Elections Bill

Baroness Chakrabarti Excerpts

Lords Hansard - Part 1 & Committee stage
Wednesday 23rd March 2022 Lords Chamber

[Lord Holmes of Richmond (Con)]

My Lords, I shall speak to Amendment 143, which has received such wholesome support from other Members of Your Lordships’ House. I can sum it up in four words: no taxation without representation.

I do not suggest for one moment that other contributions are not valid. The clause says nothing on that. I do not suggest anything to the wider debate; that has been well laid out. It is a clause set out in extremely simple terms on an incredibly specific point: the disfranchised 16 to 18-year-olds who currently can work and go to war cannot vote for how those taxes are spent and cannot vote for the Government who send them to war. Nothing more, nothing less than that.

I do not decry wider issues; it is simply a point on that specific group of people which is currently disfranchised. The Minister may wish to consider one possible solution: taking the 16 to 18-year-olds out of taxation completely. Amendment 143 offers an alternative solution, where they can be represented. I accept entirely the point of the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, on the complexities in previous years, but what one can now do with digital tax and real-time tax data would overcome those points. It is a simple amendment for a specific group of people, and a cry which has gone through democracies for centuries: no taxation without representation.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond. I would have pre-empted him, but I am so glad that I did not. With respect, some noble Lords wrongly anticipated an incredibly creative and clever probing amendment. He has made the point about no taxation without representation through Amendment 143. I would not like to see it on the statute book because I do not want to return to the link between property, earnings or wealth and the franchise, but he has made a brilliant point very succinctly and incredibly well.

I will not torture Ministers further with my views on this subject. I have tortured Ministers of both stripes with my support for votes at 16 for some years. The poor Minister was tortured a while ago by my noble friend Lord Adonis, who is not in his place. We rehearsed this, and I commend to the Committee that extensive debate that we had one Friday, three years ago or five minutes ago; I forget which. It was five minutes ago. I do not support votes at six. I accept that any age of majority is slightly arbitrary because people mature differently. We must pick an age in law.

I rather think that we should be coalescing around 16, not only for voting but for criminal responsibility. The disparity between suffrage and criminal responsibility, in addition to taxation, I find very troubling. The noble Lord, Lord Holmes of Richmond, made his point so well. Of course, taxation is not just for people who are earning and paying taxes. There are sales taxes and, as the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, said, people who are doing unpaid work and keeping families and small businesses going. However, Ministers have human rights too, and I would like them to get a comfort break and some supper quite soon.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I am afraid that I am going to strike a discordant note because I invite my noble friend to reject these amendments, and certainly Amendments 137 and 138. I follow what the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, said about Amendment 143. It is an interesting idea but highly complex and probably not practical.

The Committee will recognise that I am committed to a vibrant civil society. I have spoken about it, I have moved amendments about it, and I think that it is a very important part of our democratic system, because it maximises people’s ability to participate, collectively or individually.

The noble Lord, Lord Wallace of Saltaire, who is not in his place, referred to lowering the voting age in order to increase citizenship education, which seemed to be the wrong way around; citizenship education would lead to improved understanding of what voting is all about. I absolutely agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. That was a central theme of our cross-party review on citizenship for civic engagement. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Collins, as a member of the Liaison Committee, for having backed the idea of a follow-up, since when we have gone sideways, if not backwards. I am pleased to be able to say to him and the noble Baroness that the revised report will be published on Monday and out in the wider world on Tuesday, to probably no effect whatever but at least we will have some benchmarks.

During the committee, we had two issues from which the chairman has scars. The first was about British values. What were they, or were there any? The second was the voting age.

I shall quote a couple of sentences from our report, because they summarise some of the issues that lie behind these two amendments and which mean that I personally do not support them. Paragraph 319 of the report states:

“However, the issue has divided our witnesses. There is no consensus on whether the age should be lowered to 16 or whether it should remain at 18. Proponents of the change listed being able to marry and become a member of the armed forces as a reason for considering that 16 year olds are sufficiently responsible to vote. However this raises questions of whether it is right for people to be trusted as responsible enough to vote whilst not being responsible enough to ‘buy a beer or cigarettes or even drive to their friends or buy a firework’”.


That was what Professor Jon Tonge, professor of politics at the University of Liverpool, said in evidence to us. He and Dr Mycock have been doing some more research on this whole area. As the noble Baroness said, there was obviously a fierce discussion about the pressure for democratic backing for the change. Professor Tonge told our committee that he thought young people were almost evenly divided, though he said that some of that data was quite old.

The noble Baroness referred to the Make Your Mark campaign, but I am not sure she gave the full picture of what we were told. To quote from paragraph 321,

“the Make Your Mark campaign coordinated by the UK Youth Parliament included the votes of over 950,000 young people”,

which the noble Baroness referred to,

“who had voted to make votes at 16 one of their core campaigns.”

However, an analysis of the votes done by our staff showed that

“it received 101,041 votes”—

only one in nine—

“and came 5th out of 10 topics. This suggests that young people care more about other topics than about votes at 16.”

Interestingly, the topic that received the most votes was “A curriculum to prepare us for life”, which in turn suggests support for a radical overhaul of the whole area of citizenship education and involvement. As Professor Tonge said:

“You would not let people go out on the road and drive a car without giving them some lessons first, yet we expect them—particularly if we lower the voting age to 16—to go out and vote without giving them any training in what our political systems are about. It seems perverse.”


To summarise, my view is that unless the case for making a fundamental change is overwhelmingly made, we should not make the change. I do not think that case has been overwhelmingly made. It certainly was not made before our committee and that is why I hope my noble friend will reject these amendments.

I shall dare to trespass on the Committee’s time for a further moment, ending with not a discordant but a sour note. In the debate on voter ID in the last meeting of the Committee, my noble friend on the Front Bench took a lot of heavy punishment about how it was being introduced to try to benefit the Conservative Party. He rejected that, rightly in my view. Would I be wrong to say that there might be some advantages for other parties in the House in young people voting and that that may be why it is being so enthusiastically supported?

--- Later in debate ---

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

I take the noble Lord’s point, because there are all sorts of polls and this is in the Library briefing, but I can honestly say that I have debated this issue in the past with Labour Ministers who were not for votes at 16 at the time. I think we are getting to a stage in thinking about sophistication and education where we have to coalesce around an arbitrary age. I go back to the criminal responsibility point. The noble Lord speaks very eloquently. He argues “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” and that we should not make a radical change without a great deal of consensus. He did not speak like that when he was talking about radically overhauling the refugee convention on another Bill.

[Lord Lexden (Con)]

My Lords, I simply venture to suggest that, at the moment, the priority should be to assist and encourage as many of our young people who are already entitled to vote at the age of 18 to get on the registers. We do not have nearly enough of them on the registers. The Government have a number of important initiatives in hand to encourage more of those aged 18 and immediately above to register to vote. My noble friend might be able tell us briefly about some of those important initiatives when he comes to reply.