Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

Debate between Baroness Kennedy of Shaws and Lord Soley

Monday 13th December 2010 Lords Chamber

[Lord Soley]

My Lords, I rise in support of my noble friend Lady Hayter. Let me begin by perhaps anticipating the Minister’s response. Despite his commitment to his party as part of the coalition, he will say that it is not possible to do this in the Bill, that the Electoral Commission would not approve and that these young people would not be able to vote in the referendum anyway because the Bill will not allow time for that. He said much the same about the right to vote for prisoners. My reason for rising to speak is to say that this argument is based on a fallacy and that this Bill ought to be something much wider. It ought to be about constituency and voting reform generally, but it is not. It was put together in order to preserve the coalition. That is what it is about. It is concerned with enhancing the coalition’s chances of staying in government for a bit longer. I have to say that that is not good enough.

If the Minister thinks that I am the only person who is saying that the coalition Government are not allowing time for the Bill—they ought to allow time, so that we could consider the wider issue of votes at 16, which is his party’s policy, or indeed votes for prisoners, which is also his party’s policy—let me quote from a letter sent to me and to others by one of his honourable friends in the House of Commons, Andrew Turner, the Member of Parliament for the Isle of Wight. He says the following in relation to a different part of the Bill:

“Debate in the Commons was so curtailed that I was unable to speak on this subject during Committee Stage and only for five minutes during Report Stage”.

In a sense, that sums up the problem. There is a case for votes at 16, although I will touch on that only briefly, since my noble friend summed up my position in her remarks, just as there is a case for votes for prisoners following the European Court of Human Rights ruling. However, there is no room in this Bill for doing things easily unless—this is the point—the Government accept that the legislation ought to be about reform and not just about preserving the coalition’s position.

Perhaps I may deal briefly with why votes at the age of 16 are important. For many years I have felt that, if you can serve in the Armed Forces, you ought to be able to vote. Also, as my noble friend pointed out, if you pay taxes, you ought to be able to vote. However, the important point concerns the Armed Forces. Secondly, it should be understood that many young people start to get interested in politics at this age. However, if they are not allowed to express that interest, if anything they are put off later. It is no accident that in this Chamber either last Friday or in a previous Youth Parliament, I cannot remember which, the young people voted in favour of votes at 16. I might add something that will encourage Members on both sides: they also voted by a majority of between 60 and 64 for a largely appointed House as opposed to an elected House. There are all those wise young people out there, wanting to vote and to keep an appointed House because they recognise some of the strengths of that. The arguments in favour were interesting because the young people were wise enough to support the concept of, at least, a largely appointed House.

I suppose that we all think of our own backgrounds. My noble friend was remembering where she was for her first election, albeit with some uncertainty. I remember mine clearly. It was in 1955. When I had campaigned in the previous election, I was belted round the ear by someone with a rolled-up poster who told me that I was too young to be thinking about such things. All that did was to reinforce my view that I ought to think about it a bit harder, if only to deal with people who belted you round the ear with a rolled-up poster. There is a genuine interest. Certainly, I was very interested in what was happening internationally. We had come out of the Second World War, which had influenced me very much, as it had so many of us who were born, as I was, just before it. If you grow up under the shadow of dictatorship, you know the importance of democracy. That argument was profoundly important to me. It always has been and still is.

I should not need to exercise these arguments with the Minister, because his party supports this policy and I believe that I am right in saying that he does. The only thing standing in the way is this attempt to get through a Bill that is about the survival of the coalition, not the reform of the parliamentary system. The Government really need to do better on this. It is just not good enough to duck this issue in the way that he ducked the issue of votes for prisoners.

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws]

My Lords, I, too, support my noble friend Lady Hayter. I came to this issue rather sceptically but changed my mind when I was chairing the Power inquiry, as we took evidence from around the country and heard from young people and their teachers. One thing that this House should have in mind is the alarming way in which we in this country are losing the habit of voting. What we are finding is that young people, if they do not establish a habit of voting, do not turn to it. People would say to us, “Well, they soon start voting once they start having children of their own or a mortgage, or when they start paying tax”—often, they were Members of Parliament. Yet the reality is that, if the habit is not established before, very often people do not end up voting at all.

Teachers were telling us that already, in schools, there is talk before age 16 about why the vote is so important and about the history of the vote. Then there is a gap, where a substantial number of our young are still not staying on at school to 18, so when they leave school there is a period of non-participation in the public arena. They do not vote, so they never establish the habit of voting. We should move from knowing about voting at school—understanding its history and its importance in our firmament and why it is at the heart of our democracy that people should vote—to harnessing that while people are still young and interested. That is vital.

Hearing from young people who were clearly interested in how their country worked and in the issues of the day, yet then hearing from teachers about the terrible loss of interest between the ages of 16 and 18—sometimes, it is as long as four years before these young people get the chance to vote—was a lesson that convinced me that people lose the habit of voting. We should take this opportunity to reform the system as soon as we can. I know that many people, certainly among the Liberal Democrats, share this view. We should be harnessing that interest in politics before it is lost. Now is a good time to do it, when we are in the process of engaging in some reform of our electoral system.