Votes at 16

Chloe Smith Excerpts

Wednesday 3rd April 2019 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Secretary, Cabinet Office (Chloe Smith)]

I thank the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) for securing this debate; I confirm that I will leave a little time for him to conclude it. I also thank you for your chairmanship, Mr Howarth, and all hon. Members who have taken part.

Voting age is a really important topic. Like all hon. Members present, I have followed the arguments closely over the years. I stand here at the age of nearly 37; I was first elected to this place when I was 27; and, like many in this Chamber, at the age of 17 I was taking part in youth forum politics. Crucially, the arguments are not being made only by young people; they need to be considered across age groups and across society, as we have done in this thoughtful debate.

I want to take on some of the arguments that have been made, furnish a little more detail and crystallise the choices that we face. I will come on to how the Government are setting out to engage and educate young people, which is very important, but let me start with the fact that the Government were elected on a manifesto commitment to retain the current franchise for parliamentary elections. In response to the hon. Member for Lancaster and Fleetwood (Cat Smith)—my Front-Bench opponent but also, dare I say it, my hon. Friend, because we have shadowed each other in this brief for a while—let me say that if we are talking about the core concepts of democracy, one of them is manifesto commitments. Those commitments mean something to people who follow politics, and it means something for us to stand up and say that we should have faith in the decisions that we offer the electorate and expect to defend.

I will address some points that were made about public opinion and then move on to the issues that were raised about the standard age of majority. My hon. Friend the Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk) referred in passing to the state of public opinion, so let me furnish hon. Members with some detail. In 2004, in one of the most comprehensive reviews and consultations to date on lowering the voting age, the Electoral Commission found that two thirds of people thought that the right age was 18. Instructively for our discussion, it found that more than half of 15 to 19-year-olds agreed. In 2008, the then Labour Government established the Youth Citizenship Commission, which found that although the majority of 16 and 17-year-old respondents were in favour of lowering the voting age, all older categories of respondents were opposed to such a change—an interesting detail.

[Jim McMahon]

The 2004 Electoral Commission report also recommended that a further review be carried out in four to five years, but that review has not yet taken place. Will the Minister commit to it now?

[Chloe Smith]

I almost misheard the hon. Gentleman and thought that he said “45 years”, but he rightly notes that the recommendation was four to five years. No, I am not in a position to commit the Government to such a review today, because the Electoral Commission’s own review concluded that the age should not be changed and, as I shall set out, the evidence still says so.

In 2013, a YouGov poll of voters of all ages and political views found that they opposed changes to the voting age—even the majority of young people did not want 16 and 17-year-olds to have the vote. More recently still, in April 2017, a very large poll of adults found that only 29% were in favour of lowering the age to 16, while 52% were against it.

The international state of play has been discussed, but I will not dwell on it because hon. Members’ examples were well given. The topic that I really want to address, and that the bulk of our debate has focused on, is the age of majority. We have to face up to the fact that 18 is widely recognised in this country as the age at which one becomes an adult. Rightly, we have a range of measures to protect young people below that age. It is a concept in our laws: there is a wide range of life decisions that entail taking on significant responsibility, for which this Parliament has judged that 18 is the right age.

Not only is the Government’s stance built on a bedrock of public opinion, from which we take our manifesto commitment, but there is a clear consistency to it. I do not think that the same can necessarily be said of all the arguments that have been made in this debate. Either someone is old enough or not—both cannot be true, so which is it?

Let me start with health. We generally seek to protect children and young people, who can be some of the most vulnerable members of our society, from actions—either by themselves or by others—that could be detrimental to their health. For example, Parliament has raised the age at which a young person can buy cigarettes; private vehicles carrying someone under 18 must now be smoke free; and we have introduced legislation to ban under-18s from buying e-cigarettes. As I suspect hon. Members know, the all-party parliamentary group on smoking and health recommended only last month that the age at which someone can buy cigarettes ought to be raised from 18 to 21.

The arguments are fundamentally about health and damage; I wonder whether there are hon. Members present who voted against such measures, because they have an argument to answer about consistency. We as a society determine that young people need that additional support and protection. If we consider them to be minors in that area, why do we not in another area?

A further health example is sunbeds, which have been mentioned. Another, which draws on the point about how we differ in parts of our country, is that the Public Health (Wales) Act 2017 raised the minimum age for getting tongue and intimate piercings in Wales to 18. That is a recent way in which the age has gone upwards. A non-health example is that of buying fireworks, which has also been mentioned.

There is a serious consistency point. Someone is either old enough or they are not, and that is not only an idea that is based on health examples—there are plenty of other areas where Parliament has made the same judgment. It includes the right to take out credit, to be able to gamble, to sit on a jury, to own land or property and to legally sign a contract. We could also look at the way the criminal justice system works, where young people are treated differently, with different types of courts and institutions.

Let us move on to the two areas that require parental consent: marriage, other than in Scotland, and joining the armed forces. Those concepts have been discussed in today’s debate. We have to be able to return to the central point of understanding whether someone is or is not old enough, and we should be honest on that point.

[Cat Smith]

Will the Minister give way?

[Chloe Smith]

I have to continue as I must allow time for the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton to wrap up the debate.

The field of education and work is also relevant. At the age we are talking about, young people can choose to participate through full-time education, a job or volunteering combined with part-time study, or by undertaking further training—many young people choose to do so because it gives them good prospects. I think we would all argue that having people in education post 16 helps the economy and society more generally. If we determine that it is good for individuals and for young people collectively, we have to address that question to ourselves when we talk about their voting choices.

That leads to the question of when people work and pay tax. Some people—I think the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton mentioned it first in the debate—make the “no taxation without representation” argument. A minority of young people work—a small number—but not very many of them pay tax, in part at least because of the raising of the personal allowance. Those who earn least in our society, including our young people, will not be required to pay tax until they earn more.

I understand the argument that one could work and therefore one could pay tax and therefore one has an interest. It does not follow that the tax should be linked to the right to vote, especially if we turn the argument around. If we turn if from “no taxation without representation” to “no representation without taxation”, we would essentially be saying that those who are unable to work or the lowest earners in our society should not get the vote. That is the corollary of the argument, and it needs to be drawn out. If we want to make a link between tax and voting, we have to look at the opposite case as well. It is right that we should do so.

Parliament has determined time after time that we have such a thing as an age of majority, and we seek to protect people who are younger than that age. We have to confront that in today’s discussion.

I move on to what else we should, must and do do to improve citizenship education and expand the range of ways that young people can participate in our democracy. The Government absolutely recognise that point and have a record of action to prove it. We work in partnership with a range of civil society organisations, including the British Youth Council, to help young people be involved. The Government facilitate the UK Youth Parliament, and last year we saw the success of National Democracy Week. Of course, the national curriculum now rightly includes citizenship education.

I am so pleased that the hon. Member for Oldham West and Royton reminded us of Annie Kenney, because that allows us to look at what the Cabinet Office did for the suffrage centenary last year. It delivered a range of things to help young people get involved in our democracy. I urge hon. Members to look at the toolkit, the democracy ambassadors scheme and the school resources, which are there for us all to use in our constituencies. Those resources help us to do the practical work in a way that makes a difference, and help young people to be in their rightful place in our democracy, as part of what we should all be doing to promote and improve the way that we do politics. We do that by including young people, but also by being respectful of the arguments that go with that: what public opinion really says; what minority and majority really mean; what commitments such as those in manifestos actually mean to people; and how we can consider all of those things together in a way that means that everyone is welcome in our democracy, at the right age. That is as it should be, and it is a good thing.