Voting Age (Comprehensive Reduction) Bill [HL]

Baroness Kidron Excerpts

Friday 25th October 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kidron (CB)]

My Lords, as others have said, central to this debate is the question of maturity: whether a young person of 16 or 17 is mature enough to take on the mantle of independent thought and wise enough to play their part in the democratic process. I will not repeat what has already been said in the debate, but it seems that we have not categorically decided when a child becomes an adult, and therefore it is of little surprise that the interests of the young are woefully unrepresented.

The reality of the current political process is that the concerns of those who vote become the concerns of the political class. As a result, the young are suffering the worst employment rates, have a full-time wage that cannot meet the ever increasing costs of housing, utilities and transport. They have become burdened with debt for their education. We have consigned them to be poorer, to live at home for longer, and to look forward to bearing greater responsibilities for looking after the old. They endure a lack of representation that is positively deforming of their interests, so unless all of our citizens participate in the political process, the “political market” will always favour those with votes to spend. And yet we ask this under-represented group to make life-defining choices before the age at which they can vote, choices that tacitly require investment in a future over which they have no purchase. In doing so, we demand high levels of those same qualities that we doubt they own, those of maturity, commitment and wisdom. If we demand so much, perhaps we also owe them the tools to help shape the future we are asking them to invest in.

The noble Lord, Lord Tyler, referred to the positive relationship between citizenship lessons and registering to vote in Ireland, while others have also talked about citizenship. However, in September this year the statutory requirement to provide citizenship education was, I think, disapplied. The only formal entry point to the democratic process was loosened from the statutory offer in our schools. Next spring will see the introduction of individual electoral registration, legislation that disproportionately affects young people as many of them move to educational institutions and new towns and cities in search of work. Would it not be a much more equitable state of affairs if every young person left school with a full set of jabs, a national security number, a decent education, already registered to vote and—as other noble Lords have commented—confident to vote?

The habits that are formed in youth “stick”, whether they are smoking or reading, sports or debating. A voting habit in the next generation would be transforming to our democracy. We are leaving it too late to invest political power in the young, to make participation a norm, and to give them agency over their investment in the future. We are leaving it too late for them to have the right to demand a world that meets their needs adequately. Some people assert that a 16 year-old is not mature enough to vote, but the right to vote, as others have suggested, is not contingent on maturity or wisdom. If it were, many of us adults might be considered unfit. Voting well or correctly is not a consideration here.

In the Library note that has provided us with the background to this debate, I was amused by the ever changing statistics on the voting patterns for “Britain’s Got Talent” and “The X Factor” versus electoral turnout. Having a right and exercising it are not material; they are two separate issues. In my capacity as co-founder of an educational charity, which is declared on the register of interests, I have been privileged to have visited scores of schools and talked to hundreds of young people over the past decade. Scratch the surface and they display wisdom, energy and foresight in copious quantities. The arguments about introducing an unfit cadre into the electoral equation sounds suspiciously like other arguments of exclusion made at other times.

The question that should frame this debate is not about their suitability, but ours. We have allowed a crisis to develop—a lack of engagement and faith in the political process that threatens its legitimacy. We have failed to deal with many of the most intractable issues of the day and we have left for the next generation a multitude of fiscal, environmental and political debts. Lowering the voting age is not a question of our altruism. The political class needs some votes to spend on behalf of the long-term interests of the young, and for that we need to allow young people to participate in our democracy.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, this has been a high-quality debate and I thank all those who have taken part. I have to say that there is no consensus within the Government on this change. This reflects differing views in society at large and the divergent positions on the topic within and across political parties. Having said that, let me bring one of the underlying issues out into the open; let us all be a little honest: the reason why the Greens, the Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party are in favour of votes at 16 is not completely unconnected with the hope and belief that young people are more likely to vote for those sorts of party, and the position of the Conservative Party for various reasons is not entirely the same. The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, is an enthusiast for making it easier for those who live overseas to vote. That again is an important issue in terms of democratic participation. It is not completely unconnected perhaps with the belief that those people might just be a little more inclined to vote Conservative. So we need a cross-party consensus on the franchise and we need to approach this as carefully and consensually as possible.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, for continuing to push for this change; it is very much a debate that we need to continue to have. I was rather struck by the report of the youth council saying that there was a severe lack of evidence that there is a demand for votes at 16, so it is a discussion that we need to continue.

The debate has gone rather more widely than this issue. We have discussed the decline in participation in party politics, the shift to single-issue politics and disengagement and alienation from politics. Those are issues that all of us in political parties need to be concerned about. It is a long-term shift, having started in the late 1960s with disillusionment with the then Labour Government, and it creates real problems for all of us who are involved in the trade-offs which politicians, particularly those in government, have to address.

Single-issues campaigns always want 100% of what they go for. I recall one of my Liberal Democrat colleagues, a lawyer, saying, “When you give a particular group 80% of what they wanted, they attack you that you didn’t give the other 20%”. Government is very often about compromise and about realising that you cannot spend everything on everything, and single-issue campaigning can to some extent deteriorate politics. I do not want to edge over in the Transparency of Lobbying Bill beyond saying that I have a particularly painful awareness this morning of the new political technologies and the extent to which singe-issue campaigning can go into that area, because the Electoral Reform Society successfully crashed my computer last night in an attack which was worthy of Russian technology in the way that it took place.

Perhaps I may comment on some of the issues that have been raised. To the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, I say that the precedent in Scotland is one that has been brought about by the Scottish Government for the Scottish referendum; it does not necessarily affect where we go from here in the rest of the United Kingdom.

The noble Lord, Lord Lexden, listed the social dimension of party youth wings. The particularly close nature of that social dimension among young people of one sort or another is something that I remember well; indeed, I met my wife at a Young Liberal conference.

How to re-engage young people in politics and how far citizenship education relates to that seem to me to be at the core of this debate. My own personal view is that the need to make sure that citizenship education is taken more seriously in schools, with all the other pressures on the curriculum, is in many ways the most powerful argument for considering lowering the voting age. We are all of us here, I am sure, committed to more effective citizenship education and encouraging young people to vote. I am not myself persuaded, nor are the Government, that making the first vote compulsory would help in this regard. I was wondering, as the noble Baroness was suggesting it, how we would enforce it. Would we impose fines on young people for not voting or would we send them to prison? Would we have compulsory service of some sort? There are real problems in insisting on compulsory voting if we want to put penalties on it.

I strongly share the noble Baroness’s views about active citizenship. As I have said previously, having started as an initial sceptic about the citizen service scheme which the Conservatives initiated, I have become a convert. I have found that through that young people find that working within their own community and promoting projects to help others within it is something which 15 and 16 year-olds are capable of and can enjoy, and it gives them a sense of local engagement. I suspect that we need to spend more time working on community councils—really local councils, which we have lost—if we are to re-engage an awful lot of people with politics. There is a whole host of issues there which are not within the frame of this debate.

I think that I heard the noble Baroness, Lady Kidron, say that every young person should be equipped with a national security number.

[Baroness Kidron]

I meant social security.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

All thoughts of shadows of the dominant state emerged there. For those of us who are concerned about the debate on data sharing, data protection and data privacy, I note that that is not a phrase that one would want to use lightly.

I have touched on citizenship education. The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, raised the delicate issue of taxpaying and voting. That relates particularly to the participation of overseas voters. We are unclear about the principles which would apply to voting as such.

Having welcomed the debate, the Government have no agreed view on how we should respond. I wish the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, well. I am glad to hear that the policy is in the Labour Party manifesto, and I hope that it will follow through on that commitment in its manifesto as vigorously as it did its commitment to Lords reform in its previous manifesto.