Representation of the People Bill

Cat Smith Excerpts

Monday 2nd March 2026 Commons Chamber

[Sir James Cleverly]

It is easy to vote. Everyone has the right to vote. The right hon. Lady says that voting should be as easy as breathing; she is advocating for the removal of all electoral limitations and restrictions, whether that is the need to show ID, to provide proof of address, or to register. [Interruption.] There you go; the mask has slipped. If we take democracy seriously, we should want everyone who has the right to vote to be able to vote, but nobody who does not have the right to vote to be able to vote. Otherwise, the democratic process is meaningless. Safeguards must be robust, verification must be clear, and pilots should be transparent. Integrity is strengthened by accuracy, not automation for its own sake.

As for voter ID, let us look at the facts. At the last general election the vast majority of those who sought to vote were able to do so successfully and immediately, and public confidence in polling integrity has increased, so why should we weaken the system by allowing bank cards without photographs to be used as ID? A name printed on a card is not an identity check, and I am not hearing that the Secretary of State is advocating the checking of PINs at the polling station. The risks are obvious, and, indeed, the Electoral Commission itself has raised concerns about the security and practicality of expanding the lists of acceptable IDs.

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Wyre) (Lab)]

On that point, will the right hon. Gentleman give way?

[Sir James Cleverly]

I need to make some progress, otherwise I will be told off by Madam Deputy Speaker.

Integrity is not just about integrity at the door of the polling station. At the time of the recent Gorton and Denton by-election, Democracy Volunteers reported widespread breaches of ballot secrecy. Parliament strengthened the protections for ballot secrecy through the Ballot Secrecy Act 2023—and this is not “family voting”; it is breaking the law. If polling station staff do not intervene when a voter is directed by another inside the polling booth, if secrecy signs are missing, if offences are ignored, the problem is not an absence of legislation, but a failure to enforce the legislation. The vote belongs to the individual—not to that person’s husband, not to that person’s brother, and not to a community leader—and no cultural practice overrides the secrecy of the ballot box in this country.

The Secretary of State mentioned artificial intelligence and deepfakes. He was right to say that we are entering a new era, and we support the idea of digital imprints. The rules exist, but the technology is moving fast. We would support and are happy to engage with sensible, proportionate measures to ensure that AI-generated political material is clearly labelled and subject to transparency as a requirement, but that work should be done carefully and in consultation. Again, this is exactly the kind of issue that would benefit from cross-party engagement.

The centrepiece of the Bill—its big sales point—is the lowering of the voting age from 18 to 16. Both domestically and internationally, through the Children Act 1989 and the United Nations convention on the rights of the child respectively, we define 16 and 17-year-olds as children, so allowing votes at 16 can only logically be explained in one of two ways.

--- Later in debate ---

[Cat Smith (Lancaster and Wyre) (Lab)]

Those of us who are in this Chamber on a Thursday morning know that we sometimes have questions to the Speaker’s Committee on the Electoral Commission then, and I say that because in the last Parliament, as an Opposition MP, I was a spokesperson for that Committee. It is the only time in the parliamentary week when Members pose questions to an opposition Member to answer. That is an important point, because it highlights the fact that the Electoral Commission is not answerable to Government, of any colour; rather, it is answerable to Parliament, because it is a regulator like no other. It regulates politics, and it therefore holds a very special status.

I also served in the last Parliament on the Elections Bill Committee, and I saw there what happens when political parties use legislation for political advantage. I am really pleased to be able to say that the Bill before us contains many of the important democratic principles that I have been speaking about for the last 11 years in this House, and I am excited to vote for it on Second Reading this evening.

Among the Bill’s measures is the expansion of voting rights to 16 and 17-year-olds. We have heard some quite bizarre things said about that so far this evening, some of which were really quite remarkable. The Bill also includes bank cards among the forms of ID that can be used to access voting. For those who were not in the last Parliament to see the Elections Bill go through and become the Elections Act 2022, let me say that time and again, Conservative Ministers told us at the Dispatch Box that if people need ID to collect a parcel at the post office, they should need ID to vote at a polling station; but if we want to collect a parcel at a post office, we can use a bank card for that, so this is completely in line with the arguments made for the introduction of ID, and I would expect the official Opposition to support expanding the relevant ID to include bank cards.

It is important that we come together on upholding confidence in democracy, because confidence in democracy is not very high in this country right now. That is why it is so important that expanding the franchise to include 16 and 17-year-olds goes hand in hand with working with our colleagues in education to ensure that those young citizens are equipped to vote, and have the necessary support. Already, young citizens in Wales and Scotland have the right to vote, and bringing English and Northern Irish citizens into line makes logical sense.

[Peter Swallow (Bracknell) (Lab)]

I declare an interest: I am chair of the all-party group on schools, learning and assessment, and we are conducting an inquiry on votes at 16 to see what support young people will need to make the most of the vote, when they get it. The most important thing that young people are telling us is that they are concerned that their teachers do not feel confident enough to lead discussions in the classroom around politics. Does my hon. Friend agree that we must support not just our young people, but our teachers, and enable conversations about democracy, the voting process and citizenship?

[Cat Smith]

I thank my hon. Friend for making that point. His APPG sounds very interesting. I am sure that those on the Front Bench heard those points, and I agree with them.

In my remaining time, I want to address the need to protect our democracy from foreign interference. In cleaning up politics, we need to address specific weaknesses identified. There is a very good blog by Professor Alan Renwick at the University College London constitution unit, which I would love to quote from, but my time is quite limited. He highlights that while the Bill introduces stricter eligibility criteria for company donors, there are still huge gaps regarding cryptocurrency and the potential for illicit funds to bypass traditional checks. We should be bold enough to start talking about a donation cap, too. There is no plausible argument against introducing caps on political donations to prevent a small number of wealthy people from exerting disproportionate influence.

The changes made in the last piece of legislation that went through this House on electoral law have left a huge vulnerability. That legislation abolished the 15-year rule we used to have, whereby citizens who had lived outside the UK for 15 years or longer lost the right to vote and to donate to UK politics. When that rule was abolished, there was no way for elections officers in councils up and down the country to verify that people claiming to have lived at an address in another constituency in 1976 actually did so, because those records were not kept past 15 years, as of course there was no point. Now, there are permissible donors to the UK electoral system who claim to have lived in the UK, and we have no way of proving whether they did. That is a huge vulnerability, and I urge those on the Front Bench to look again at that, and at closing that potential back door that we have left open to foreign money interfering in UK politics. We are an outlier in having this rule; in the Republic of Ireland, for instance, those who leave the country lose the right to vote after one year.

I would like to finish by saying that many colleagues have made the case for proportional representation, and this Bill would have been a great opportunity to set up a commission to look at all the different options that would be available to make sure that people feel that their vote counts, and that there is no such thing as a wasted vote.