Voting Age

Natascha Engel Excerpts

Thursday 24th January 2013 Commons Chamber

[Stephen Williams]

My right hon. Friend is absolutely right. He was the first Member to attempt to make this change—in, I believe, 1999, when he was crushed by 400 votes to 36. I hope we will have a markedly different result today. He is right that this generation of young people have had all the educational opportunities to understand the democratic system, yet we continue to withhold from them the opportunity to put that knowledge into practice. We should not continue to withhold the vote from the best-educated generation of young people.

[Natascha Engel (North East Derbyshire) (Lab)]

Before the hon. Gentleman moves on, one important point to make—I want to make it before the hon. Member for North Herefordshire (Bill Wiggin) leaves the Chamber, because it relates to a point he made—is on under-18s dying when they go to war. Surely decisions on who goes to war and when affect 16, 17 and 18-year-olds. If they can die for their country, surely they should be able to participate in making the decision on whether their country, for which they are dying, goes to war in the first place.

--- Later in debate ---

[Natascha Engel (North East Derbyshire) (Lab)]

I would quite happily have given way to the hon. Member for Shipley (Philip Davies). I really am looking forward to hearing what he has to say—and I suspect that I will disagree with every word of it. It is a shame not to be able to engage more directly before he says what it is I imagine he will say.

I want to thank the hon. Member for Bristol West (Stephen Williams) for an incredibly thorough speech in which I think he mentioned every single aspect of why the voting age should be lowered to 16. I hope I do not simply repeat what he said. I fully endorse every part of his speech, during which he was very generous in giving way.

I want to focus on the constitutional issues that this subject raises. One reason we are having this debate is that two things have changed: the proposal to lower the voting age to 16 for the referendum in Scotland; and the new fixed-term Parliaments, which mean that voting takes place every five years and not before. The important point was made, but it is worth repeating, that that means that if an 18-year-old’s birthday happens to fall the day after the general election day, they will be 23 before they are able to vote. Nobody is proposing that we raise the voting age. My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North East (Fabian Hamilton) referred to the things that people gain the right to do overnight, as it were, when they become 16, 17 or 18. The situation is totally different with the voting age, because people do not usually wake up on their 18th birthday to discover there is a general election; usually, the election will occur at some point during the subsequent five-year period. I doubt whether the Members who oppose this motion are making the case for raising the voting age, so we need to look at lowering the voting age to make sure that more young people can participate.

Engagement is important. My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds North East spoke eloquently about school councils and citizenship classes, which the hon. Member for Bristol West also mentioned. We must be honest—the experience of citizenship classes is patchy. In some places, citizenship is taught excellently by dedicated citizenship teachers; in others, it is not so good. However, if we lowered the voting age to 16, citizenship, the importance of democracy and the role of political parties would be taught better at schools. It would encourage MPs, local councillors and other elected representatives to visit schools and make the case for why politics is important.

The counter-argument, which I hear quite a lot, is that politics should not be taken into schools. I totally disagree. Politics is important to 16-year-olds, just as it is to older young people. Politics decides what kind of schools we go to. Politics has ensured that there is access to free education for all. It is politics that meant that the school sports partnerships were abandoned. It is politics that decides what people learn at school—which classes are compulsory and which are not. In Derbyshire, the youth services have been seriously undermined; it was children and young people who were campaigning to keep their youth services open and active. This is straightforward politics, and it is good for young people to engage in it.

My hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) mentioned the youth mayor in Newham. Let me give an example from my own constituency of young people taking responsibility. A budget was given to the school council at one of my primary schools, and after much discussion with the teachers, the school council decided to spend the entire £50 on rabbits. The teachers recommended that it not do so, pointing out that they would take a lot of looking after, but it decided to go ahead. Sure enough, they did take a lot of looking after, but those children learnt that if they make such a decision, contrary to advice, there are consequences, and that they had a duty of responsibility to those rabbits. I hope those rabbits are still alive—I have not visited them recently. Even though that is a small story, it demonstrates that if we give young people responsibility, they have to learn how to deal with it properly.

I also think that it is a matter of respect. We as parliamentarians should be saying to young people, “We respect you enough to allow you to make your own decisions about matters that affect you.” This is an important issue that concerns the widening of the franchise and human rights.

The United Kingdom is a signatory to the United Nations convention on the rights of the child. My hon. Friend the Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman) is shaking his head, but the convention states that when decisions are made that affect young people, they should have a say in those decisions. As has been pointed out today, we make decisions in the House about the age at which people are allowed to join the armed forces—as opposed to the age at which they are allowed to go to the front and lose their lives—and the age at which they are allowed to go to work and pay tax and national insurance. They can do those things from the age of 16 onwards. We make decisions that affect young people, but they have no way of voicing their opinions about what we do.

[Mr Sheerman]

As my hon. Friend knows, I interrupt her speech with deep reluctance, because we are on very good terms. She knows, however, that the UN convention is about the preservation of childhood. It contains nothing about the voting age; it is about preserving childhood as a precious space, a principle that has been entirely absent from the debate so far.

[Natascha Engel]

My hon. Friend and I have had long discussions about this issue. I do not disagree with him about the preservation of childhood—in fact, I entirely agree with him about it—but I also think that lowering the voting age to 16 will not encroach on people’s childhoods. What it will do is give them responsibility, which is very different from taking their childhood away. My counter-argument is that, although we make decisions here that affect the day-to-day lives of people aged 16, 17 and 18—and, in my view, those aged up to 23, because many people are knocking on 23 before they are able to vote—we have taken away their right to have a say in issues that affect them. That is what I find so deeply offensive and wrong.

The hon. Member for Bristol West made a strong point about the widening of the franchise. I think that this really is a matter of human rights. It is slightly different from the issue of giving the vote to women, but I agree with the hon. Member for Worthing West (Sir Peter Bottomley) that the sky will not fall in if we give 16-year-olds the vote. The sight of a 16-year-old in a polling station putting a cross on a ballot paper—not one, two, three—should not panic people. This will not mean that the entire polling station is full of 16-year-olds; it will merely mean that younger people too will participate in the decisions that we make in the House. It is a shame that people are so fearful, and worry so much about 16-year-olds taking part in a general election.

The Scottish referendum will give us an opportunity to see how giving 16-year-olds the vote could work. Why should we not view it as a pilot? After 16, 17 and 18-year-olds have had their say in the referendum, we can look at how it went. I agree that the genie is out of the bottle once 16-year-olds are able to vote in a referendum, because after that it will be very difficult to say to them that they are to be denied a vote in the general election that will take place in the following year.

I have some sympathy with the view of Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, who has described this as an important constitutional matter. Issues were raised earlier about the devolved Assemblies and Parliaments in Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales. Each of them has voted overwhelmingly to lower the voting age to 16, but none of them can do so until we in this Parliament have made the decision for them.

I think it important for us to have this debate, and important for all views to be aired. However, I hope that when we go through the Lobbies, all of us—not just Labour and the Liberal Democrat Members—will vote in favour of seeing what happens in Scotland, and then lowering the voting age throughout the United Kingdom.

[Several hon. Members]

rose—