Election Law

Baroness Royall of Blaisdon Excerpts

Tuesday 18th November 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

Actually, there are a very significant number of young people who have expressed their wish to take part in the political system. From my point of view, engaging more people in our system with the education steps that I spoke about earlier, to make sure that we introduce civic education and education around the political process, will help improve trust and confidence in the system.

[Baroness Royall of Blaisdon (Lab)]

My Lords, further to my noble friend Lady Brown’s question about automatic registration, and following on from questions about young people, can my noble friend give me the assurance that at least young people voting for the first time aged 16-plus could be automatically registered? We know that voting is habit-forming and that we need participation in our democracy in order to give it strength.

[Baroness Taylor of Stevenage (Lab)]

As I explained, we are doing our best to look at all forms of identification and how that might impact on voter registration. We want to be as broad-minded as we can. I will expand a little more. The secondary curriculum will also build on the introduction of civic citizenship at key stages 1 and 2 so that we can make sure that, at both primary and secondary age, pupils are getting an essential grounding in all the topics they need. We need to work on making sure that young people are not disfranchised because of the ID systems we use for voting. So we are putting our minds to it and will bring forward new steps in the elections Bill.