Voting Age

Lisa Nandy Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Lisa Nandy (Wigan) (Lab)]

I speak in support of lowering the voting age because I start from the perspective that extending the franchise has historically always been a good thing and that in a democracy people should have the right to shape the decisions that affect them, unless there is a really good reason why not. My starting point is not, “Why lower the voting age to 16?” but, “Why not lower the voting age to 16? Why prevent people from voting until they are 18 or even 23, as in the case of some young people voting in a general election for the first time? My hon. Friend the Member for North East Derbyshire (Natascha Engel) made that point.

I acknowledge that there are arguments of some merit against such a move, and I will spend a little time discussing them, because some young people themselves make those arguments. Recently, I went to talk to a large group of young scouts who had very mixed views about lowering the voting age. They were marginally in favour as a group, but many of them were against. Some talked about the problem of maturity, but far more of those young people talked about a lack of knowledge and the difficulty of gaining the necessary tools and information to make meaningful choices of political parties. That is why I agree with so many hon. Members that lowering the voting age should go hand in hand with good-quality citizenship education in all our schools. Also, so many young people have made the point to me that citizenship education should not be an afterthought or an add-on; it should be a high priority for schools in enabling young people to make those choices.

I want to go further than that, because I am a huge supporter of the UNICEF rights respecting schools programme, which some hon. Members may have seen in action and which is incredibly important. We have heard the argument, “Why stop at 16? Why not go earlier?” We have debated that, but from a very young age children can and should be involved in shaping the institutions and communities they are part of, thus having an impact on the decisions that affect their lives. I say to hon. Members who say that that somehow does not protect childhood that it is an active part of childhood; children are people—they are citizens—who live in communities and they are not atomistic individuals who should be seen only through the lens of their parents. The UNICEF rights respecting schools programme is incredibly important, because it enables children to learn about politics in an active and not a passive way; surely we want those sorts of adults in the future.

The argument that some people do not want the vote and that some will not use it completely misses the point. The point is that many 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds do want the vote and do want to use it. Hon. Members have referred to evidence from overseas, and, in particular, from Austria and Germany, which suggests that if young people start voting at 16—this is the crucial point—when they are still in formal learning, they continue to do so. The argument that 18 to 24-year-olds are less likely to vote therefore again misses the point. Now is a very opportune time to introduce this measure, because we are raising the participation age so that young people stay in some form of formal learning until 18. That is often advanced as a reason not to give young people the vote, but all the evidence suggests that it is in fact a reason to do so, as they will still be in formal learning and can be given the information and skills they need to make the decisions.

I agree that young people mature at different rates, and that is reflected in the different ages at which we allow people to do different things. I will not rehearse those differences, because we have had a great deal of discussion about them, but I wish to make two points. First, I do not believe that representation should be directly linked to taxation. Lots of people in this country do not pay tax, for whatever reason; unemployed people are one such example. I hope that most hon. Members would not agree with the idea that such people should not have the vote—that idea appals me. The argument that someone has to pay taxes before they are allowed to vote is completely spurious.

Secondly, the fact that young people mature at different rates surely cannot be a reason to say to all 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds that they are simply not allowed to vote. We have not always got right the ages at which we decide that people are mature enough to do things—in my view, the age of criminal responsibility is far, far too low in this country—but the fact that we are even having a debate about whether young people should wait eight years from when we hold them criminally responsible for their actions to when they are allowed to have a say in the criminal justice system that we are catapulting them into is completely wrong.

I argue for 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds to have the choice about whether to vote, not the responsibility to vote; voting is not compulsory in this country and I do not think anybody is suggesting that it should be. They should have that choice as we all do.

I say to hon. Members who have raised the issue of protecting childhood that I do not see any justification for saying that we somehow keep our children safer by denying them the right to be active members of and citizens in their communities. The idea that teenage girls on the streets of Doncaster would be protected by not being allowed to vote until the age of 18 strikes me as ridiculous.

Over the past few years, we have seen starkly how the decisions we make affect young people from an early age. Young people have taken to the streets to defend the education maintenance allowance, to oppose the rise in tuition fees and to occupy multinational companies that refuse to pay their taxes. Those young people are campaigning on issues that will not affect them—those decisions have largely already been taken—but they are taking to the streets to defend the rights of the young people who come after them and to make a case for the sort of society in which they want to live. They are highly political, optimistic, energetic and ambitious—we know that from the evidence—yet they have little say in the decisions we make.

Every time we delay decisions on issues such as care for the elderly, pensions, the environment and child care, we are storing up trouble for future generations. The decisions we make and those we do not make will have profound repercussions for the generation of young people growing up today. It will fall to them to solve the problems we create and I am appalled that they do not have a say in the decisions that affect them.