Wales Bill

Chris Ruane Excerpts

Wednesday 10th December 2014 Commons Chamber

[Chris Ruane (Vale of Clwyd) (Lab)]

The Minister has mentioned the registration of young voters in Scotland. What was done there to get the registration rates so high was great. Is he aware that the registration rate for 18-year-olds in England and Wales is as low as 55%, so if this provision goes ahead, we will really have to work hard to get the registration rate up?

[Alun Cairns]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. The Bill contains measures to encourage the Assembly to engage with younger people and encourage them to register, should it wish to extend the franchise in the referendum on income tax varying powers.

[Chris Ruane]

Has the Minister heard of an organisation called Bite the Ballot? It can go into sixth forms and register 100% of the students at a cost of only 25p per registration. Does he think that the Assembly—and, indeed, the UK Government—should be working closely with organisations such as Bite the Ballot to get the registration rate up?

[Alun Cairns]

The hon. Gentleman makes an important point. I am not familiar with that organisation, so it would not be right for me to endorse its activities at this stage. Clearly, however, any activity that encourages people who are eligible to vote to do so is broadly positive, and I would encourage the Welsh Government, the Assembly and the UK Administration to engage with a range of organisations and bodies to support that aim further.

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[Nia Griffith]

I have made it clear what our policies are.

With the advent of individual voter registration and the worry that many people, including many young voters, will fail to register under the new rules, which was a point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane), lowering the voting—

[Chris Ruane]

A good way of ensuring that there is 100% registration of young people, instead of the current registration rate of 55%, would be if, at the same time as they are issued with a national insurance number at the age of fifteen and three quarters, they were automatically registered to vote.

[Nia Griffith]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Lowering the voting age to 16 could provide an impetus for registration campaigns in schools, as all young people are in compulsory education until 16. Such campaigns would be another opportunity to encourage young people to register to vote before their 16th birthday, and most would have at least one opportunity to use their vote before leaving home for university or job opportunities elsewhere.

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[Chris Ruane]

I welcome the Government’s proposals to give 16 to 18-year-olds a vote in a referendum on income tax raising powers. I would also like those young people to have a general right to vote in all elections —general elections, Assembly elections, local elections and other referendums.

I share the concern of the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams), however, as the move needs to be accompanied by civic education. My hon. Friend the Member for Swansea West (Geraint Davies) has a degree in economics, but even the great Member himself does not quite understand everything about the subject.

[Geraint Davies]

On a point of information, I do.

[Chris Ruane]

That is as may be.

It is incumbent on us and the National Assembly for Wales to make sure that, if young people aged 16, 17 or 18 are to have the right to vote in the referendum, they have the relevant education, background and knowledge.

[Mr Llwyd]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s argument. Surely part of our function is to ensure that we have an informed debate, and assisting people as they come to a conclusion about how to vote is part of our function as well, is it not?

[Chris Ruane]

I agree entirely, but that should not be left to a short campaign two or three weeks before a referendum; it should be as of right.

I was a teacher for 15 years, admittedly in a primary school rather than a secondary one. We should try to teach these issues at a level that young people will understand. By the age of 18, someone has the right to have a mortgage. We need to make sure that young people are educated, in ways they understand, about mortgage rates, interest rates and student loans.

[Stephen Crabb]

I know that the hon. Gentleman is in no way belittling primary school children, but I should say that I have faced some of my most challenging questions when visiting primary schools, not least about the Chartist movement when I visited a Newport primary school.

[Chris Ruane]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I used to delegate the collection of the orange squash money to the brightest child in the class, whose money-counting skills were greater than mine.

We need to educate young people, especially about student loans and VAT, so that when they put their X in the box, they are making an informed decision. They need to know the crucial difference between progressive and regressive taxes.

[Mr Mark Williams]

Like the hon. Gentleman, I used to teach primary school children. He will be aware of the sense of injustice that primary school children and older children will feel. The biggest injustice does not relate to not being educated on these matters, but to being denied a vote in one election and then allowed a vote in another. Yes, we welcome what the Government have done—I pay tribute to Lord Tyler and Lord Thomas of Gresford in the other place who pushed the issue forward—but is not the biggest injustice the inconsistency between different elections?

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[Chris Ruane]

I agree entirely. I would prefer it if young people were able to vote in all elections. My hon. Friend the Member for Wrexham (Ian Lucas) said that he was wary of Tories bringing gifts, but I welcome this gift from them to 16 and 17-year-olds, especially as such gifts do not usually come from their party.

The move represents a foot in the door for opening up voting rights to 16 to 18-year-olds in other elections. The small precedent of voting in one referendum has been set. A path has been paved ready, I hope, for when Labour gets in in May, and we can point to this as a precedent and say, “If it’s been done for a referendum, it can be done for all other votes.”

We need to look particularly carefully at the registration of 16 to 18-year-olds, as that will have to start quite early on. Using the precedent that 18-year-olds can be registered to vote at the age of 16, perhaps these young people should be registered at the age of 14. As I said earlier, a golden opportunity comes when a young person’s national insurance number is issued at the age of 15 and three quarters. I have raised this point in parliamentary questions. Currently a young person can be registered at 16. Could not that be taken back three months to 15 and three quarters, when their national insurance number is issued? With the introduction of individual electoral registration, a person’s national insurance number is required when they fill in the registration form. Why not arrange to have that form filled in on the day when the elector gets their national insurance number? That would make eminent sense, and it would also get over the fact that only 55% of 18-year-olds are registered, as I said earlier, and only 44% of them vote. Only 25% of young people take part in the democratic process.

That has consequences for young people as individuals and for the whole of society. Let me give a practical example. One of the first steps the coalition Government took was to increase student loans from £3,000 a year to £9,000 a year, so, for an average student, the total rose from £9,000 to £27,000. Would they have taken such measures against pensioners, whose registration rates are 96% and whose voting rates are 86%? The fact that young people are not registered and voting means that political parties—all political parties—will bear that in mind when they are drawing up their policies. It is important that we have maximum registration from the outset for 16-year-olds who will have the right to vote.

[Mr Llwyd]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman. Does he agree that when we come to discuss things economic with young people who may not be highly qualified, it is best to avoid phrases like “post-neo-classical endogenous growth theory”?

[Geraint Davies]

That was what I learned in school.

[Chris Ruane]

My hon. Friend is taking issue with the right hon. Gentleman. There is a place for such terminology in some debates, but perhaps not those with 16-year-olds.

The issue of civics should go beyond finance and how we organise our economy. The finances of a country can impinge on wider issues such as racism, sexism and consumerism. There are threats from parties out there that are against the fabric of our British society. They want to promote the issue of race. It is fine if they want to discuss that, but it has to be done with intelligence, not bigotry.

The introduction of voting rights for young people at the age of 16 for the income tax raising powers referendum is a good idea. We should be very wary of what the Electoral Commission has done—or has not done—in the past if we are to make sure that these young people are registered. The Electoral Commission should be contacting electoral registration officers in the 22 authorities in Wales to make sure that they know how to register these young people. It should be regularly monitoring best practice from around the UK—indeed, around the world—and relaying that information to the Welsh Government in Cardiff to make sure that best practice is pursued in Wales for the purposes of registration for the referendum.

Best practice in registering young people exists in Northern Ireland. The EROs in Northern Ireland are proactive in going out to schools to register young people. We should be doing that, but the Electoral Commission has refused to replicate in the rest of the UK what is now done in Northern Ireland.

The Electoral Commission has failed to ensure that electoral registration officers obey the law. Statutorily, they must knock on the door of non-responders. If a 16-year-old was not registered to vote for the referendum, for example, the local ERO would have to go round, knock on the door and register that 16-year-old. Even though that requirement has been set out in law for many years, there has not been a single prosecution of an ERO who has broken the law. One ERO in Devon has broken the law by not conducting a door-to-door canvass for five years on the trot, but the Electoral Commission has done nothing about it.

We should make sure that the Electoral Commission warns EROs in Wales about that. We do have best practice in Wales. My own electoral registration officer, Gareth Evans, is one of best performing EROs in the whole country, but not all officers are as good as him, and we need to make sure that they all perform at the standards of the best so that young people are registered.

The Electoral Commission has failed miserably to use the most effective and efficient third-party organisations, such as Bite the Ballot, to get young people on to the electoral register. Bite the Ballot can register young people for as little as 25p per registration, but when one compares the cost of the Electoral Commission’s advertising campaign with the number of registration forms downloaded from the internet, it spent £80 per registration in 2005. The commission should therefore work with EROs in Wales, as well as with Bite the Ballot, to encourage them to ensure that 16-year-olds are registered from the outset.

This is a great opportunity, and I congratulate both elements of the coalition, especially the Conservatives. It is not in their nature to extend the vote. They are rightly fearful of young people, which is perhaps why they are not talking much about the lack of registration at national level. Registration rates in some wards in student areas of big university cities such as Manchester and Liverpool are as low as 20% following the move over to IER. I congratulate everyone, including my Front-Bench colleagues, and I hope that we will learn from this opportunity and go on to extend to 16 to 18-year-olds the right to vote in all elections.

[Alun Cairns]

I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd (Chris Ruane) for the positive way in which he has ended this debate. He contributed to it by highlighting the need for young people to be educated about the process, and the need for us to engage with the activities of electoral registration officers, which were mentioned by my hon. Friends the Members for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) and for Ceredigion (Mr Williams).

The Lords amendments are intended to be positive. They will extend the powers of the Assembly. They provide greater powers than those in the original Bill, and this is the first time that we have had the opportunity to discuss them. At some stages of the debate, I felt that although all parties are in favour of those powers, they were being welcomed almost through gritted teeth. I am therefore grateful to the hon. Member for Vale of Clwyd for finishing on a positive note.

Some hon. Members said that they have campaigned for votes at 16 for a very long time, but if there was such support, the extension of the vote could have been done during the 13 years of the previous Labour Administration. The hon. Member for Carmarthen East and Dinefwr (Jonathan Edwards) pointed out that he tabled amendments at the time and they were certainly not accepted by Labour. However, I want to be positive.