Elections: Voting Age

Lord Wills Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Wills]

My Lords, I, too, congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, on securing this debate. It is timely and important and, as so often when we discuss constitutional issues, I agree with a very large amount of what he said. He is right that the issue has been debated for some time without any conclusion being reached. There are passionate feelings on both sides but we seem unable to come to any conclusion. He is certainly also right that the United Kingdom should not be dragged backwards into making an ad hoc constitutional decision by the manoeuvring of the SNP.

However, I am more agnostic than he is about the issue of lowering the voting age. It is not an issue where sides are chosen on the grounds of political ideology. It is also an unusual issue in that positions are not driven, as is so much public policy, by differing priorities. Rather, the position taken on this issue seems to be as much the result of some gut instinct as anything else. For every argument advanced by one side there is an equally compelling argument on the other.

If the argument for lowering the voting age is that young people should be considered adults at 16 rather than 18, there are counterarguments that young people mature at different rates. Whereas some are clearly adults at 16, others are clearly not, and there is no sensible way of evaluating this. If the argument is that the law should be consistent in a way that it is not currently and that there should be one age at which young people are deemed to have become adults, with all the rights and responsibilities that follow, there is no particular reason why it should not be equalised at 16 rather than at 17, when young people are deemed mature enough to take possession of the lethal weapon that is a motor car—or at 18, which will soon be the age up to which young people will be deemed unarguably in need of full-time education.

If the argument is that possession of the vote will engage young people more in civil society and democracy, there is no evidence—as the noble Lord, Lord Norton, pointed out—that it has had that effect on those aged 18 and over. If the argument is the principled one of no taxation without representation, it will soon be the case, when the school leaving age becomes 18, that the already very small number of 16 and 17 year-olds who pay tax will dwindle even further.

In the face of the directly conflicting arguments that have clearly bedevilled the resolution of this issue for many years, it might be tempting to fall back on the essentially conservative argument that the noble Lord, Lord Norton, put forward: namely, that the case for change is insufficiently compelling to merit the upheaval that always accompanies any kind of profound constitutional change. However, I have an alternative suggestion.

Whenever constitutional change is discussed—we have heard it already, and I am sure we will hear it again from the distinguished speakers who will follow me—politicians lament the decline of trust in politicians, the increasing disengagement from formal political, democratic processes, and how disadvantaged groups and younger people are increasingly unlikely to vote at elections. One way of helping to tackle these problems is to develop ways in which the public can be more directly involved in the formulation of public policy. New methods of engaging the public in this way through deliberative democracy are potentially important both in engaging the public in politics between elections and in improving public policy.

Such methods would bring together perhaps 500 to 1,000 people to deliberate on policy, exposing them to a range of opinions and policy options and allowing them to debate them over a period of time, typically a day or two, before coming to conclusions. Such exercises would enable the public to bring relevant knowledge, experience and wisdom to bear on policy formation that may not always be available to cloistered Ministers and officials. Engaging the public in this way could help legitimise and entrench policy that might otherwise be unnecessarily contentious.

When politicians cannot come to any sort of settled agreement on an issue such as the one we are discussing today—I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, on this—constitutional change should always take place as far as possible on the basis of broad agreement across Parliament. That is not always possible, but it should always be at least the starting point. When the change so directly affects our constitutional arrangements and, therefore, everyone in the country, such deliberative democratic arrangements could play an important role in crystallising the issues and helping Parliament to come to a conclusion, thereby providing an important part of that proper consideration that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has so rightly called for. Those involved in such an exercise would be selected randomly but filtered to ensure that they are demographically broadly representative. In this case, they might legitimately include a significant weighting of 16 and 17 year-olds. Whatever decision this group arrived at, in keeping with our precious system of representative democracy, it would still be for Parliament to reach the final decision, but it could now do so informed by the wisdom of the people that it serves.

The Liberal Democrats used to be in favour of such methods of enriching democratic participation before they became preoccupied with other things such as government. I hope that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, can perhaps persuade his colleagues in government to rediscover that enthusiasm.