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

Baroness Greengross Excerpts

Friday 28th January 2022 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greengross (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Adonis, for introducing this Private Member’s Bill. The Bill is part of a conversation about how we should prepare our young people for participating in a modern democracy, and we need to be much better at doing that.

Much of my professional working life has been spent advocating for older people, but, at the same time, my volunteering work throughout my life—in this country and abroad—has always been with young people. This experience has taught me that between the ages of 16 and 18, people mature and develop considerably and will often only just start grappling with big political and social issues. I am not totally convinced that the voting age should be lowered immediately, but I think it should be in the longer term and I am interested in seeking views and input immediately from young people. In fact, I see the engagement of young people in our political system as crucial, as many of the decisions we make today will impact on their lives for many years to come, and we need to prepare them immediately for having the right to vote.

As a species, we are going through a phase of unprecedented transformation. How do we prepare young people to participate in our democracy so that they can make sense of the increasingly complex challenges that face us? Historically, we have educated children from the ages of five to 16 mostly through imparting information and expecting this to see people through their lives. In 2022, we all now have access to an overwhelming amount of information—one of the wonders of the internet age. The challenge is filtering information so that complicated political or scientific ideas are not ignored or given the same status as conspiracy theories or other misinformation.

In his 2018 publication 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Dr Yuval Noah Harari argues that today, the last thing we need to be doing in schools is imparting even more information, as most students have already received far too much. Instead, he argues that

“people need the ability to make sense of information, to tell the difference between what is important and what is unimportant, and above all to combine many bits of information into a broad picture of the world.”

He goes on to say that this has been the ideal of western liberal education for centuries, but up until now our education system has often failed to fulfil this ideal.

In this country, citizenship has been a statutory subject on the English national curriculum since 2001. This followed the 1998 Crick report recommendations that stressed the importance of teaching democracy in schools. In 2010, this was scaled back to a broader goal that schools should prepare students for life in modern Britain. This change saw a shift towards teaching knowledge rather than skills and practice—the very thing that Dr Yuval Noah Harari argues we should try to move away from.

In 2018, the House of Lords published a report entitled The Ties that Bind: Citizenship and Civic Engagement in the 21st Century. This publication was critical of the state of citizenship education in England, saying that it has been allowed to

“degrade to a parlous state.”

The report called for a statutory entitlement to citizenship education from primary to the end of secondary education.

It is crucial that in this increasingly complex and changing world, we prepare our citizens with the tools they need to make sound, informed choices when participating in our democracy. Whatever age we allow people to start voting, we need civics education that not only teaches them how our democracy works but teaches them critical thinking, so that they can separate the wheat from the chaff. Once we have made these improvements to citizenship education in England, we should work towards a change in the voting age, which I would strongly support.