Representation of the People Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

2nd reading
Monday 14th September 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, in following the noble Lord, Lord Mackinlay, I make no apologies for returning to the subject of political funding, because, of course, we are conducting this debate under the shadow of one number, £72 million, or rather one sum—two times £36 million. This has led to far more attention being paid to the issue of political funding. Your Lordships’ House very often is facing the Government Benches and saying, “You’re heading in the right direction, but you need to go further”. Well, now there is a very clear direction from the country that we need to see this Bill going far further in capping donations to political parties wherever they come from.

There is another factor that I am sure the country does not know about. If it did, it would ask us to please cut the amount of spending that is allowed on elections—particularly given the fact that it was massively increased under the last Government at very little notice, very late in the Bill, with very little attention.

There are specific factors that influence the issue of political funding. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady May, and share her scepticism about cryptocurrencies. They are good—no, great—for fraudsters and criminals, but there is no evidence that they in any way contribute to the public good. The noble Lord, Lord Evans of Weardale, said, as I have heard him say on many occasions, that we have invited into this country corruption from around the world over many years—from Russia, China and other countries, and we are now seeing money from very dubious sources in the US coming into our UK politics. We need to take action on these issues.

Those two contributions help me make the point that this is not, however, a new problem. Political funding has been a huge issue in British politics for decades. We have had big money choosing what kind of politics we get. We get the politics it has paid for. Where does it come from? It comes from financiers, the City, gambling companies, property developers, fossil fuel companies and other giant oligarchic companies from around the world. This has to stop if we are going to restore trust in our politics.

One specific point that I will raise, as my honourable friend Ellie Chowns did in the other place, is the issue of donations from companies. I rely here on analysis from the Centre for the Analysis of Taxation. Almost £1 in every £10 donated by companies comes indirectly from individuals who are likely to be ineligible to donate directly. Around a quarter of donor companies are opaque, meaning it is not possible to identify who controls them. Currently, the tax system provides an implicit subsidy of up to 39% for political donations routed through companies. It is very easy to get around what the Bill is supposed to be trying to do. So why not ban political donations from companies altogether? The Bill accepts that a company’s right to donate depends on the rights of its individual owners. If they can donate directly, why are we allowing corporate donations at all?

I want to pick up a couple of other points from the debate. It rather stuck in my craw when the noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, complained about a lack of consultation, given the way in which the last Government’s Elections Act was railroaded through. I was disappointed and surprised that she repeated totally debunked, clearly politically motivated allegations about family voting from Gorton and Denton. I refer your Lordships’ House to the Manchester Police press release of 27 March, which found

“no evidence of any intent to influence or refrain any person from voting”.

We need to stop undermining our own system when there is no reason to do so.

We have heard many powerful testimonies, particularly from the Learn with the Lords programme, about why we should have votes at 16. The noble Baroness, Lady O’Neill, asked why not 15 or younger, and that is a good question. I very much agree with the many contributions saying that we need more political education. However, having visited schools and colleges with Learn with the Lords, I have found that 16 year-olds are, on average, as well-informed about politics as 60-year-olds. That is not to say that both groups do not need a great deal more political education, understanding and help with critical thinking in our current media age.

Representation of the People Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 2nd November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Lister of Burtersett (Lab)]

My Lords, I will speak to Amendment 6 in my name, which is a probing amendment that seeks to clarify the scope of Clause 2 by excluding secure children’s homes from the definition of “youth detention accommodation” for the purposes of the disfranchisement of 16 and 17 year-olds otherwise newly enfranchised. First, echoing my noble friend Lord Murphy, I emphasise that I very much support our manifesto commitment to votes for 16 and 17 year-olds in the name of recognising their value as citizens, as is the case in Scotland and Wales. I will return in a later group to citizenship education, which is so important.

The issue raised by this amendment was brought to my attention by Mark Alexander, a doctoral researcher at Cambridge, on behalf of the steering group for the Unlock the Vote campaign at the penal charity Unlock. Although I believe that some prisoners should have the vote, that is not what this amendment is about, and I do not intend to spark a more general debate on that. It is about exploring why children serving custodial sentences in secure children’s homes, SCHs, should be denied the new right to vote, when the Government accept that residence in such a home is not of itself a basis for disfranchisement.

I realise that young people in SCHs who are not convicted prisoners will not be disfranchised. The Minister for Democracy has made that clear, both in the Commons and in a letter to Unlock, and the Explanatory Notes recognise that children may also be residents in such homes for welfare purposes, so SCHs will accommodate both children who have the vote under Clause 2 and children who do not. The question raised by Unlock is whether it meets the Bill’s wider objectives that a conviction of a child should disfranchise them when they are accommodated in a welfare-oriented rather than a penal institution.

The Bill is intended to increase young people’s engagement with democracy. The Government have described their objective as enabling young people

“to find their voice and exercise their right to vote”,

thereby, it is hoped, building long-lasting engagement with our democracy. These are objectives that I very much share. However, arguably, they sit uneasily with the exclusion of vulnerable children whom the state is seeking to rehabilitate and reintegrate into our society. Surely such rehabilitative education should include an appreciation of the importance of active citizenship and public duty.

The issue is especially significant because the Government recognise that eligible children in SCHs will require tailored support to exercise their democratic rights. Arrangements are already being developed with the Department for Education to highlight the value of civic engagement and democratic participation in SCHs for some children but not others. There is a risk that a child being told that they cannot participate in democracy alongside their peers in the same home will feel a sense of alienation and disaffection that could undermine their rehabilitative journey. Rather than building their identity as active citizens, it could have the very opposite effect.

I ask my noble friend the Minister, first, why a child serving a sentence in an SCH should be disenfranchised—thereby being treated them differently from other children in the same institution. Secondly, why should the distinctive welfare and rehabilitative character of SCHs not justify treating them differently from those in penal institutions? Thirdly, have the Government assessed the likely impact of this disenfranchisement on the rehabilitation and future democratic engagement of convicted children in SCHs?

Unlock has raised a valid question on whether the justification given by the Government for the disenfranchisement of those children is sufficiently sensitive to the distinctive nature of secure children’s homes. I look forward to my noble friend’s response.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and to speak to my Clause 2 stand part notice, which goes further than the noble Baroness’s amendment but is headed in the same direction.

It is no secret that Green Party policy is that all those held in detention in prisons should be given the vote unless that is excluded by reason of electoral fraud or similar—or if a judge has decided that they should not be able to exercise their vote. However, that is not what we are addressing here. We are talking about a small, important and particularly vulnerable group of young people. Like the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, I have been informed in what I am about to say by the penal reform charity Unlock. This addresses how Clause 2 risks further alienating and marginalising an already excluded group of young people from politics and society in a way that is not just morally wrong but likely to be counterproductive.

I have seen a letter from the Minister in the other place saying that the Government’s view is that those convicted of a crime and serving a sentence in custody should be unable to vote. As the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said, this is creating a real mess in secure children’s homes. More than this, my argument is that we are talking about children whom we want to include, and we want them to see themselves as part of society, as having a stake in society.

We are not talking about an issue that is going to have any significant impact on the outcome of elections. Up to March 2025, 610 children in England and Wales were covered by this clause. There are equalities issues here, because minoritised communities are significantly overrepresented among those children, as are care-experienced children. Hundreds of young people are being told that one more way that they cannot participate in society while their peers can is in respect of voting.

This will affect the way they feel about their society—whether they feel valued or listened to, rather than being abandoned and judged. I note that what I have just said is based on the testimony of lived experience from people who have been through youth detention. I am very strongly of the view that we need a world where everyone makes politics about what they do, not have done to them, and these are young people who have had lots of politics done to them. These are young people who have been victims of political decisions, such as austerity, where others have put them in a situation where, in many cases, they have fallen through the cracks in our society.

Having spoken to my clause 2 stand part notice, I will restrain myself from engaging at length with the other amendments in this group, but I will just very briefly note that it is interesting that, in the Representation of the People Act 1969, the extension of votes to 18—the first in the world—was generally uncontroversial and had broad cross-party support. Interestingly, it was thought at the time that it might actually slightly advantage the Conservative Party; how the world has changed.

None the less, I want to pick up a point made by the noble Baroness, Lady Coffey, who said that 16 and 17 year-olds are more likely to vote than 18 and 19 year-olds, and that is the evidence that we have from other places. But we also have evidence that people who vote in their first election are more likely to keep voting, so we are actually engaging people at a point when they are more ready to be engaged, and that is something that will bear impacts decades into the future.

I also want to point to the Scottish Youth Parliament, which has been a leader in calling for equality of votes at 16 and 17, which, of course, they have enjoyed in Scotland for some time. I have to share a little story from the 2014 referendum. I remember hearing a BBC Radio 4 presenter on the streets of Edinburgh saying, “I am standing with 16 and 17 year-olds, and they are really informed and engaged”. The surprised tone in his voice said a lot more about the reporter than it said about the 16 and 17 year-olds.

Finally, I am afraid I do not really follow the arguments of the noble Lord, Lord Udny-Lister, regarding Amendment 33, which proposes an

“Assessment of susceptibility of 16 and 17 years old to election-related disinformation and foreign interference”.

The noble Lord said he did not actually think that 16 and 17 year-olds were more vulnerable, so I do not really understand the argument for that amendment. But beyond that, I have absolutely no doubt that, if one did such a study, we would find there are an awful lot of people around the average age of your Lordships’ House who are terribly vulnerable and definitely need some education to reduce their susceptibility.

[Lord Bailey of Paddington (Con)]

My Lords, I support Amendment 1. Just to pick up on the last statement that was made, the reason that young people are more susceptible to malicious actors is that they spend significantly more time online. It is a much bigger source of their news, and they pay far more attention to it than people who are older who normally have a broader reading palette and tend to read more from official sources, such as newspapers and the like. Having been a youth worker for over 35 years, I know that the young people I work with exclusively read about the world online. If you want to hide something from them, I suggest you put it in the Times, because they will never find it.

I support Amendment 1 because I do not think we should be using the ballot box as an engagement scheme for young people. This policy relies largely on an education piece, and it looks like the Government have put the cart before the horse. Surely, you should do the education piece before you give the added power—the new choice that young people would have.

This is not about whether I believe young people can have an opinion. I have been a youth worker for well over 35 years, and I have been at the wrong end of young people’s opinions and at the right end. I certainly know they can have that opinion but look what we are doing—the Government’s risk assessment is almost non-existent. They are about to turn school, the place that is safest for minors, into a political battleground. School is the safest place, particularly if you come from a poor community and particularly if your family is suffering. You go to school to be safe. Peer pressure in school is a very real thing. If you are going to expose our 16 and 17 year-olds to political peer pressure, you had better see what the effects of that are before, not after, you do that.

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

My Lords, the amendments proposed by the noble Lord, Lord Frost, would also apply the electoral franchise currently used for local elections in England and Northern Ireland to all elections in Scotland and Wales. In practice, this would mean that some foreign citizens would no longer be able to vote in local elections in Scotland and Wales, or elections to the Scottish Parliament or Senedd Cymru. For completeness, I also note that the noble Lord has tabled multiple amendments, some of which would remove Commonwealth citizens’ voting rights as well, although these would not.

The idea that because people move around the United Kingdom they will, somehow or other, be fogged by the fact that there are differences in its different countries seems very odd. I happen to think that the history of electoral arrangements in Northern Ireland—and in Ireland in general—have not been very happy, but the fact of the matter is that it is for Northern Ireland to decide how it is to be governed, as far as its own devolved position goes.

That is also true for Scotland. I dislike the Scottish nationalists; I think they are the worst Government in the United Kingdom. They have done terrible damage to Scottish education and to Scotland generally, but in the end it is the Scots who have to decide how their own Government are elected. The idea that we should take back to the United Kingdom Government the decision about how we do that seems to undermine the whole concept of devolution. I believe in devolution because the closer that people are to the decision-makers, the more they are likely to feel engaged and that they are their Government.

I hope very much that this House will not go backwards by suggesting that we should force other people to choose their Governments in the way that we like. It is right that everybody shall vote the same way for the central United Kingdom Government, but it seems, frankly, very old-fashioned and out of date to suggest that we should go back on what we do now.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow and almost entirely agree with the noble Lord, Lord Deben, although I do not accept his label of the current Welsh system as odd. I am otherwise in 100% agreement. It is also a great pleasure to admire the speech of the noble Lord, Lord Wigley.

The noble Lord, Lord Jackson, said that this group of amendments would be a check on devolved power. It would be a check on the representatives chosen by the people in their own nations. I say to those who wish to defend and maintain the union that they should realise that denying and removing rights is no way to maintain it. I hope the noble Lord, Lord Frost, would accept that devolution is about difference: different choices in different nations. We have different languages that are protected and relied on in those nations. We have different rules about the management and treatment of land—we will park the Crown Estate in Wales on the side for the moment. We have different kinds of politics and those nations have made very different political choices. I do not think there is any evidence that a change in franchise has made a significant impact on the political choices that those nations have made.

However, I will mostly address a particular element of this group that the noble Lord, Lord Frost, did not address in his introduction, but perhaps he might in the wrap-up. There is an exception. We are talking about every election being under the same franchise, except for the City of London’s ward elections. I point noble Lords to my Amendment 269, which we will undoubtedly get to much later. It would abolish the business vote for the City of London Corporation elections. My amendment would end the nation’s last rotten borough. It would finally introduce the principle of one person, one vote in 2026.

[Lord Deben (Con)]

The noble Baroness kindly said that she liked following my speech. May I say to her that what she said is nonsense, and there is no reason at all to change what happens in the City of London?

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

I am delighted to allow the noble Lord to say just that. I am sure there are many people in your Lordships’ Chamber who would agree with him. In fact, I will point Members to a book that I was at the launch of last week. It is called The Assetocracy and is about the composition of the House of Lords. Noble Lords might find it of interest with relevance to the relationship between this House and the City of London.

Coming back to where I was, I am not going to cover fully the points that I will raise on Amendment 269. However, I ask the noble Lord, Lord Frost, to justify saying, in this context, that everything else has to be the same except the City of London. If you are going to impose uniformity, why have this odd little black hole in the centre of the City without democratic control? Why is that being excluded?

[Baroness Smith of Llanfaes (PC)]

My Lords, I will speak briefly, as my noble friend Lord Wigley has covered some of the most important points. It is also a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett. It is interesting that there is the exception in these amendments for the City of London but not for whole nations, so it would be interesting to hear more about that in closing.

The only points I wanted to raise was that the Welsh Parliament, Senedd Cymru, is the people of Wales’s Parliament. Therefore, it is only right that the people of Wales decide how it is run. The same goes for Scotland and the Scottish Parliament. These amendments are, essentially, an unnecessary power grab. Why is it the business of this Parliament how the people of Wales and Scotland decide to be represented in their Parliaments there?

On the point in relation to different electoral arrangements and whether people understand those when you vote at 16, I want to share the story that during a lot of engagements with younger people across Wales, a lot of them raise how they understand the different systems, particularly because of what happened during the Covid pandemic. During that pandemic, Wales and England made different decisions on whether schools were open. They also made different healthcare arrangements. The younger people of today have experience and knowledge of that; they understand the systems and what the different Parliaments make decisions on. It is really important to share that and rebut what was said in earlier speeches; because of those experiences, they know those differences of opinions.

We take a different approach on matters, and that is devolution. I end by saying that this is a matter, in my opinion, for the Welsh Parliament and the Scottish Parliament only.

Representation of the People Bill

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Committee stage
Monday 2nd November 2026 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Fox of Buckley (Non-Afl)]

Clarification understood. Therefore, I ask the noble Lord to consider that the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, was trying to ensure that people who were entitled to vote were checked up on. The accusation was that he was somehow trying to limit the franchise and I was defending him in relation to that point.

I want to ask the Minister about something that was in a government amendment in an earlier group—we kind of run out of time but it relates to this—which is that registration officers will now have to obtain information, or will be given the right to obtain information, about 14 and 15 year-olds throughout the land and to retain that information for use when inviting them to then register to vote. I thought the point about any Government’s history—I am not making a sectarian point—of looking after data and keeping it safe was a point worth noting, especially if children’s data has been gathered up.

On registration officers collecting data, could the Minister say whether there will be any consideration of the suggestion from the noble Lord, Lord Fuller, about using national insurance numbers? I thought that was a really good suggestion, but I am really asking the Government whether they are open to detailed discussions on the nuts and bolts of how we are going to make this work in relation to both immigration status and the expanded franchise for 16 year-olds. Will there be an opportunity or are there plans to ensure that this is watertight?

To reiterate, if people believe that elections are happening that are not safe, with people being able to vote who have not been strictly checked on or are not registered, then it will undermine democracy. I know that that is the very opposite of what the Government aim.

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP)]

My Lords, I will be very brief. I have signed three amendments in this group—Amendments 52, 59 and 67—that all address the issue of the “missing millions”. This phrase has been used multiple times in this debate; it is a real scar on our polity and a reflection of inequality in our society and in access to participation in the democratic process.

Very briefly on Amendment 52, I commend the noble Baroness, Lady Royall, for her previous work in this area. It is really time to see this finally nailed on, as this amendment would.

I will focus particularly on the two amendments in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. We suffer a great deal of distrust in our politics that comes from us having seen a great number of successive Governments’ Ministers saying, “Look, I’ve pulled a lever”, but everyone knew that that lever was not attached to anything. Promises were made and not delivered. Just two cases that particularly come to my mind are sustainable urban drainage systems, which were promised in planning but have still not been delivered; and the promise to exclude at least illegal deforestation from the supply chain has, again, still not been delivered.

We need to see the Government not just making promises but setting out a reasonable timeframe for delivery. As the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said, Wales is showing that this can be done. That was an interesting cross-reference to our earlier debate on the ways in which the devolved nations can be a real model from which England can learn. It can save itself a great deal of work and effort by seeing what works and just copying it.

[Baroness Coffey (Con)]

My Lords, I have tabled a clause stand part notice on Clause 17 to try to understand the pros and cons of automatic voter enrolment. We had 48.2 million electors at the last election. About 3 million people registered in the month before the election happened, which is about 7% or about 4,500 per constituency, on average, but I am sure it differed. Speaking candidly, that included the person who is now the MP for Suffolk Coastal, who defeated me. They managed to declare themselves as resident in that constituency before they were on the electoral roll. So there is a point here about the real authenticity of the people who are registering, which is where I come to the pros and cons.

There is a lot to be said for not having a huge rush of people registering at the last moment, but there is also something about getting it right. I am conscious that the pilots of the automatic process in Wales saw an increase of between 2% and 8%. Admittedly, only a handful of parts of Wales were covered but, basically, 14,500 people were added through the automatic process and there was a lot of manual checking. I do not know the cost of that, and the Electoral Commission said that it would need to be evaluated based on that cost, but it is worth while trying to get a sense of what happens in a regular process around the country where people have second homes. A lot of second home owners get turned down if they apply in the normal way but not based on their principal residences. I will discuss students and children at boarding school in a different set of amendments, so will not get into the detail on this right now.

On the broader scale, in the review after the last election, an estimate of between 7 million and 8 million people had not registered. There is a law in this country that people are supposed to register, and the council can, if it so wishes, pursue them with a fine of £1,000 per person for not registering. I am not suggesting that councils are going to start trying to generate lots of money, although it feels like a lot of money could be generated if that were the case, but rather that we think about how we do this in a sensible way. That is why there is a sense of ambition—it is not overambition—but how accurate will it be?

Other amendments propose the DWP issuing information to electoral registration officers. I think that the amendment that refers to those issued in the last year being sent on is fine. Actually, HRMC is responsible for the national insurance database and is the overall guardian of that; what happens with the DWP is linked to what happens in HMRC. For example, for people who have not claimed child benefit, it does not happen and they end up going through a manual process to get a national insurance number. But the broader point here comes back to accuracy.

That leads on to the question of what is going to happen about who is entitled to vote in that place if we suddenly have a huge expansion of the electorate. Research has shown that it often becomes an issue if people have moved during the year and end up being registered in more than one place. How does that get resolved? When it comes to parliamentary voting, what is supposed to happen is that the only place where you are allowed to be registered is the principal place in which you live. There is very strict guidance from the Government and the Electoral Commission that this is the case for local registration officers. My concern is that what often happens in the rush at the end is that none of that is gone through, so we end up having a lot of people registering in places where, if they had registered in normal time, their registration might have been turned down because it was not their principal place of residence. There is a risk of overinflating the electorate.

What does that mean for the consideration of constituency boundaries—for example, in the Cities of London and Westminster constituency and in Leeds Central and Headingley? Of course, they often match up to university towns and places of transience where people might move. Things might change under the Renters’ Rights Act, but this is something that the Government need to think through.

I would be grateful to hear from the Minister what lessons the Government have learned from the Welsh Government pilots and how they intend to ensure accuracy. I think there is a case here of rushing to an outcome that, instead of improving democracy, could significantly undermine it. So, as I said, I would be grateful to hear what the Government are doing to manage the risks as well as big-up the benefits.

What guarantees will prevent personal information that is supplied to, for example, HMRC, the DWP or the DVLA from being disclosed to the electoral register? Who bears legal responsibility if somebody is incorrectly registered, omitted or, indeed, registered at an address where they are not entitled to vote? Will automatically created registrations at secondary addresses be excluded from constituency election calculations where appropriate? Most importantly of all, what level of erroneous registration would the Government consider acceptable? How will they measure that, and how will they address it?

This is why, on the surface, it might seem very convenient to have automatic voter registration, but when we are talking about integrity and, ultimately, who forms a parliamentary constituency and who forms a Government, a lot more detail needs to be had than what we have in the Bill.