Representation of the People (Young People’s Enfranchisement) Bill [HL]

Baroness Falkner of Margravine Excerpts

Friday 28th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

My Lords, I start by paying tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Adonis. He has been utterly consistent over the years in his attempts to move electoral law in this direction. However, I do not think that repeated attempts at something necessarily imply their soundness. I am surprised that someone as committed as he is to the UK’s international affairs has said so little about the UK’s obligations under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. This recognises that individuals are children until they reach the age of 18.

The recognition that young people are defined as children is the foundation of our thinking about them when we wish to keep them out of harm’s way, particularly in conflict. In the late 1990s, I worked for the late Baroness Williams of Crosby in her attempts to prevent children from joining the Army. Her campaigning was rewarded in 2000 by the then Labour Government, who signed and implemented the optional protocol to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child to

“take every feasible step to ensure that children below the age of 18 years do not take part in hostilities”.

I hope that the noble Lord will not propose that we remove parental permission to allow children to join the Army after he has given them votes. However, the logic of his argument will inevitably take us there. If you can vote and stand for elected office at 16, it logically follows that you would stand—at this point no one has disputed that. I find it hard to understand how you could vote for elected office but be barred from standing for it. If that were to happen, as I argue would be the next step, then it would be an obscenity if you yourself were to call on others to make the ultimate sacrifice but would not lead from the front in doing so yourself. A child deciding to send an older man or woman into war does not fit with my moral compass, I am afraid.

I also want to argue a general point—one picked up by the noble Lord, Lord Hannan of Kingsclere—that, before we move to a system whereby we decide to lower the age of voting, we need to think about the rights agenda as a comprehensive whole. I refer to the legal fragmentation that exists when we consider someone a “child” for the purpose of considering their status as a rights-bearing individual, as opposed to when we sanction them for wrongdoing. This framework overall is confused and irrational, and requires a comprehensive rethink across the board.

I personally consider it an abuse by the state to continue to hold to an age of criminal responsibility of 10, on the one hand, with all the irreversible damage that it will do to a child, while denying them full employment rights until they are 18. Not only do we deny them employment rights, but we detract from their rights by having different categories of minimum wage, as if a strapping 17 year-old in a warehouse is somehow less capable of stacking shelves than a 44 year-old.

However, employment rights are perhaps a debate for another day; I will stick to this one. I want to highlight some of the other inconsistencies and confusion of who is and who is not a child for the purposes of this legislation, something which the supporters of the Bill might wish to consider. The Gambling Act prohibits those under the age of 18 from gambling or placing a bet in a casino or betting shop. If we can vote at 16, and thus, as I argue, stand as a candidate at 16, surely we ought to be able to take a flutter on an election result at 16. Moreover, we have moved the minimum age for participation in National Lottery games from 16 to 18 since last year; I understand that that was a Labour amendment. The direction of travel when we look at contemporary harms, rightly, is to move the age upwards, not downwards.

The Children and Families Act 2014 was concerned with the health effects of smoking, and banned smoking by adults when children under 18 were present in a car. In this case, the state was expected to infringe on the Article 8 rights—respect for a private life, family life and so on—to protect the health of “children” under 18. In the same space, on health, the parties opposite are all over the place, wanting a ban on the sale of tobacco products to under 21 year-olds; I think that is the noble Lord, Lord Rennard. One gets the sense that, instead of defending the autonomy and choices available to young people, there is a lack of proportion in these kinds of policies. On this one, I would have thought that young people needed education on the harmful effects of substances, not bans under the guise of “protection of childhood” while we move selectively to change the definition of childhood in the Bill.

When thinking about young people as rights-holders and duty-bearers, we as lawmakers still have some way to go. I want to talk in more positive terms of what we might do to engage young people in participating as active citizens; voting is only one criterion of that, sheet anchor though it might be. As we become a more “rights-bearing” society, while simultaneously becoming more litigious, it is increasingly obvious that citizens have a rather patchy understanding of their rights. Citizenship education, which is a relatively recent innovation in this country, introduced to the curriculum 20 years ago, is still rather inadequate.

One of the reasons why society is so polarised is because people have very different understandings of what is and is not within the law. One area that we see a lot of is a lack of public understanding around discrimination, harassment and victimisation. Another is the boundary between freedom of expression and what is referred to as hate speech. These issues create friction and contestation every day, day in and day out.

My point is that before we can make voters out of our citizens, we need to share some basic concepts about the duties that they owe to one another that go along with the rights that they will exercise. One 16 year-old will be very different in maturity from another, but if they have both benefited from better knowledge of the public square then they will be better equipped to live well together in it. Voting is simply one component of that democracy. I applaud the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for his determination but I suggest that his efforts to improve our democracy would bear more fruit if we spent more energy on changing the culture of politics rather than the processes of its manifestation.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

My Lords, I congratulate my noble friend Lord Adonis on bringing forward this Bill. I thank him for giving me a timely reminder that legislation can sometimes be empowering rather than oppressive.

I have long been an enthusiast for the extension of the franchise to 16 and 17 year-olds, since long before I joined a political party, and have found the arguments against it reminiscent of those once marshalled against votes for working people and for women. That the Government opposed this measure in their 2019 manifesto means little given that, by definition, the disenfranchised category could not endorse that; I suspect that it was not determinative in that election but I could be wrong about that.

Given the shenanigans contained in the pending Elections Bill, I have no doubt that some would ideally like to raise the voting age, perhaps to 39, or indeed reintroduce the property qualification, but I am not among their number. Of course, I accept that maturity is a gradual and organic process—and, judging by some of the behaviour that I have witnessed even in the Palace of Westminster over the years, it may not be complete at any particular age.

Still, the law requires some fixed, if necessary, arbitrary ages for the allocation of rights and obligations in a society. As voting is such a fundamental democratic right, it seems better to err on the side of enfranchisement rather than deprivation, particularly when general elections may come four or so years apart. To be just under 18 when a general election is held may leave a young citizen without an effective say until they are nearly 22. That is a long time, not just in politics but especially in a young life that we wish to include in and inspire with our democratic rituals.

I wish to make six arguments in favour of the age of 16. The first is probably older than the Boston Tea Party: no taxation without representation. Many young people work for low or no pay and, frankly, it is outrageous and an unjustified discrimination that they have a lower minimum wage of under £5 an hour when under 18. Those who perform vital and totally unpaid caring work in their homes for younger siblings, parents or grandparents are effectively subsidising the state with their unpaid labour, often at significant cost to their own health, education and life chances.

That leads me to my second argument—namely, that the electorate and successive Governments neglect the interests of the disenfranchised in public spending and prioritisation decisions over, for example, children and young people’s health, especially mental health, and other services. This warping of priorities becomes especially dangerous in the context of climate catastrophe, for example, which is perhaps more readily ignored, sometimes to the point of delusion, by those less likely to live to see its more dramatic consequences.

Thirdly, I must point to other things we believe it is appropriate for a 16 year-old to do, including consenting to sex; marrying or joining the military with parental consent; otherwise leaving home; driving a moped or, I believe, a small tractor, not that I have had experience of that; flying a glider; drinking a beer, cider or glass of wine with a meal in a restaurant; investing in a cash ISA, apparently—I guess for some but not for others; consenting to medical treatment; and changing their name by deed poll. I say to the two noble Lords opposite who just spoke that Botox is harmful, as is putting yourself in the field of battle, but voting is not.

With the greatest respect to the noble Baroness who is chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, in 30 years as a human rights lawyer, I have never heard an interpretation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child that says it prohibits voting under the age of 18.

[Baroness Falkner of Margravine (CB)]

The noble Baroness referred to my role as chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission. I want to make it clear that in this debate I am speaking in a personal capacity, not representing the EHRC. I was in this House prior to becoming chair so have spoken on these matters in the past.

[Baroness Chakrabarti (Lab)]

Indeed, but I was referring to the noble Baroness’s expertise rather than suggesting that she was speaking on its behalf. I am grateful for her clarification.

Fourthly and crucially, we think it acceptable for children to bear criminal responsibility for their actions at just 10 years old—a frankly barbaric state of affairs that your Lordships’ House neglected to remedy at the end of last year. I remember that the Minister was in the Chamber at that time, as was I. There is a whole eight-year gap between facing potential criminal sanction under the laws of the land and being able to elect those who shape them.

My next argument is that to extend the franchise in the manner proposed by my noble friend Lord Adonis could serve to enliven a crucial stage in the educational journey, making the learning of citizenship, humanities and applied science a vital practical exercise, not just an academic one, with, as my noble friend said, electoral candidates spending more time in schools and young people’s spaces, to the benefit of their own understanding of their constituents’ challenges. Like many noble Lords, I have had the enormous privilege of speaking in literally hundreds of schools and colleges over the years. My predominant experience is of secondary school-aged children increasingly concerned and curious about the state of the world, though not always encouraged and empowered to believe that they might affect it for the better. However, they might.

That brings me to my sixth and final argument, which concerns not what the vote could do for these young people but what they could do for the vote. That is not in a partisan sense, because I do not believe the noble Lords opposite need to be so pessimistic as to assume that any group is lost to one side of the argument or another in politics. How many in your Lordships’ House rely on children—or even, dare I say it, grandchildren—for advice or practical help, with matters relating to technology in particular? Who better to help to shape debates about online harms or the increasing algorithmic determinism that is in danger of hardwiring inequality and injustice into the human experience? In reciprocity, who better to lead the charge towards enfranchising our younger people than the mostly older heads of a wise and kindly, if unelected, Chamber demonstrating its imagination and independence?