when we know that, if they are too young, it is just not in their best interests. Amendment 39 would strengthen the hand of parents and the current system of age verification.
Amendments 35 to 37 cover the schools angle, which was covered in group 3 earlier today. At Second Reading, I warned that the Bill brings party politics into schools. I am not talking about the pedagogy of politics but of political partisanship. The Bill puts teachers in a difficult position. It drives wedges between pupils and invites parents to complain that their own political prejudices have not been adequately reinforced. It is our job to set the statutory ground rules for how electoral politics is treated in our schools. I heard the Minister earlier, but we need to show teachers, pupils and parents that we will not permit a Wild West that disrupts classrooms and increases tension. We need to strengthen their hand and resist providing a conduit for party activists.
My amendments do not suggest that schools should not discuss the election at all. After all, the young people will not have voted before, and teachers will have a role in explaining the process. However, that does not mean that schools should be a dumping ground for all manner of party leaflets. Otherwise, schools will become a magnet for activists, who will conclude that they can reach hundreds of voters at once—which is a damn sight easier than knocking on hundreds of doors.
My amendments are not just about party activists; I am also interested in protecting children from the undue influence of a teacher’s personal political predispositions. My Amendment 35, on the duty to be impartial, is intended to strengthen teachers’ ability to insulate themselves from outside influence and ensure that learners aged 14 to 18 can make neutral, informed decisions about their vote. My Amendment 36 prohibits the display of election materials in educational establishments outside the structured classroom environment, which must be scrupulously impartial. Amendment 38 seeks to ensure that hustings held in schools are politically balanced and that all candidates are given reasonable notice and the opportunity to attend, although whether they actually turn up will be up to them.
This is an important group. The other place failed to consider the practicality and second-order consequences of extending the franchise to those who are so young that they are still at school. We must stop turning schools into political battlegrounds, sowing division and reinforcing sectarianism. This happens in some areas with campaigning in Urdu, which places teachers and schools in an invidious position. Just as importantly, this group will allow those who are mature enough to vote to look at the socials, provided that they have exercised the privilege of registering to vote in the first place. I beg to move.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
My Lords, Amendments 34, 35, 36, 38 and 39 in the name of the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, do us a favour in that they force us to consider the second-order consequences of a very big constitutional change. Regardless of one’s views on votes for 16 or 17 year-olds, it is a hugely important shift in the franchise and we should take seriously what it means for how society and politics operate. I therefore found just thinking through these issues very important.
I want to raise something I have been wondering about, which is not quite reflected in this but comes from it, which is a nervousness about electoral or party politics coming into the classroom. Will there be a different atmosphere among teachers who are actively engaged in politics—and we want them to be; that is what you want citizens to be like—when instead of just educating pupils, they might want to win their votes and not just win their hearts and minds to ideas?
Baroness Lawlor (Con)
My Lords, I support my noble friend Lord Fuller’s Amendments 34, 35, 36 and 38, which would require non-partisan teaching and non-party political posters, which would require balanced hustings, with all the candidates invited and with proper notice. They are very important amendments. It may be argued by the Minister that they are already covered by law under Sections 406 and 407 of the 1996 Act. Indeed, the law requires schools to
“prohibit the promotion of partisan political views”
and
“take steps to ensure the balanced presentation of … views”.
There are also teachers’ standards, which require teachers not to use their standing or position to influence pupils who may or may not be vulnerable due to their age. We also have the duties under the Human Rights Act and the Equality Act, as well the promotion of British values. All these are there.
I do not know how the Minister will respond to these amendments, but they are important because we are now looking at an entirely new category of people aged 16 and 17. The law as it stands was framed for the general teaching of youngsters at school, most of whom would not be going to the polls during their school years —maybe some at the very end but mostly not. Therefore, the idea of what teachers are doing is a pretty abstract notion. But now we are going to be teaching impressionable youngsters—children—who will be going to the polls and for whom this is not an abstract matter at all.
As other noble Lords have said, there is a danger of influence—maybe not intentional, but non-intentional —by the kind of material displayed and the kind of teaching mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Fox. How can somebody who is a committed member of any party avoid somehow influencing youngsters? It is necessary for the Government to think about how to put in special provisions for people at school who will be voting, as opposed to the cohorts at whom we have, to date, aimed the law, most of whom will not be voting in parliamentary or other elections.
Lord Pack (LD)
My Lords, the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, touched on perhaps the most interesting element of this group, which does not directly affect the Bill at all. It is the potential wider knock-on effect on the Online Safety Act. If we get to a place where we have 16 and 17 year-olds registered, the existence of that electoral register, as the noble Lord rightly mentioned in passing, may become an important building block in future age-verification processes under that Act. So, I suspect that in some ways the most important issue these amendments raise is not for this Bill but for other areas that exercise us at other times.
A general point has come out through these amendments and in several earlier groups, which is that we will have two fundamentally different processes. Under this Bill, we will have the right to vote from 16; under the Online Safety Act the key age threshold is 18. I will not relitigate the previous debate, particularly in light of my comments earlier, but just observe that those two ages being different is not a reason to be particularly hostile, because we have many variations in all sorts of other areas, as was noted in previous debates. However, we should recognise that those two numbers are different. It would be helpful to have more clarity from the Government about their plan to ensure that the different age threshold under the Online Safety Act does not provide inadvertent, unwanted consequences that damage the extension of the franchise to 16 year-olds.
I do not agree with all the details of the methods that the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, has chosen in his amendments, but one important point is worth drawing out, which comes under his Amendment 35. Lawyers might argue over the word “outcome”. I think it is reasonable for schools to teach children about the values of democracy. If we look at, for example, the decisions made about the national curriculum under previous Conservative Governments, there is a very clear direction that we, as a nation, are not neutral between democracy and dictatorship. Therefore, it is reasonable for schools to communicate that we want people to participate in elections. It has to be done in a way that is fair and that recognises there are people who may wish to spoil their ballots or not to vote as a matter of principle, but promoting democracy is a reasonable part of our education system. Although there are some details I disagree with, the basic point about how the Online Safety Act world and the world to be created by this Bill are going to interact is one on which it would be helpful to hear more from the Government.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
My Lords, I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Fuller for his amendments, which raise important questions about young people’s access to electoral information and the need to ensure political balance in our schools. We have had a number of useful contributions. This has been one of the shorter debates, but some important issues have been raised.
As I recollect our discussions so far on this Bill, most, if not all, noble Lords have been in almost universal agreement about civic education. The noble Lord, Lord Murphy of Torfaen, who is not in his place today, said he spent 17 years teaching the British constitution. In fact, my first exposure to democracy was learning the British constitution, and I am pleased to say I passed.
My noble friend Lord Gascoigne made an important point on the first day that votes at 16 cannot be seen as an end in itself but must be accompanied by an understanding of what citizenship is and what playing a part in our free, liberal, democratic society means and entails. It is important—and we are spending quite a lot of time on it—that we consider those two things in parallel.
This group again addresses the complete inconsistency in the Government’s approach to votes at 16. As my noble friend Lord Markham told us at Second Reading, if we consider a 16 year-old old enough to choose a Government, we must accept that they are old enough to hear all the arguments. The noble Lord, Lord Pack, raised the fact that we have a distinct difference between the Online Safety Act age of 18 and votes at 16. We need somehow to reconcile that and recognise that we need to make sure that those who are going to vote have the information they need.
My noble friend’s Amendment 34 would require politically neutral, age-appropriate election information to be published on social media; that recognises the reality that young people, as has been said several times today, obtain their information online on social media and not through the more traditional channels of newspapers or TV. If the Government intend to extend the franchise, they must ensure that newly enfranchised voters can access the information necessary to exercise that right. Will the Minister explain how the Government intend to ensure that young people can receive accurate and politically balanced electoral information?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, Amendment 34, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, seeks to require extra steps to be taken to publish impartial, age-appropriate election information on social media suitable for young people who may be subject to restrictions on social media access. The Government agree that extending the franchise to 16 and 17-year-olds 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.
We are also clear that that the social media ban must not inadvertently cut young people off from valuable information that is essential for their democratic participation. While the Government’s proposed social media restrictions will apply to young people under 16, they will still have access to many websites, including news sites, and to political information from a wide range of trusted sources, including schools, colleges and the Electoral Commission.
We have committed to working with regulators, industry, civil society and subject matter experts to ensure this information is accessible and easy to find for young people affected by the ban. We are also working across government to strengthen democratic education and media literacy, helping young people to develop the knowledge and skills they need to engage confidently with our democracy. For those reasons, I do not believe that an additional statutory duty to publish election information on social media is necessary.
Turning to Amendments 35, 36 and 38, tabled by the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, on political impartiality in schools and educational settings, I of course recognise the importance of ensuring young people receive politically balanced information and can make informed decisions about their vote. However, we do not consider these amendments to be necessary. As I mentioned in response to amendments in group 3, schools are already subject to clear legal duties on political impartiality. They must prohibit the promotion of partisan political views and take reasonably practicable steps to ensure that, where political issues are brought to pupils’ attention, opposing views are presented in a balanced way.
Existing Department for Education guidance makes it clear that these duties apply not only to classroom teaching but to public displays and school communications. This picks up the point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Lawlor. There are also specific safeguards during election periods to prevent schools being used to promote a particular party or candidate. In relation to hustings, on one occasion when I was a parliamentary candidate, I was invited to attend hustings which were then cancelled because other candidates were not available to attend. I can verify that schools take this very seriously.
At the same time, schools have an important role in helping young people understand democracy and the electoral process. Schools can harness the interest generated around election periods to raise political awareness through activities such as mock elections. Of course, it is true to say that teachers have been educating voters since 1969, when votes at 18 were introduced, and before that teachers in colleges and universities. For many years, primary schools have organised mock elections of the kind I just referred to; I have participated in those myself. The Government therefore consider that the existing framework already provides an appropriate, judgment-based approach which protects political impartiality without unnecessarily restricting or proscribing legitimate educational activities.
I thank the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, for tabling Amendment 39 and so raising the important question of how we ensure that young people who have registered to vote have access to information to inform their voting decision and learn how elections operate. We agree that extending the franchise to 16 and 17 year-olds must go hand in hand with ensuring access to reliable information.
Earlier this year, we announced our intention to ban social media companies from offering their services to under-16s, alongside a package of other measures to improve their safety and well-being online. I understand the references made by the noble Lord, Lord Pack, to the Online Safety Act and making sure that these two things are working together. The Government must act where they see real evidence of harm. These changes seek to reset the rules so that children are protected from the platforms and online features that create the most harm. We are also clear that the social media ban must not inadvertently cut young people off from that valuable information which is essential for their democratic participation.
The Electoral Commission already provides a wide range of information, including resources specifically designed for young people. As I set out earlier, we are working across government to strengthen democratic education and media literacy. We also accept the issues around citizenship education and democracy—the very issue that the noble Lord, Lord Pack, referred to. It is important that young people understand, for example, that we value democracy, but they need to know the difference between that and a dictatorship, and some even worse methods of government.
For these reasons, we do not believe that an additional statutory duty is necessary. I hope I have reassured noble Lords that we have put provisions in step for political education.
Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)
Before the Minister sits down, I want to query two things. First, the social media ban will apparently not prohibit young people accessing trusted news sources. Trusted by whom? Who makes that call? That was partly my point. I would have thought that you could trust the Home Office to bring out an interactive game without getting it so badly wrong. That might be something to consider.
Secondly, the noble Lord, Lord Pack, is absolutely right: we have to look at this. When discussions came out about drilling for oil in the North Sea, searches on that were age-gated, and anybody under 16 could not get through. You had to prove who you were, prove your age and so on. That was quite a big discussion. Will the Minister at least take back to the Government the possibility of thinking this through a bit more, rather than just saying that it is all going to be all right? I do not agree with the ban on social media for under-16s. I had to listen to practically everybody in this House lecture me about how you cannot let under-16s anywhere near this stuff, how everything will lead to suicide, mayhem, bedlam and all the rest of it, and how we have to stop them getting access to it. Suddenly, it is okay if it is news—and that is news to me. We therefore need a bit more detail.
Lord Jamieson (Con)
I want a bit more clarity. I understand that schools are obliged to be politically neutral. In this country we have tens of thousands, if not millions, of teachers—I do not know the number. If we are to have 16 and 17 year-olds voting and want politically neutral education on the political landscape for them, it will be a lot easier, and we will have much more consistency, if there are clear guidelines that can be reviewed and seen by others. Is that the intention?
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
In response to the noble Baroness, Lady Fox, social media is not the only source of high-quality news content, nor always the most reliable, as we all know only too well. It is important that young people continue to have access to a wide range of trusted sources on political information. There will also be a defined list of exemptions including, for example, educational services. The noble Baroness is right to flag up the point that we are in a new area here. We need to continue to think about how we make sure there is access to the information needed to make the decisions that these young people will be making, while also protecting them from some of the terrible online harms we have seen.
The noble Lord, Lord Jamieson, referred to impartiality in schools. Existing guidance expressly allows schools to use election periods to raise political awareness and all those issues. I am not sure whether I am quite addressing his question. The existing guidance makes sure that, if there are mock elections, hustings or visits from candidates or party representatives, schools have to maintain a political balance. Schools already do this, and I am sure that they will continue to do so.
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, this debate has not quite gone in the direction I anticipated. My noble friend Lord Pickles, who was Secretary of State when I was a council leader many years ago, once addressed a meeting of the Conservative local government group, and he said: “If you don’t trust the folks, don’t go into politics”. True words.
Politics is about cherishing and promoting the freedom of expression and freedom to explore, which is the bedrock of democracy. The Government are getting themselves in a muddle here. They cannot say on the one hand that these youngsters—I am thinking particularly of attainers aged 15 and above—are mature enough to vote or prepare to vote on their 16th birthday and make their own decisions but then, in the same breath, say that they are so immature that they need to be protected from socials.
Where this debate has gone in an unexpected manner is that we have now started to think about what information these youngsters will be permitted to see—and I am concerned about indoctrination, groupthink and censorship. Only state-approved media will be permitted for these rising attainers. We have to have a process whereby these attainers have access to social media, which in turn will do more for the promotion of registration to vote than any electoral registration officer or automatic registration. Rising attainers need to have access to make up their own minds—otherwise, they could be forced underground, and I think that is really dangerous.
Lord Hayward
“Review of cost of duties to raise awareness and provide assistanceWithin 12 months of the day on which this Act is passed, the Secretary of State must publish a report on the costs to local authorities of the duties in sections 15 and 16 (duties to raise awareness and provide assistance).”Member’s explanatory statement
This amendment seeks to probe the estimates in the impact assessment of the Bill of the national costs of its provisions.
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, this amendment is essentially about the operation of the impact assessment and the way in which it looks at costs in general. I have chosen one particular example, but I will come back with more detail about one or two other elements of the impact assessment overall.
Before I do so, I make a broad observation that I am interested in the inclusion of Clauses 15 and 16, which put in an obligation to educate in relation to 16 and 17 year-olds. When we pass legislation in relation to obligations imposed on teachers, doctors or large numbers of other groups, there are no similar clauses in legislation. I do not know whether it is going to be a new development that each time we pass a Bill, we finish up introducing a clause that says there must be an education of farmers, seagoers or whatever it may happen to be. I call into question whether these two clauses should actually be in the Bill.
My other observation is in relation to impact assessments in general. They started several decades ago. The original intention of impact assessments, as I understand it—I have looked back—was to look at the burdens imposed on particular groups. That was all they were intended to do. I say that as somebody who was for a period the chief executive of the British Beer & Pub Association and had to deal with the changes associated with the Licensing Act. Impact assessments nowadays seem not only a question of an assessment of costs and burdens but—and I say this in particular in relation to this impact assessment—a justification of every decision that has been taken. It is quite striking: you read paragraphs that explain why the Government have taken a decision in relation to whatever it may happen to be. That certainly was never the aim of the impact assessment.
Coming on to my major concern, I pray in aid the impact assessment that went with the Football Governance Bill. Only a few weeks ago, it was identified as being out by over 100%, in 12 months. I have gone through this impact assessment and find myself in exactly the same quandary. I do not understand how many of the figures have been arrived at. I therefore ask the Minister: did the same people who drew up the impact assessment for the that Bill draw up this impact assessment, or others who have operated to the same broad rules? There are explanations of the principles that they have followed—I have read every single line of the impact assessment—but if they are following the same rules that resulted in another impact assessment being out by over 100% in 12 months, the Treasury will have quite a surprise when it discovers the actual costs of this Bill.
The chart with the assessment of costs that I want to refer to is on page 62. It relates to the costs associated with the introduction of votes for 16 and 17 year-olds. We heard from my noble friend Lord Fuller on Monday about the information that he had received on the costs for local authorities in registering new voters. The other side of the costs, which we have heard about persistently today, is the obligation to educate. The noble Baronesses, Lady Royall and Lady Lister, the noble Lords, Lord Pack, Lord Rennard and Lord Wallace, and any number of other noble Lords have said that there needs to be much greater levels of education for this group—and there does. It is about ensuring that they are not just registered but fully aware, as has been identified on any number of occasions, of the issues on which they are ultimately being asked to vote.
I will quote one or two parts of the impact assessment. In relation to staffing costs, paragraph 122 of page 55 says:
“Extra staff may be needed to deal with the additional demand in some LAs”.
Which local authorities are not going to have the extra demand? I am talking here about both registration and education. Paragraph 160 on page 61 says:
“Wider staffing costs associated with the Votes at 16 policy have been excluded, in line with the treatment of MHCLG departmental staffing costs in this impact assessment”.
Paragraph 174 identifies a particular issue and then says:
“Therefore, this cost is not monetised”.
I do not have the IT capacity to go through the whole document and find out how many times it says that a cost is “not monetised”, but I do not have to look much further than paragraph 174; I just have to go to paragraph 178, where the phrase is used again:
“these contributions are not considered significant in cost terms and have therefore not been monetised”.
What are these costs in paragraph 174 that have not being monetised? It says:
“There is an additional resource implication arising from the collaborative development of this policy, with staff time from other government departments, principally DfE”—
which comes as no surprise, given the debates we have had—
contributing meaningfully to its design … There is also a potential impact on education staff”.
That means education staff in every single local authority across the country. Therefore, how on earth does one come back to “may” have implications for some local authorities?
There are many other examples that I could quote, but, in conclusion, I come to paragraph 166 on page 59 of the impact assessment. The Electoral Commission was asked to submit its assessment of its costs, and there is no question that it has very substantial costs. In the central scenario, these are given as £39.8 million. You might think that the Electoral Commission has certain work, but think of all these local authorities, government departments and registration officers. If the Electoral Commission has £39.8 million of extra costs, what have all the other government departments and local authorities got? The figure is given as a mere £48 million. It is almost the same as it is for the Electoral Commission. I was going to use a word that I would normally hear more on a rugby pitch than in the Chamber, but all I will say is that this impact assessment, in so many ways, is not credible. I beg to move.
Lord Fuller (Con)
My Lords, I have not spent as much time as my noble friend Lord Hayward going line by line through the impact assessment, but I have spent some time with text search trying to find the paragraphs that relate to the issues that have concerned me most as we have debated the Bill thus far. They are the attainers and the 16 to 18 year-olds. Because so much of it says “non-monetised”, I have made my own inquiries of one the more senior electoral registration officers in the country, who also happens to be a police area returning office, or PARO.
We have heard in the debate hitherto how many assumptions are made about what the powers may be by extending the franchise and also from auto-enrolment. There is going to be so much more hand work and so many more duplicate entries created automatically. There will be a need to de-duplicate the duplicates that have been created, for the best of reasons: that is just where the legislation is. There are so many moving parts.
I did not realise that the noble Lord was going to mention the figure of £48 million, but I want to dwell on the provisions for registering the attainers alone: those aged between 14 and 16 who the Bill proposes will come on to the register but who do not have a national insurance card or a gas bill, because their parents do that bit. They do not have a driving licence and may not have a passport. In effect they do not really exist to the state.
Lord Hayward (Con)
I did not make reference to the question of automatic registration, but since my noble friend has encouraged me to do so, on page 101, improving registration is given as costing £5.2 million.
Lord Fuller (Con)
I think that would be characterised as the downpayment, but there we are.
So much is to be done by secondary legislation. I am not going to trespass too greatly on a future group, but when it comes to identification and bank cards, there are all sorts of unintended consequences. There are going to have to be huge changes in bank card systems if they are to be fit for purpose.
The noble Baroness, Lady Pinnock, who is not in her place, posited earlier that automatic registration and the duplicates may lead to more frequent boundary reviews. One thing is absolutely for sure: given the way the legislation is today, we are going to need duplicate and parallel IT systems, which will have to be reconciled, and that is going to be expensive. My focus has been on the 1.4 million attainers, but there are a further 1.4 million 16 to 18 year-olds, many of whom will also not have the documentary evidence.
I know that democracy has a cost. We live in a free society, and that costs money. But what we have not worked out are the costs in this impact assessment. The figure the noble Lord has referred to is just a downpayment; it is a drop in the ocean. Chances are, it is probably four times greater than that, and we should be told.
Lord Pack (LD)
That was an enthusiastic heckle, there.
I think it fair to say that the impact assessment, weighing in at 130 pages, is very on brand for election law, especially given our comments earlier about how voluminous election law is. I was struck, though, on looking through it, by how little there is about police time and resources. As the Minister will know well from previous questions and debates, councillors, MPs and members of political parties are already often quite frustrated, when they raise issues with the police—perhaps fears for personal safety due to harassment—by how often police resources are not really available to properly follow up such concerns.
In the parts of the Bill to do with political finance, which we will come to on future days rather than this evening, some of the issues we are looking at there, around, for example, crypto transfers, will require quite sophisticated and advanced investigatory techniques. It will not simply be a matter of whether the local police team has the resources to take seriously issues raised with it to do with election law; I am sure there will be quite a lot of pressure on many specialised parts of the police service, the National Crime Agency and so on.
It is striking that the impact assessment seems to be just about completely silent—I say that in case I missed something in my reading of it, but I did not spot any reference at all—on the potential costs to the police and the associated law enforcement apparatus of the range of offences that the Bill will create, toughen up or put a greater focus on. I hope the Minister can tell us a little about what assessments have been made of the potential costs to the law enforcement apparatus and what reassurance we have that, whatever form this Bill takes when it is passed—and then, we hope, commenced by the Government—the necessary resources will be available to actually enforce it.
Baroness O’Neill of Bexley (Con)
My Lords, I thank my noble friend Lord Hayward for tabling this amendment, and indeed for everything else he has done on this Bill. He has worked many, many hours.
The amendment seeks to address the numerous unqualified costs arising from the provisions of the Bill—which have surely not escaped anyone’s notice—some of which have been raised in the Chamber today, as well as those raised on Monday. I am really concerned that the Government are proposing substantial changes to our electoral system without providing a sufficiently comprehensive account of what those changes will mean. It is particularly concerning given the scale of the reforms proposed and the additional responsibilities they will place on electoral administrators and local authorities.
How does the Minister expect this House or those in the other place to properly assess value for money when one of the principal costs of implementing a major reform has not even been qualified? We are potentially looking at substantial expenditure on new IT infrastructure, data-sharing arrangements, staff training and ongoing administration costs. Can the Minister commit to evaluating the total cost of rolling out automatic voter registration first? We have yet to receive a number.
Moreover, the Bill seeks to place a greater burden on local authorities. Electoral registration officers already operate within a complex legislative framework. The Bill will introduce further obligations, potentially requiring new systems and additional verification procedures. Has it failed to escape the Government’s notice that this will be at great expenditure? We all know that local authorities are already under considerable financial pressure. It is therefore essential that the Government explain whether these additional costs will be fully funded by central government, or whether councils are simply meant to absorb them from existing budgets? I would welcome a clear answer from the Minister.
The Government have proceeded with substantial changes to electoral and political finance law without the degree of prior consultation that such measures deserve. Indeed, significant provisions have been introduced or altered during the passage of the Bill following the original impact assessment, as my noble friend Lord Hayward has identified already. That makes a comprehensive assessment of the cumulative financial impact all the more important.
I therefore ask the Minister two very straightforward questions. Will the Government publish a full estimate of the costs of implementing automatic voter registration, including those of the IT infrastructure? Will authorities be fully compensated for the additional burdens imposed by this legislation? My noble friend Lord Hayward’s amendment asks the Government to be transparent and accountable, and to use public money responsibly. These are not and should not be controversial principles. I hope the Minister can provide the Committee with substantive answers, rather than simply referring us back to an impact assessment that leaves significant questions unanswered.
Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)
My Lords, the provisions referred to by the noble Lord, Lord Hayward, are important to ensure that we encourage as many eligible young people as possible to participate in our democracy.
I will come on to the monitoring and evaluation in a moment, but will respond first to the noble Lord’s points about the impact assessment. All impact assessments produced by the Government are produced by departments in line with His Majesty’s Treasury’s investment guidance in the Green Book. We follow the rules set out in it. However, there have been a number of detailed questions raised about this impact assessment, so what would be most helpful at this stage of our debate is for me to write to noble Lords in response.
On local authority costs, as the noble Baroness will know only too well, and has probably lobbied on, as I have, where there are new burdens on local government then government has to respond by providing funding for those new burdens.
On the monitoring and evaluation of the Bill, our approach will comply with our published evaluation strategy, which is what we were referring to in the impact assessment. We will publish evaluation findings in a timely manner, consistent with our policy for the publication of research and government social research guidelines. That evaluation will include an assessment of the impacts of the reforms on electors, local authorities and others responsible for delivering elections; a process evaluation that will seek to examine how the reforms are implemented; and, as I referred to earlier, an economic evaluation to assess whether the benefits of the policies outweigh their costs.
These are difficult areas to address. Anyone who has tried to do it will know that net present social value is quite a difficult concept to evaluate in financial terms or to monetise, which is where some of the difficulty occurs. The appraisal of policies in the impact assessment relies heavily on qualitative evidence and non-monetised impacts, which do not get reflected in net present social value calculations. It is important that we get a clear picture and continue to look at the economic evaluation, which we will do.
The areas highlighted by the noble Lord will be covered by this monitoring work. I commit to write to Members on the specific financial questions they have raised this afternoon.
Lord Hayward (Con)
My Lords, I thank the Minister for her open response. One thing she referred to earlier that time did not allow me to comment on in my opening remarks was the fund; it is not referred to in the impact assessment, but she referred to it earlier. On that basis, I seek leave to withdraw my amendment.