Elections: Voting Age

Baroness Young of Hornsey Excerpts

Wednesday 27th February 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Young of Hornsey]

My Lords, I, too, am pleased that the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has given us the opportunity to discuss the lowering of the voting age to 16. One of the main benefits of such a discussion is having the opportunity to think about how our attitudes to young people have changed and developed over the years here in the UK.

Encouraging young people to become actively involved in local community politics through exercising a right to vote could help reinvigorate local government, as well as contribute to boosting the number of people who vote in police and crime commissioner elections, and so on. I agree with the noble Lord, Lord Norton, that giving younger people the right to vote should not be seen as a universal panacea for increasing engagement with parliamentary and local government democracy, but there seems to be little evidence to suggest that lowering the voting age will be detrimental to voter turnout. In Austria, Nicaragua, Guernsey and the Isle of Man—where 16 year-olds are allowed to vote—there are consistently higher levels of voter turnout than we currently have here, and we need to understand why.

I have heard some extraordinary comments about 16 year-olds and their apparent lack of sense, political naivety, lack of intellectual capacity, inability to tell when they are being taken for a ride, attachment to superficiality and celebrity, et cetera. I only wish I could say that none of those observations applies to people of my own and other age groups. In my experience of visiting schools and speaking with groups visiting Parliament, young people know and feel very strongly about key global issues relating to the environment and poverty, through connections with schools overseas, the internet, and so on. As the noble Lord, Lord Tyler, has said, this information was simply not available when many of us were younger.

Back in 2006, in response to a recommendation by the Power report, one MP argued against the lowering of the voting age to 16, saying:

“Clearly, a line must be drawn to indicate when a young person becomes an adult, and the present age of 18 is widely accepted across society as signifying a major turning point in the personal development and maturity of individuals”.

Of course, that is not actually true because there is so little consistency about when we deem a young person to be an adult. In any case, those kinds of distinctions are very much socially constructed and change over the years. When I was a teenager, the line was drawn at 21, and I am sure that at that time it seemed equally obvious that that was the magical age at which maturity suddenly dawned. But I would argue that even in the seven years since the inquiry headed by the noble Baroness, Lady Kennedy of The Shaws, reported its findings on participation, we have seen sufficient changes in society to warrant a fresh look at this issue.

There is a general recognition, I think, that many of our children and young people mature physically and psychologically earlier than previous generations. Some even have the responsibilities associated with older people, such as acting as carers for family members. Since the 1980s, more and more young people have expected to go on to further and higher education and as a consequence have had to develop skills of intellectual analysis, which again were not necessarily available to some of us when we were younger. A-levels are offered across the country in government, politics and public administration, and there are courses on citizenship, rights and responsibilities, mock elections, and so on.

As has already been mentioned, the so-called new media such as Twitter, YouTube, the internet and apps offer opportunities to learn about the world in a much wider way than ever before. Young people born into the digital age are most adept at exploiting these resources.

Anyone who doubts that 16 and 17 year-olds are capable of unpicking and analysing political discourse should go to some of the schools that colleagues and I have visited as part of the Peers in Schools programme. When I went to Haringey Sixth Form Centre in Tottenham, when we were in deadlock here debating the reform of the House of Lords, I was well grilled by a group of 16 and 17 year-olds on every aspect of the Bill in a very knowledgeable way and in great detail. They were far more knowledgeable than some of my friends outside the House.

Then there is the Youth Parliament, formed in 1998. Members are aged between 11 and 18 and more than 500,000 young people vote in the elections each year. I will give the last word to somebody who was a representative in the Youth Parliament and who now interns for me, Adam Jogee. About six years ago, when he was 16, he wrote the following:

“As an elected representative of the young people of Haringey, I have first hand experience of their passion, energy and commitment: the energy they use to serve our community, the passion with which they view the world and its future and the commitment which they use to contribute to our society. If we look back over the decades, there are countless cases and examples of people rising up and fighting for their basic human right—the right to vote!”.