Electoral Register: Young People

(asked on 7th May 2019) - View Source

Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, whats steps the Government is taking to encourage young people to register to vote.


Answered by
Kevin Foster Portrait
Kevin Foster
This question was answered on 13th May 2019

The Government is committed to respecting, protecting and promoting our democracy. We want to build upon recent record levels of individuals registering to vote and participating in elections. Our Register to Vote website is widely used by young people: over 7.83 million online applications have been submitted by 16-24 year olds since the service was introduced in 2014. Ahead of the General Election in June 2017 young people aged under 25 were particularly engaged, submitting over 1 million applications - more than 35% of all applications received in the pre-election period.

Since then we have taken further steps to promote democratic engagement amongst young people. Making use of the Suffrage Fund, we have delivered three projects to promote youth engagement: a scheme to recruit and train 1000 youth Democracy Ambassadors; the development and publication of a toolkit for parliamentarians to engage young people; and a new history and citizenship resource for secondary schools (www.suffrageresources.org.uk).

The Government’s recent report, Democratic Engagement: Respecting, Protecting and Promoting Our Democracy, sets out how we work with partners to encourage democratic participation. This includes National Democracy Week, which convenes youth focused organisations such as the British Youth Council, UK Youth, Elevation Networks and Patchwork Foundation to deliver targeted democratic engagement activity. The report also highlights steps to help Higher Education providers work with local authorities to promote electoral registration amongst their student populations.

DCMS provides funding for the UK Youth Parliament, Youth Select Committee and Make Your Mark ballot which support young people to raise issues on local and national levels.

Make Your Mark is a ballot of youth views which gives the UK Youth Parliament its mandate and gets young people, aged 11-18, involved in democracy, with over 1 million young people voting in 2018. (http://www.ukyouthparliament.org.uk/makeyourmark/)

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