European Union Referendum Bill

Lord Tyler Excerpts

Wednesday 18th November 2015 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack]

Yes, indeed: she thought that was inconsistent, and I agreed with her; of course it was. I do not think that one needs to prolong this argument. We should be getting the Bill on to the statute book as soon as possible. I hope that we will have a referendum in which I will be able to campaign for membership of the European Union by the middle of next year. This thing is dragging on far too long. We should look separately at the question of the franchise and the question of maturity and decide whether we have got it right.

[Lord Tyler (LD)]

My Lords, I am a signatory to Amendment 3, in common with not only the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan of Ely, but Members on the Conservative Benches and Cross-Benchers. It is genuinely across the House that we now feel that this moment has arrived. Having deployed the argument for this extension of the franchise so often in the past, as the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, so kindly said, I can be very brief. I certainly do not need to repeat the noble Baroness’s excellent exposition of the advice we have now had from the Electoral Commission and the Association of Electoral Administrators about the practicalities.

In Committee, I thought that the most persuasive contribution of many was from the Conservative Benches, from the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, who said:

“So the question I am struggling with is: how can it be right to allow 16 and 17 year-olds to vote in a referendum on Scotland but not in a referendum on Europe? There has to be some sort of consistency”.

We are back there again, as the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, has so admirably emphasised. The noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, went on to rubbish the official explanation that somehow the extension of the franchise in the Scottish independence referendum did not originate with Conservative Ministers. He said,

“although the coalition Government and the Prime Minister did not specifically approve votes for 16 year-olds, they did acquiesce in votes for 16 year-olds”.—[Official Report, 28/10/15; cols.1227-8.]

He and others, notably now an increasing number of Conservative MPs, have warned that we simply cannot pretend that Scottish young people are somehow more mature, well-informed, responsible or capable of exercising common sense than their English, Welsh and Northern Irish counterparts. Several colleagues from this side of the House have challenged anybody from the other side to produce that argument, without any success.

The noble Lord, Lord Blencathra, referred to the United Kingdom. He is right: in the long term, we have to address the consistency of the franchise, the bedrock of our representative democracy across the United Kingdom, but we have a particular issue at the moment. We have a Bill. We have a referendum coming. It is on that issue that we need specific consistency. That was very much the argument of the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, and he had no problem whatever with my quoting his contribution in Committee. As an avid fan of both versions of his “House of Cards”, I am very disappointed that he is not able to be here today. I do not know whether I am being as cynical or conspiratorial as some of the characters in those great productions, but I wonder whether there has been some encouragement for him not to be here today. I wonder whether the Government Whips may have encouraged him to stay away, reassuring him that nothing controversial was to be discussed or decided.

One of the key lessons of the Scottish referendum was that the 16 and 17 year-old age group registered—well over 100,000 of them—and voted in larger numbers than those aged 18 to 24. Why? It is very interesting. The reason why that has been identified is that the younger cohort were often still at school and in their local, family environment, where they had much more encouragement to take the issues seriously. When they got away from home to their first job or further or higher education, they lost touch with some of the issues and concerns that might otherwise been part of their consideration.

There is hard evidence—looked at very carefully by Bite the Ballot and others—that there is a good case for a direct link between citizenship courses and electoral registration. Indeed, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, said, there has been a successful pilot in Northern Ireland in that regard.

[Lord Forsyth of Drumlean]

On the numbers, it is certainly true that 75% of 16 year-olds voted—of course, it was a novelty—but that is not very different from the figure for 25 to 34 year-olds, which was 72%. It is true that there was a fall-off for voters aged between 18 and 24, but then a lot of those people had gone off to university and were not able to vote. So there is no evidence whatever that somehow or other, this increases participation in elections.

[Lord Tyler]

That is simply not true. I have worked with the Electoral Commission over the years and there is good evidence that, once you start voting, you tend to continue to vote. The cohort that is missing out at the moment is very much the 18 to 24 year-olds. The turnout for them was down to 54%—it dropped dramatically. Therefore, the noble Lord is simply wrong on that point.

I wonder whether the Minister has come armed with the same wholly inadequate response that was employed in Committee, when I moved a similar amendment. The noble Lord, Lord Faulks, then extracted a very short quote from the advice given by the Electoral Commission:

“The Commission’s view is that any changes to the franchise for the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union should be clear in sufficient time to enable all those who are eligible, to register and participate in the referendum”.

Today we have some additional advice from the Electoral Commission:

“Recent media reports have indicated that the Commission believes there must be 12 months between legislation passing through Parliament to change the franchise and the first electoral event to which this applies. This is not the case”.

It then says, in heavy type:

“The Commission has been consistently clear that a change to the franchise is a matter for Parliament, and that we will advise on the practical implications of any such change”.

I hope that the Minister will not now pray in aid the commission.

I have worked with the Electoral Commission for some years, and it is very careful in the words that it uses in advising Parliament. It is responsible to us—to Parliament, not to government—and its advice is to Parliament. It is a statutory commission, with very considerable responsibility. Noble Lords should note that clarity of intention is what it is worrying about, not whether Royal Assent has actually been granted. It can start preparing for this change, as the noble Baroness, Lady Morgan, mentioned earlier. In other words, this is an argument not for doing nothing with this change to the franchise, but for getting on with it as soon as possible.

On the evening before the day in Committee to which I referred, the Minister’s ministerial colleague systematically rubbished the Electoral Commission and all the advice given to us, in the context of the Government’s acceleration of the electoral registration change. We should be absolutely clear now that there is no practical objection to this extension of the franchise, assuming that the referendum is not held before June 2016. For all the other reasons that have already been explained in Committee and today, it is very unlikely that the Government would contemplate a referendum before that date. Six months is acknowledged to be an adequate minimum period for the preparatory work, based on the Scottish experience. So for Ministers to drag their feet while so many in both Houses are urging them to recognise the strength of the case would be irresponsible, frankly. Indeed, trying to postpone it for as long as possible in the hope that that will make the change more problematic would be a failure of good governance.

[Lord Lawson of Blaby (Con)]

What the noble Lord is saying, as others have said, is that the decision to reduce the voting age for the Scottish referendum is a precedent that has to be followed for all elections of all kinds. That makes it a very important matter indeed, which clearly the Westminster Parliament as a whole needs to pronounce on. Can he remind us by what majority the Westminster Parliament decided that this should happen in Scotland?

[Lord Tyler]

My Lords, it did not—but I quoted specifically the noble Lord, Lord Dobbs, who identified precisely that the Cabinet of the previous Government actually agreed with that change.

I am not arguing today for the extension of the franchise in all parts of our electoral system. That is not what is on the Order Paper. What we are debating is very specific. I have an expert witness—I will come to him in a moment—who says that this is an exceptional circumstance in which it should be done.

I simply do not understand on what basis the Government, without a principled or practical objection, are continuing to resist—assuming that they are.

[Viscount Ridley]

The noble Lord said that the Electoral Commission’s advice is based on the experience of Scotland. Does he accept that when the franchise was extended to 16 and 17 year-olds in Scotland, we still had household registration without the requirement, as I said earlier, for national insurance numbers and so on, and that the process would be much more complex now?

[Lord Tyler]

I have had that discussion with the Electoral Commission. It does not regard that as a particular obstacle in this case. I am grateful to the noble Viscount for helping me in that respect.

Any reference to the disadvantages of piecemeal constitutional change is frankly absurd, particularly from that side of the House. When female suffrage was extended, that is exactly what we had: piecemeal changes. I used to be a historian. It was Disraeli who started this process. The Conservatives have been at it ever since. They always tell us that they want change on an incremental basis. That is constantly what we are told. It was the same with female suffrage. I think it was the noble Lord, Lord Morgan, who said that he heard some of the arguments we have been hearing today before, at the time of the extension of female suffrage. My wife and I went to see the excellent film about that subject, and there were occasions when I thought I was listening to the present-day House of Lords.

[Lord Trimble (Con)]

I have been reflecting on this issue and the piecemeal way it has been done. Presumably when David Cameron decided that he wanted to make sure that people aged between 16 and 18 did not have a vote, it must have been because he considered, or feared, that most of them would vote to leave.

[Lord Tyler]

I do not follow that because I do not think that at this stage the Conservative Party has collectively made up its mind. It will be very interesting to see what happens, because a large number of Conservative Members take the view that this is an inevitable change. That was reflected in the contributions of a number of Conservative Members in the Bill Committee.

The evolution of our constitution has always been piecemeal. Indeed, down the other end, the Government are currently changing the constitution, through English votes for English laws—EVEL, or evil, as some would prefer it— on a piecemeal basis. It may be that before Christmas, the noble Lord, Lord Strathclyde, will come forward with another piecemeal change to our constitution. Are noble Lords going to be against that? Some may be, but I do not think that others will be. It is frankly absurd to argue that we cannot make a change because it is piecemeal and ad hoc.

I have a great deal of sympathy with those who say that we should in the longer term have a constitutional convention. I have no problem with that—I have always thought that—but here and now we have a Bill before your Lordships’ House, and we have to deal with the franchise. We have already agreed some changes to the franchise, not least to include your Lordships in the electorate for this referendum.

I do not understand the argument that somehow, it is not the right time. That was what they said about female suffrage before the First World War, and some went on saying it after the First World War. We have a Bill before us and a big decision for the citizens of this country to take in the near future. Those young people who will be so affected by the outcome—just like their colleagues and compatriots were in Scotland a year ago—should be given the opportunity to participate in the choice about their future.

I was challenged earlier about why this situation is exceptional. I have an expert witness. Last week, David Cameron described this vote as,

“a huge decision for our country, perhaps the biggest we will make in our lifetimes. And it will be the final decision”.

That is the strongest argument I have heard for extending the franchise to this particular group. The Prime Minister is absolutely right, and it must surely follow that this group of our fellow citizens cannot be denied a say in that decision.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lord Faulks]

The noble Baroness is right in the sense that we do not assess mental capacity before deciding whether somebody might vote. That is correct. However, when we take the difficult decision on where to draw the line—on whether the voting age should be 18, 16 or 21—we are entitled to inform ourselves generally about individuals’ state of development to see generally what a typical adolescent might be like.

[Lord Tyler]

Will the noble Lord tell us whether he has seen the film “Suffragette”? The argument that he has just been advancing was the argument for not giving women the vote until after the First World War and then for not extending it to those under the age of 28. Those arguments were deployed by his contemporaries, as it were, of that period.

[Lord Faulks]

I am afraid that I have not had enough time to see the film, but any argument about where you draw a line could be simply dismissed as one that has been used hitherto in different circumstances. I am concerned about whether giving these particular young people the vote is appropriate.