Votes at 16

Debate between Jim McMahon and Chloe Smith

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.

Voter ID Pilot Schemes

Debate between Jim McMahon and Chloe Smith

Wednesday 6th June 2018 Westminster Hall

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

May I first thank the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge (Ellie Reeves) for requesting the debate, and everyone who has taken part in it?

Haven’t we heard some big words from Opposition Members? We have heard “disenfranchised,” “discriminatory” and “voter suppression” bandied about. Last time I looked in the dictionary, disenfranchisement meant not having the right to vote. We have one of the largest electoral registers this country has ever seen. Having every opportunity to cast a vote, with carefully designed safeguards and a safety net, is not disenfranchisement, it is not voter suppression and it is not discriminatory. Let me get that out of the way at the start.

The success of the pilots highlights that a reasonable and proportionate measure was taken. Voter turnout remained steady in all the trial areas—indeed, in one area there was a notable increase. The overwhelming majority of people cast their vote without a problem. I pay credit to the returning officers in the pilot areas, who were undeterred by some ill-informed and regrettable scaremongering in the run-up to polling day. They delivered successful awareness-raising campaigns to ensure that voters knew the requirements in their area. It is of course returning officers’ duty to ensure that registers are as accurate and complete as possible, and it is absolutely their duty—and it is in everyone’s interest—to get people on the register and get them out to vote.

While I am on the subject of legal duties, let me answer a point made by the hon. Members for Oldham West and Royton (Jim McMahon) and for Crewe and Nantwich (Laura Smith). The powers to make such pilot schemes are contained in section 10 of the Representation of the People Act 2000. The hon. Gentleman, perhaps mistakenly, suggested that no Act defined such a scheme. That is simply wrong; it is in the Representation of the People Act, which enables changes to be made to the rules regarding the conduct of elections. That Act was of course fully debated and passed by Parliament.

As we have heard, the estimates by the Electoral Reform Society, which is a political lobby group, of the number of people who were turned away from polling stations were wildly exaggerated. I really wonder why hon. Members should trust the survey that the society published today when the facts so clearly speak against its record. Data from returning officers in all five participating local authorities show that 340 electors who were asked to return to the polling station with the correct ID did not return. That represents just 0.06% of the electorate and 0.14% of votes cast. I have of course put those data in the Library.

The experience in Northern Ireland, where paper ID has been required since 1985, and photo ID since 2003, shows that once that requirement has become established, voters find it easy to be part of that reasonable idea. Indeed, the responsible Minister at the time—a Labour Minister—was clear that no one would be disenfranchised by those measures.

Despite repeated claims by the Opposition, many of the people I spoke to about the pilots before the elections, as others will have done, thought they were a common-sense approach. Some—particularly people from Austria, Canada, the Netherlands and the many other countries where showing ID is a normal part of the voting process—were surprised that we did not already need to take ID to the polling station. It is clear to me that people value their vote individually and want collective confidence, which is what the scheme is about.

I read what the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge wrote in some recent articles about electoral fraud, and about voter ID in particular. I am shocked that she does not seem to think that electoral fraud of this type could influence elections. Do those stolen votes not count? Do they not undermine confidence in the very process that puts us in this place and gives us the privilege of being here? Does not any type of electoral fraud threaten the resilience and integrity of a democratic system and the confidence that people have in it? What level of fraud would be palatable? How many voters is it okay to silence and have robbed of their vote? Electoral fraud is real. By definition, it is difficult to detect if it is done effectively.

[Jim McMahon]

Will the Minister give way on that point?

[Chloe Smith]

I will not. I have to conclude, and the hon. Gentleman and others have had their chance to contribute.

Voter ID is of course just one element of efforts, which I hope command cross-party support, to protect and sustain the electoral system, which should be precious to us all. I thank the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) for coming along to express his support for voter ID. Indeed, he explained that he would go further and do more to protect the voting system. That is why we at the Cabinet Office, in partnership with the independent Electoral Commission and Crimestoppers, are working to ensure that people feel encouraged to report electoral fraud if they see it. I marvel at how the rest of the Labour party cannot bring themselves to support such efforts.

At the moment, it is easier to vote in someone else’s name than to collect a parcel at the post office, so doing nothing would be wrong. We cannot allow a crime to happen until it reaches a certain level. It is doubly unfortunate that the Labour party continues its scaremongering, especially given that the previous Labour Government introduced photo ID at polling stations across Northern Ireland in 2003. Although today’s Labour party might not think doing that is an acceptable step to protect our voting system, constituency Labour parties think it is good enough for them, as they routinely insist on ID. Doing one thing and saying another seems unprincipled to me. On top of that, Opposition Members came here to quibble about the numbers. This is not about statistics; it is about the principle. Why do they disagree with the principle of tackling electoral fraud?

Electoral fraud is not a victimless crime. The Electoral Commission stated in its 2013 review:

“The majority of people in communities affected by electoral fraud are victims rather than offenders. The people who are likely to be the victims of electoral fraud can be described as vulnerable.”

In his report on electoral fraud, Sir Eric Pickles explained clearly that it was

“local residents who lost out from the crooked politicians who bullied them and wasted their money. The law must be applied equally and fairly to everyone.”

I remain committed to ensuring that equality is integral to everything we do in elections policy. I met the EHRC earlier today, and we share common ground on ensuring that whatever we do has the rights of electors and the fairness, equality and inclusivity of our electoral system at its heart.

The hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge made repeated reference to photographic ID. I think she knows that was not helpful. That is not what the pilots required. Let me put on the record that no one needed to purchase ID documents to be able to vote in the pilots. Local authorities provided alternative methods free of charge, to ensure that everyone who was registered had the opportunity to vote.

The Government will reflect on the voter ID evaluation that the Electoral Commission publishes in July. The hon. Member for Edinburgh East (Tommy Sheppard) will find that the Electoral Commission has published the list of the data that it will use in that evaluation. We will use that as an opportunity to review, among other things, how the awareness-raising campaigns operated and what could be improved.

I say again to the hon. Member for Lewisham West and Penge that I am grateful to her for bringing forward the points she made and for staying in touch with residents in one of the important pilot areas, but her arguments are not convincing. This really is a simple matter of principle: do we or do we not believe in stamping out electoral fraud? I do.