Voting: Young People

Lord Storey Excerpts

Monday 7th April 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, in the most recent visit by representatives of Bite the Ballot to the Cabinet Office they presented it with a draft voter mobilisation Bill that would indeed mean that when young people interacted with the state they would be reminded on each occasion to register. There are a number of quite tricky questions about government and the citizen, and how many things that you pull together in each interaction between government and the citizen, and we may be producing a Green Paper on this next year. We are conscious that the ICT revolution makes all this much easier, but the privacy lobby is not entirely keen on us making it as easy as we would like.

[Lord Storey (LD)]

My noble friend will be aware that the schools initiative in Northern Ireland saw a 50% increase of the entire young people’s population. Why are we not running such a scheme in the rest of the UK?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, we are looking at the Northern Ireland Schools initiative that took electoral registration officers and others into schools, with forms, and that is one of the things that we will need to consider. We are also talking with teachers from the Association for Citizenship Teaching and others about how to energise students in schools and in further education colleges, to make sure that they are reminded that they have the opportunity and the duty to register to vote.